Humans are remarkably safe at driving

https://jperla.medium.com/humans-are-remarkably-safe-at-driving-f213331918f4

by ljlolel • 6 years ago

58 92 6 years ago

jperla.medium.com

rhacker2• 6 years ago

I randomly said in my head 80 Million, apparently I was off by 20 million.

busyant• 6 years ago

So, basically spot on.

With these types of questions, I feel like if you're within 1/2 an order of magnitude, you answered correctly.

ghaff3• 6 years ago

Yes, especially given that things like life-altering injury and pedestrian/cyclist serious injury/death probably deserve to be counted in any measure of total automobile safety.

ljlolel14• 6 years ago

Yes, a lot of people say like 1 million miles

ghaff3• 6 years ago

The headline is calculated to provoke a reaction and is actually fairly accurate. But then the piece just argues for collecting a ton of "data" from Amazon delivery vans without articulating what collecting all this data is expected to accomplish.

Data gets thrown around as a mindless incantation with respect to autonomy. Yes you need data. But just collecting lots of data and feeding it into a computer somewhere doesn't make better autonomy just pop out of the other end.

giantg22• 6 years ago

Amazon drivers seem to be some of the worst drivers I've seen - speeding, stopping on blind turns, and trouble backing up or negotiating driveways.

jhfdbkofdcho• 6 years ago

No joking, just this morning outside my house in a residential neighborhood it’s raining heavily and a fully loaded prime van is gunning it and peeling out and fish tailing. I thought the driver was gonna crash for sure!

mattbee• 6 years ago

Isn't that because they're expected to meet insane delivery schedules with severe consequences for their pay if they can't make them?

ljlolel14• 6 years ago

I also wrote a book with more detail: https://gumroad.com/l/KBBhm

falcor84• 6 years ago

I know Waymo’s is a dead-end demo.

This very controversial statement appears in the middle there without any real justification.

ljlolel14• 6 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, I added a link there to https://jperla.medium.com/tesla-saves-lives-waymo-gambles-pa...

applecrazy• 6 years ago

I’m sorry, but your statement in this article is just wrong. Tesla autopilot has killed people when it’s malfunctioned, thereby making it significantly more unsafe (in the eyes of any sane person) than Waymo’s AV (which has not killed anyone to my knowledge).

And the title is quite poor as well—it is in fact Tesla who’s gambling lives by aggressively rolling out their self-driving capabilities before they’re fully baked (and having paying customers bet test them), not Waymo (who runs very limited demos in very controlled conditions).

ljlolel14• 6 years ago

Author here: two more related pieces I wrote with more ideas

Why Tesla Autopilot ought to be awful, until it’s perfect

https://jperla.medium.com/why-tesla-autopilot-ought-to-be-aw...

Waymo Gambles Lives with Unsupervised Self-Driving Cars

https://jperla.medium.com/tesla-saves-lives-waymo-gambles-pa...

analog31• 6 years ago

I admit that when I read something like this, I'm always thinking about whether "framing" is in play. Sure, 100 million miles is a lot, but at 10k miles/y and 50 y/lifetime, that's 200 lifetimes. Is something that will kill you in 200 lifetimes considered to be "remarkably" safe?

Granted, I'm certainly not downplaying your conclusion about the challenge of designing a self driving car.

ljlolel14• 6 years ago

Car crashes are a top cause of death for humans

swiley• 6 years ago

I don't know what happened this year but since I started driving again after being in lockdown I've gotten into two accidents. Maybe the three month break from driving affected me more than I thought.

sp3322• 6 years ago

I try to get out for a drive once a week to keep my car in working order (slosh some oil around, keep the tires from getting flat on one side). Maybe it's good for my brain, too.

alisonkisk• 6 years ago

Article is void of content. It just says that the average person has about a 0.01% chance of dying in a car crash each year, ignoring that being permanently crippled or having your car crushed is inconvenient as well.

michaelcampbell• 6 years ago

That something else is bad, does not make one thing not bad.

You say "void of content", then list content.

savrajsingh• 6 years ago

relevant subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/savedyouaclick/

libertine2• 6 years ago

From my driving experience... I've seen way too many near-accidents being actively avoided by other drivers (myself included) that saved bad drivers and other innocent drivers.

Specially too many near frontal collisions, some left dumb found, namely those done in curves and slopes, or trying to pass large and compact lines of cars.

I don't understand the decision making process of those few wild cards. Somehow they're lucky that everyone else aren't like them.

mnd999• 6 years ago

Sure, if we could improve the driving of those at the bottom then safety would be even better. I think the point the article is trying to make is that it’s already pretty good.

libertine2• 6 years ago

Yes I understand that, I just wanted to give an extra credit do the "regular" drivers that sometimes make an extra active effort to save themselves and others, sometimes putting themselves at risk (which at the time could be a perceived as "less-riskier"), yet it's decisions made in fractions of seconds.

rizzom5000• 6 years ago

I believe it's absolutely possible to do more to reduce to incompetency behind the wheel on US roads. It may even be trivial to reduce preventable traffic fatalities in the US by half. We accept these preventable fatal as a society.

Per 1 billion miles driven, the US fatality rate is nearly 2x that of Germany.

https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/why-getting-a-german-drive... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

modzu• 6 years ago

this made me think about my car's infotainment UI (typically have android auto running) and how annoying it is that much of it locks while the car is in motion. searching for an address in waze, accessing a text message, etc. even worse is some things work for a few seconds (scrolling down my list of songs) before it locks and says "eyes back on the road... wait a minute", and unlocks again. this is terrible when i have a passenger who could help (could you search for a gas station, or please reply to that message we will be late) which requires pulling over. whats more safe on a freeway? it sort of reminds me of red light cameras, which have been proven to cause drivers to burn through yellows at 100 miles an hour (increasing crashes on the other side) to avoid the fine for what would otherwise be a minor issue. i digress..

jacquesm• 6 years ago

You shouldn't be pulling over on a freeway for stuff like that either. You should do it in a parking space.

Noumenon72• 6 years ago

I'm glad I am living in the era before do-gooders take control of our phones and prevent us from using our own judgment about safety tradeoffs. So many restaurants I've found, plans I've made, songs I've remembered, on empty roads or in Nebraska in broad daylight. I've encountered multiple people who don't think it's safe to use your phone while stopped at a light. They're intolerant of other opinions so they will win eventually.

hn_user82179• 6 years ago

I would agree, but I've also been a passenger with drivers who insist on using their phone (and won't let me text for them) and watched the car veer back and forth, where they'd correct just after the car had crossed the lane line. I don't ride with those people more than once, but these were people who are otherwise intelligent, educated, kind humans.

The problem with trusting humans to use their own judgement is that it is very self-focused: "Am I going to die in an accident?", not, "Could I hurt or kill someone else"? Given how many people (at least in the US) refuse to wear masks for the health of those around them right now, I don't think those people would also be concerned about hitting others.

FWIW, I think it's possible to safely use your phone at a stoplight (I frequently do), but I saw my friend release the brake and start rolling and then look up from his phone, because he had seen it was green in his peripheral vision. That is not safe, and I think scenarios like this happen more than we realize.

mcguire3• 6 years ago

Do you have a source for "red light cameras, which have been proven to cause drivers to burn through yellows at 100 miles an hour (increasing crashes on the other side) to avoid the fine for what would otherwise be a minor issue"?

All I have been able to find is:

* https://abcnews.go.com/US/red-light-camera-backlash-cameras-... "On the other side of the debate are statistics that show the cameras also cause accidents. A 2005 federal study demonstrated that while injuries from right angle or T-bone crashes decreased by 16 percent at red-light camera intersections, injuries from rear-end collisions increased by 24 percent."

* https://www.iihs.org/topics/red-light-running "When it comes to crash reductions, an IIHS study comparing large cities with red light cameras to those without found the devices reduced the fatal red light running crash rate by 21 percent and the rate of all types of fatal crashes at signalized intersections by 14 percent (Hu & Cicchino, 2017)." (Referring to https://www.iihs.org/topics/bibliography/ref/2121.)

"Previous research in Oxnard, California, found significant citywide crash reductions followed the introduction of red light cameras, and injury crashes at intersections with traffic signals were reduced by 29 percent (Retting & Kyrychenko, 2002). Front-into-side collisions — the crash type most closely associated with red light running — at these intersections declined by 32 percent overall, and front-into-side crashes involving injuries fell 68 percent." (Referring to https://www.iihs.org/topics/bibliography/ref/1510.)

"The Cochrane Collaboration, an international public health organization, reviewed 10 controlled before-after studies of red light camera effectiveness (Aeron-Thomas & Hess, 2005). Based on the most rigorous studies, there was an estimated 13-29 percent reduction in all types of injury crashes and a 24 percent reduction in right-angle injury crashes.

"Not all studies have reported increases in rear-end crashes. The review by the Cochrane Collaboration did not find a statistically significant change in rear-end injury crashes (Aeron-Thomas & Hess, 2005)." (Both referring to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15846684/.)

"A study sponsored by the Federal Highway Administration evaluated red light camera programs in seven cities (Council et al., 2005). It found that, overall, right-angle crashes decreased by 25 percent while rear-end collisions increased by 15 percent. Results showed a positive aggregate economic benefit of more than $18.5 million in the seven communities." (Referred to https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05048/....)

snthd• 6 years ago

Here’s a quick question: how far would you have to drive before you die in a car accident?

Please don't call them "accidents".

https://crashnotaccident.com

Before the labor movement, factory owners would say "it was an accident" when American workers were injured in unsafe conditions.
Before the movement to combat drunk driving, intoxicated drivers would say "it was an accident" when they crashed their cars.
Planes don’t have accidents. They crash. Cranes don’t have accidents. They collapse. And as a society, we expect answers and solutions.
Traffic crashes are fixable problems, caused by dangerous streets and unsafe drivers. They are not accidents. Let’s stop using the word "accident" today.

ljlolel14• 6 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, I agree. I updated it to 'crash'

ljlolel14• 6 years ago

Why was this downvoted?

nottorp• 6 years ago

Traffic crashes are fixable problems, caused by dangerous streets and unsafe drivers.

I suppose we could ban streets and cars... if they're all so dangerous?

sp3322• 6 years ago

We've banned certain types of streets and many, many types of cars. So... yes?

dkural2• 6 years ago

Norway is working on reaching 0 deaths, in their "Vision Zero" program. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/01/03/vision-zero-norwegian...

judge2020• 6 years ago

You're right - usually insurance will call crashes 'accidents' in order to reduce perceived liability, although the word does have a place for incidents where it wasn't preventable (such as a sudden hail, or a billboard falling, or any number of outside factors causing someone to hit another car to avoid their own injury).

https://www.patrickdaniellaw.com/crash-vs-accident-differenc...

axaxs• 6 years ago

I don't know, I saw this same argument in the gun community. Stop calling them accidental discharges, call them negligent discharges. Both they and you make good points as to why.

But, then what does the meaning of accident become? With this line of thinking, nothing is an accident, everything has a cause and potentially a prevention. So once nothing is an accident, then we can start using the word accident again? I mean, most car crashes are unintentional(as are injuries at factories, and gun discharges) so why are they not accidents? Or are you arguing for the word and concept of accident to not exist at all?

jschwartzi• 6 years ago

I think the argument is that so much of safety and risk is about whether a risk is acceptable or not. If you work in a foundry you may run a very real risk of being burned by hot metal. But the question is whether a pedestrian simply walking past the foundry should bear the same risk should there be an incident. What makes a risk "acceptable," in other words? And it strikes me that much of that depends on the individual experiencing the hazard, the nature of the hazard itself, as well as the risk of an incident involving the hazard.

solidsnack9000• 6 years ago

An accident is a harm that wasn't intended. It might be negligent, it might be due to a mechanical failure. There are different levels of culpability in those cases; but neither is as culpable as intentional harm.

Sometimes being more specific about causation is important; sometimes being more specific about culpability is important.

posterboy• 6 years ago

ac-cident more or less literally means crash or collaps, cado "to fall", and might be akin to catastrophe, kata "down". ad- (assimilated ac-) might mean frontal, approximately, or compare to ago "go, drive" (voiceless e. g. in act).

It's also pretty pretty close to, what's a good example, sui-cide, electro-cution, so we might refer to car-cide or ac-cide, i.e. death by driving, with some poetic license.

It's not a coincident, where the stress lies on in, for an hinest one-time case. Also cp. case, casus by the way, from the same root. It is rather formulaic, which is however reasonable if it should cover even the most minor cases.

The fact that accidental could come to mean by chance, involuntary was probably due to the consequences being a bigger worry than the causes, in most cases. Legalese has developed a more fine grained scale of responsibility, leaving room for doubt between dolus eventualis, dolus directus 1 and 2 and in contradistion so called negligentia, luxuria and culpa latis all of which should be nevertheless culpable, in theory. However it is not always clear who to blame. Certainly not the wording, is it?

souprock• 6 years ago

We have the idea of "innocent until proven guilty". So a crash is an accident until you can show that it was done on purpose.

tayistay• 6 years ago

Ok, 100M miles until death. How many miles until injury?

jlebar3• 6 years ago

Since the article calls out Waymo engineers:

I'm a software engineer at Waymo, speaking for myself.

I agree with the premise of the article. Humans are remarkably good at driving, and making a computer better will be hard.

Where I may disagree with the author is, I think the project is both feasible and worth doing.

It's worth doing because we drive a remarkable amount. Even at human safety level, more than a million people die every year in car crashes.

As far as feasibility, Waymo is, today, running a fully autonomous, no-human-behind-the-wheel ride hailing service in Arizona. It's not a dead-end demo, it's there. I know, a Phoenix suburb is not the same as NYC or Mumbai. Trust me, I know -- probably better than you! Nonetheless, what we accomplished was impossible a few years ago.

The history of AI is a history of moving the goalposts and then blowing past them. AlphaGo solves what was considered one of the hardest problems in AI, but now that I see how you did it, eh, it's not that impressive. GPT-3 passes the Turing Test and can almost pass a coding phone screen, but come on, nobody really thought that a machine that passed TT would be intelligent. It was just a few years ago that respectable people were saying we'd never solve protein folding. Now that we have, the goalposts have moved again. Don't worry, we'll blow past those, too. Except this time people will yawn.

So give us some time. This too will happen slowly, and then all at once.

ljlolel14• 6 years ago

I am the author, and I am a self-driving car engineer too! Waymo is an inspiring project, many friends work there, and it literally inspired me to work on self-driving cars.

I wrote this to help people in the industry have the right context in the right way.

As to Waymo's driverless testing, it's dangerous! See here what I wrote about why: https://jperla.medium.com/tesla-saves-lives-waymo-gambles-pa...

pontus• 6 years ago

One of the issues that companies like Waymo will have to face is that it's not going to be enough to be better than a human driver, you actually have to be better than a human driver with lane assist, blind spot checkers, adaptive cruise control, etc. As self driving technology matures, so does driving assistance technology. The 100 Million miles that a human driver will have to drive on average to die in a crash will be pushed to a billion miles+ before L5 is achieved, effectively moving the goal post further.

Ultimately self driving technology has to be better not than a human, but than human intervention. It has to be so good that it recognizes when a human incorrectly intervenes to override L4 decisions and then be able to override that human's overriding. Only then will autonomous vehicles overtake humans.

ljlolel14• 6 years ago

Yes, and I write about that and Tesla's active safety features here https://jperla.medium.com/tesla-saves-lives-waymo-gambles-pa...

b1122• 6 years ago

One real issue is that as automated systems, assist or full driving take over, human skill will decrease.

Yes, there are people with poor coordination, spatial perception, the list goes on. Genetics makes a difference. Yet also, training makes a difference. So for those with normal or above normal genetic bounds for the above, training helps immensely.

And driving, responding quickly to issues, is often about training. Hence all the driving ed programs now mandated in many localities, prior to obtaining a license.

Still, it goes beyond that. One becomes more skillful, better at driving, as time progresses. At least, those capable of that. Meanwhile, we're moving humans further and further from direct learning experiences, and with each 'crutch', reducing training scenarios as well.

Of course, we're on a path here. The goal is ultimately to move more towards safety. However I suspect that "things will get worse", before better, as drivers will be less trained on manual tasks.

Edit:

My main point is, we're going to get to a point of 'AI drives, you monitor/intervene" eventually, as the mainstay.

Yet new drivers, will be less able to intervene. They won't have developed, or trained, via the same number of "close calls", and direct driving experiences.

Eventually, asking drivers to "intervene", will be asking for the least skilled to take over, to monitor, to watch.

And there are a lot of areas that are very high bar to handle with AI. Think on this ; all current driving tech is literally 'low hanging fruit'.

It's been a lot of work, I grant that. Yet it's been a lot of work for just that low hanging fruit!

For example, most AI driving is urban, in the southern US.

How about:

- In rural Canada

- In the middle of a snow storm

- With ice, and white-out conditions on the road

- on rural dirt backroads, which are 20 or 30 km long, comprised of potholes and other such irregularities

- with zero mapping

- at -40C

I have extremely strong doubts that AI can even remotely handle that well currently. I'd trust a 5 year old to handle this task far better.

Now, what of drivers who never really drive, end up on this side road, and get 'stuck', with the AI unable to handle things?

When all of the above is normal in the winter. For example, often schools do not close in rural Quebec, for such typical, and normal, conditions.

intricatedetail• 6 years ago

I hope by human intervention you mean someone saying: "car please turn around and take me to Rio." and then car says "did you mean Rio de Janeiro?" And they say: "Sim, por favor, vá em frente" and the car says: "you wont be able to charge me on that route, but I can take you to nearest airport. O que você acha?"

perl4ever• 6 years ago

In my opinion, AI has to be better than the average professional driver. Who is in turn significantly better than the average texting, sleepy, angry, drunken idiot. My uncle had a plaque for a million miles driving his bus without an accident.

Mulpze15• 6 years ago

Why is the self driving ecosystem trying to solve every driving challenge, which is very hard, rather than focussing on highway driving, ideally reserved lanes, high speed and close cars. And progressively expand those areas "reserved to self driving card" over time. It feels like it would bring a lot of value while reducing complexity a lot. If this is a silly question, please let me know why.

foreigner• 6 years ago

I've wondered this too. Also start with commercial vehicles instead of consumers.

Frost1x• 6 years ago

Been a bit mind boggling to me as well. There seems to be an obsession with the most challenging problems (which is fine), but it seems like there are much lower hanging fruit that is easier to grab like long distance travel. I would love to have vehicles that took care of long distance/interstate driving situations.

One of the few rationales I can summon is that when you look at driving and travel as a whole, the total time/mileage that falls in the distribution of long distance may be significantly lower than that of the total time/miles spent in the more difficult inner city driving situations. Moreover, since we're looking at businesses not trying to do humanity a favor but pursing a profit motive, the driving spent in inner city travel is deemed more profitable than the longer haul travel, likely because you have to compete with rail systems, air transit, and so forth. That's all guesswork though, curious if data exists on this.

pron2• 6 years ago

GPT-3 does not pass the Turing test. The Turing test is not about making a person think they're talking to another person while, in fact, they are talking to a machine. The reason is that such a result may depend on the expectations people have of machines' capabilities. Rather, the Turing test, in the "standard" interpretation (rather than Turing's original formulation) has an interrogator interviewing two subjects via text messages, knowing that one of them is a machine and the other a human, trying to distinguish which is which. The machine passes the test if it can trick interviewers sufficiently often.

SAI_Peregrinus• 6 years ago

This is a very important distinction. The Turing Test can be passed only by something that is indistinguishable from a conscious, thinking being.

jlebar3• 6 years ago

the Turing test, in the "standard" interpretation (rather than Turing's original formulation)

Goalposts: moved!

This is exactly my point.

lhorie• 6 years ago

I'm legitimately curious about whether a physical hard limit exists for what AI can accomplish. A few decades ago, people often assumed Moore's law would continue indefinitely, but now there's some doubt as to whether it is physically possible to keep up the pace without some amount of marketing tricks.

We don't believe AI would ever be able to solve some classes of "impossible" tasks, like breaking crypto. But at the same time, we say AI will just keep blowing past all hurdles in some slow singularity-like fashion. Those two ideas can't both be right. I'm curious where the lines converge at.

bmitc3• 6 years ago

It's worth doing because we drive a remarkable amount. Even at human safety level, more than a million people die every year in car crashes.

I'm not sure. Why is this so? To save time? Sure, but I think the self-driving proponents that I have seen have not addressed the new problems that will be brought by self-driving cars. I don't think reducing crashes is anything but a marketing ploy because the real goal of self-driving is to make companies a lot of money. I think accidents will simply be transposed and not reduced.

One problem is the initial rollout period where there is a non-homogeneous mix of human and automated drivers. This impedance mismatch will be problematic and likely lead to more accidents and congestion.

In general, it's my belief (I don't have facts or research, just a hunch) that automated driving will actually increase congestion and traffic. We saw this with Uber and Lyft, where these things plus accidents were increased where these services were deployed. I've seen it first hand that the cars causing issues are likely to be Uber or Lyft. I will be very surprised if this is not the case with automated drivers. For example, consider the case of an automated car dropping someone off in a busy area, probably one of the most wanted use cases for automated car. This is because it could notionally drop the person off and then drive off and find parking. But that seems like an insanely hard problem because such a maneuver is actually difficult for humans and very tricky in busy areas.

I truly don't understand the actual need for self-driving cars. There is a lot of hype, for sure, but I personally see that it will generate more problems. Basically the only problem that it will solve is reduction in human time driving because I doubt it will be actually safer such that it's a major difference from now. I feel our society would gain much more benefit in concentrating on better transportation and urban design: planes, trains, automobiles, bicycles, and walking.

c22• 6 years ago

I think your predictions are 100% accurate, but I also think as the fleet becomes more self-driving and as streets and other public infrastructure are redesigned to accommodate the new paradigms I believe these problems around traffic, congestion, and safety will be solved eventually by automated vehicles.

That is to say I believe human-driving is at a local maxima and it will take accepting a negative dip if we want to progress on this front.

poplarstand• 6 years ago

I'd like to offer another use case, one near and dear to my heart: grandma.

My grandmother, like many grandmothers, has no business being on the road. She is a wonderful person. She is also a horrible driver, a threat to herself and others by virtue of natural impairments (vision, reaction time, etc.)

Taking away her license would make all roads safer, but it would also obliterate her quality of life. The actual need for driverless cars, to me, is a means of retaining her freedom of movement with a far lower level of endangerment.

jlebar3• 6 years ago

I don't think reducing crashes is anything but a marketing ploy

For what it's worth, I wouldn't be working at Waymo if I didn't believe self-driving cars are very likely to save lives.

In general, it's my belief (I don't have facts or research, just a hunch)

Indeed.

kurthr• 6 years ago

One of the key things that Self Driving Vehicles need to learn from humans is how to predict other humans/vehicles. Predicting which vehicle is going to drive unsafely, or even with excessive caution is not just responding to the position (speed and acceleration) of a vehicle, but how it acts relative to predictions (and how well it is predicting your actions), and fits into a type of driver model. And then knowing that all of that will change when a traffic cop is visible or not, the start of a rain, sunset, kids/pets acting up.

That's why driving in different cities for an experienced driver can be so nerve wracking... it's hard to predict what all those vehicles will do! Meanwhile they are also predicting what you will do so you're dangerous as well (don't stop in traffic just because a pedestrian walks into the middle of a busy street in Delhi or Naples, you'll cause an accident).

dehrmann2• 6 years ago

I agree with the premise of the article. Humans are remarkably good at driving, and making a computer better will be hard.

The economic incentives for autonomous driving are interesting, for but just saving lives, collision avoidance is where to focus. If you have tech as good as Waymo, integrating that into a car so it intervenes when it's highly confident the driver doesn't know what they're doing and highly confident it knows the right thing to do would be huge.

otras• 6 years ago

Most humans in a matter of a few hours can operate any multi-ton vehicle in most weather anywhere in the world. As road conditions change humans instantaneously adapt control response and safety protocols.

I would bet that the author has not had the chance to observe common driving practices in New England by drivers unfamiliar with winter weather conditions. Ideally we would all slow down in the snow, but I would hesitate to claim that we all adopt those safety protocols.

ljlolel14• 6 years ago

And yet the numbers aren't much worse! Amazing and suprising, right?

bichiliad• 6 years ago

I think getting killed in a car crash as the driver of a car is an overly specific measurement. What about injuries? What about if you’re struck by a driver while crossing the street? One statistic that comes to mind is that in a crash involving a drunk driver, the drunk driver is much less likely to die because they don’t tend to tense up before the impact of the crash.

ljlolel14• 6 years ago

They're still remarkably rare, don't change the analysis much, and don't matter as much as fatalities.

What does get harder is there is no objective idea of what is a "major" accident versus "minor" accident, so you can spend a lot of time arguing and manipulating statistics, whereas death is easier to quantify objectively and compare (and also happens to be the most serious thing so a necessary analysis anyway).

cainxinth• 6 years ago

I think about this all the time. I'll be on the highway, cruising along with lots of other cars moving at a high rate of speed all around me and just marvel at the fact that, generally, everything works out ok.

ape4• 6 years ago

Article doesn't mention deaths/injury to pediatricians/cyclists.

ljlolel14• 6 years ago

This is including deaths to pedestrians and cyclists

djsumdog• 6 years ago

I wrote something similar a few years back, but I treated it more as a simple capacity issue:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so...

Even in smaller cities, building transportation infrastructure would greatly reduce congestion, and even reduce the need for future highway expansion. The common excuse is "America isn't built that way" but .. well it was at one time, less than 100 years ago. We use to have more streetcars and passenger rail than EU does now!

I didn't address the technical merits, but we've already seen leaked Google training data on here (that was really bad training data because it seemed to use automated/AI to build the training data and put boxes around a lot of things it shouldn't have ... can't find the link to that now), we know about Uber's engineers screwing up royally and killing a cyclist, we know about Tesla's autopilot getting people killed ... which shows even using sensors as safety features may make people less attentive to the road.

It's a hard problem space. Personally when I get really old and can't drive anymore, I'd prefer to live some place where I could still walk to cycle or take a train everywhere I really need to. I trust that stuff more than us finding the magic bullet to self-driving AI.

And I think what we can get from this article: good self driving AI requires advanced general purpose AI. And once you have that, good luck getting something that intelligent to drive you car. I imagine Marvin from Hitchhiker's Guide, "The most advanced robot in the galaxy asked to do the most menial tasks ... fix the engine Marvin. Fly the ship Marvin. Go buy groceries Marvin ... I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed."

dkural2• 6 years ago

I looked up the death rate, state-by-state variability is interesting:

"The death rate per 100 million miles traveled ranged from 0.54 in Massachusetts to 1.83 in South Carolina.Footnote1"

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state....

Inhibit• 6 years ago

With drive through liquor stores? Sounds about right.

syntaxing• 6 years ago

Disclaimer, my thoughts are of my own and not of my employer. I work in the SDC industry as well but on hardware so I wanted to share my thoughts. I'm guessing the author does not work on the hardware side of things because the safety and verification processes is transparent and obvious.

I agree with the premise that humans are great drivers and replacing humans will be a tough challenge (which makes it fun). However, the idea that SDCs cannot be verified and the rockets vs SDC analogy is incorrect. Let's go even closer and just compare cars to SDCs. What makes your standard cars that has 150+ of HP safe? Better yet, most of this energy comes from explosion of fuel! Any of the mechanical failures in a car can lead to death (brake calipers breaking, ECU malfunction, pistonhead cannonball, etc). But yet, how often do you hear in the news someone dies because their car exploded while using it?

The reason why cars are robust is not because it's mechanical, deterministic, some sort of inherent physical laws, or manufactures test every single part coming out of the production line. But rather cars are safe because there is a robust safety system that heavily incorporates a verification and validation process with a promoted transparency process that mitigate risk. A good example of this is ASIL (ISO-26262) [1] and FMEA processes [2]. Other industries like rocket/military (like you mentioned) and medical both deploy the same type of model to make their product safe and robust.

There is no glaring technical barrier that prevents SDC. The hardest barrier for a product has always been cost vs profit (likewise for most products, economics of it always comes first).

[1]https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:26262:-9:ed-1:en [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_mode_and_effects_analy...

todd8• 6 years ago

I've had a few harrowing driving experiences and fortunately, no serious crashes. The difficult driving experiences where just so rare that I would be surprised if a self-driving vehicle would know what to do.

* I once had a car driving way above the speed limit approach me from the rear, it passed me by jumping the curb driving on grass and sidewalk and swerving back onto the street in front of me.

* Another time I was driving back to a rental house in the Aspen area and the snowstorm had gotten bad enough to completely cover and obscure the road on the hillside I was driving on. My wheels went off the road, fortunately on the side away from the drop off and I was driving slowly, but then I couldn't get back on the road without using enough power that I feared I would swerve off the road on down the hill. This required a bit of puzzle solving before I could safely get back on the road.

* I've had bad GPS data that kept me circling my destination without every getting me there.

I just think that such unusual situations are going to be difficult for autonomous cars to understand very soon.

carapace2• 6 years ago

If we set it up right[1] the cars share data/experience so that each one learns from the whole fleet. A novel situation will only be novel once, for one car, then all the rest will be able to handle similar future situations "by the book".

[1] I don't think manufacturers of self-driving cars (and can we please call them "auto-autos"!?) should compete on safety, rather, I think it should be mandated legally that they have to share data on crashes with a view to preventing further crashes. Like the aviation industry, eh?

mcguire3• 6 years ago

Note that in one of Perla's linked articles, he argues that Tesla's approach to testing autonomous vehicles is better than Waymo's because unpaid safety drivers are cheaper than paid safety drivers.

"Moreover, Waymo cannot get the requisite number of miles to either prove safety or truly get all the edge case long-tail test data to make it safer than humans. It’s too expensive to pay trained safety drivers, since you need more data and more miles to get edge case data as you get safer and safer. It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars or more to drive the billions of needed miles. It’s not even close to possible to get enough paid rides in remote Arizona to drive billions of miles. The unsupervised rides save them a bit of money, but risk lives, so at what cost to the population, to us?

"As a comparison, Tesla gathers test data cheaply. Tesla had at least 10 billion miles of data driven this year worldwide in every condition, and customers paid them for the privilege to drive them as (unpaid, non-professional) supervising safety drivers."

I believe he's right about the data, although I'm not entirely sure about the quality of the data. I am also not sure I'm happy with his, and Tesla's, solution. (In order to discover edge cases, you have to put the vehicle in potentially dangerous situations and hope that the unpaid safety driver can extricate it without killing anyone.)

kabrn• 6 years ago

Every comment here frames the conversation in terms of the safety of the cars and the number of crashes they could prevent, which is exactly the propaganda these companies want us to buy and further spread. Let us not forget that the true end goal is to make a profit and to "disrupt" existing establishments; that it may or may not prevent crashes is only a convenient side effect for them to advertise.

dehrmann2• 6 years ago

Most humans in a matter of a few hours can operate any multi-ton vehicle in most weather anywhere in the world.

I was shocked at how easy it was to rent a car (with insurance!) in a country that drives on the other side of the road, and how not inept I was at driving like that. It's still a little nerve-racking.

carapace2• 6 years ago

I don't recall when I first realized how insanely good at driving humans are, but I was a kid, and in Bayesian terms it gave me a strong prior for the existence of some sort of Guardian Angels until I learned more about how the our motor minds work.

We move with extreme precision and coordination on the unconscious level even when we seem clumsy or uncoordinated on the conscious level. We are acting out cultural and personal formats or roles, a kind of post-hypnotic suggestion. This is part of the reason that you can learn hypnosis and accelerate learning: we are operating at a fraction of our potential due to old programming, upgrade your software and it unlocks "new" capabilities.

Humans are remarkably safe at driving

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