this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
544 points (96.4% liked)
Technology
59414 readers
3109 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Thousands of accidents a year from human drivers. I sleep
90 accidents a year from autonomous vehicles. Lazer eyes
You make it sound like it's a 50/50 split between human drivers and autonomous vehicles, which is definitely not the case.
There are way more human drivers than autonomous vehicles. So, when an autonomous vehicle runs your child or pet over or whatever, who do you blame? The company? The programmers? The DMV for even allowing them on the road in the first place?
What's an autonomous vehicle do if it gets a flat? Park in the middle of the interstate like an idiot instead of pulling over and phone home for a mechanic?
You need to first ask yourself if it more important to put blame than to minimize risk.
"Autonomous vehicles could potentially reduce traffic fatalities by up to 90%."
"Autonomous vehicle accidents have been recorded at a slightly lower rate compared with conventional cars, at 4.7 accidents per million miles driven."
https://blog.gitnux.com/driverless-car-accident-statistics/
That opinion puts a lot of blind faith in the companies developing self driving and their infinitely altruistic motives.
That's one way of strawmanning your way out of a discussion.
It's not a strawman argument, it is a fact. Without the ability to audit the entire codebase of self-driving cars, there's no way to know if the manufacturer had knowingly hidden something in the code that might have caused accidents and fatalities too numerous to recount, but too important to ignore, that were linked to a fault in self-driving technology.
I was actually trying to find an article I'd read about Tesla's self-driving software reverting to manual control moments before impact, but I was literally flooded by fatality reports.
Strawman arguments can be factual. The entire point is that you're responding to something that wasn't the argument. You're putting words in their mouth to defeat them instead of addressing their words at face value. It is the definition of a strawman argument.
We can't audit the code for humans, but we still let them drive.
If the output for computers driving is less than for humans and the computer designers are forced to be as financially liable for car crashes as humans, why shouldn't we let computers drive?
I'm not fully in either camp in this debate, but fwiw, the humans we let drive generally suffer consequences if there is an accident due to their own negligence
Also we do audit them, it's called a license. I know it's super easy to get one in the US but in other countries they can be quite stringent.
And I'm not denying it. However, it takes a very high bar to get someone convicted of vehicular manslaughter and that usually requires evidence that the driver was grossly negligent.
If you can show that a computer can drive as well as a sober human, where is the gross negligence?
Because there's no valid excuse to prevent us from auditing their software and it could save lives. Why the hell should we allow then to use the road if they won't even let us inspect the engine?
A car isn't a human. It's a machine, and it can and should be inspected. Anything less than that is pure recklessness.
How do you think a car gets approved right now? Do we take it apart? Do we ask for the design calculations of how they designed each piece?
That isn't what happens. There is no "audit" of parts or the whole. Instead, there is a series of tests to determine road worthiness that everything in a car has to pass. We've already accepted a black box for the electronics of a car. You don't need to get approval of your code to show that pressing the brake pedal causes the brake lights turn on; they just test it to make sure that it works.
We don't audit the code already for life critical software already. It is all liability taken on by the manufacturers and verified via government testing of the finished product. What is an audit going to do when we don't it already?
It is most definitely a strawman to frame my comment as considering the companies "infinitely altruistic", no matter what lies behind the strawman. It doesn't refute my statistics but rather tries to make me look like I make an extremely silly argument I'm not making, which is the defintion of a strawman argument.
The data you cited comes straight from manufacturers, who've repeatedly been shown to lie and cherry-pick their data to intentionally mislead people about driverless car safety.
So no it's not a straw man argument at all to claim that you're putting inordinate faith in manufacturers, because that's exactly what you did. It's actually incredible to me how many of you are so irresponsible that you're not even willing to do basic cross-checking against an industry that is known for blatantly lying about safety issues.
It may be the case that every line of code of all self driving vehicles is not available for a public audit. But neither is the instruction set of every human who was taught to drive properly on the road today.
I would hope that through protesting and new legislation, that we will see the industry become more safe over time. Which we simply will never be able to achieve with human drivers.
That wasn't an opinion, it's a statistic.
No (large public) company ever has altruistic motives. They aren't inherently good or bad, just machines driven by profit.
You don't need to put faith into companies beyond the faith that is put into humans. Make companies just as financially liable as humans are, and you'll still see a decrease in accidents.
You mean those companies who will lobby and spend a fraction of their wealth to make those lawsuits disappear?
How is that different from the current system of large vehicular insurance companies spending a fraction of their wealth to make their lawsuits disappear?
It's no different at all. We should have stronger laws for such scenarios.
Ok, but in the context of letting computers drive, I feel like people want to enforce this perfect system of liability on automated systems where we already have an existing criminal and civil legal system as is that is designed to nowhere near the same standard for humans.
Why are we willing to say that it is unacceptable that no computer can kill people on the road when almost 43,000 die in the USA due to humans driving?
Uh, because software can be fixed and those deaths can be prevented? How the hell can you ask this question seriously? I can't believe how many people are willing to blatantly shill for these companies, even if it gets people fucking killed.
And no you can't claim to be saving lives because these driverless cars very often kill people in situations that a human driver would easily navigate.
And until the system is perfect, let people die on the worse system?
This isn't me shilling for a company, this is me comparing two flawed systems.
This part is bogus to me as well. My friend who used to work in self-driving said that when self driving can be "just" better than human driving, technology has won. In statistical terms, it means having slightly lesser fatalities than humans (<43k fatalities with respect to the num of human drivers).
Now it's up for debate lesser by how much exactly. Just 5% reduction or 50% reduction. If we want to go for 99% reduction, we should stop building self-driving tech altogether.
So ban all forms of driving?