The issues of vehicles and the risk they post to people outside the vehicles are straightforward externality problems which we could solve or optimize if we really wanted to.
Every vehicle driven above a certain speed for a unit of time, whether with an human or robot driver, imposes a risk on everyone around it. (whether they are inside or outside of a vehicle) Make a ballpark, even lowball, estimate for that risk, and simply require the people inside the vehicle to compensate others for the risk being imposed on them. Of course this is simplistic and not perfect, but it would be a lot more honest than what we are doing today, and would align incentives to a safe future a lot better than what we do today.
We have. We've optimized for economic growth of car companies and full car penetration into every crevasse of the built environment. It fucking sucks but if your goal is to have as much driving as possible the current situation is probably close to optimal. It's a problem of values not execution.
I see your point but we're all imposing risks on each other all the time. I'm sitting on the 6th floor of a 10 floor building, presumably I'm at some non-zero risk of it collapsing, which would be lower if this building was shorter, but I don't feel entitled to compensation from the owner for the marginal risk because they wanted more floors.
I think we've actually done alot better in reducing the externalities of direct vehicle deaths (insurance, safety standards, vehicle inspections, etc.) than we have in other areas (energy costs, environmental impact, city/street design, parking, etc.)
Sounds like "perfect is the enemy of good."
Pickups here making up about one in six of pedestrian deaths, and a little less than one in five bicyclist deaths.
The F350 specifically is down a ways on the list, and I don't think Ford breaks their sales data down by specific model, but it does seem overrepresented vs the F150. Especially given that the F150 is more designed for "everyday" driving, so should have more miles, especially in areas where pedestrians are.
It's all just a data mess and really hard to pull anything useful out of i.
A bunch of SUVs are basically Schrodinger's car. Is a Chevy Suburban an SUV or a pickup? The part that hits you is basically a Silverado 1500. You don't know what bucket to put it in until you know what narrative you want. Ditto for many, many other models.
And this complexity is then compounded by all the SUVs that are basically cars, Nissan Kicks and the like. But they're taller than historical cars, but their hoodlines aren't actually that much taller than current cars, which adopted their styling in part because of european pedestrian safety.
And then when you look at historical data it gets weird too. Is a 2005 Outback an SUV. Most would say no, but Subaru marketed it that way because it was 2005 and SUVs were cool. But a 2015 Outback is pretty clearly SUV. There's also been huge changes in the SUV market over time.
IDK what to make of it. We should probably be focusing on limiting car to pedestrian contact in the first place.
>The F350 specifically is down a ways on the list, and I don't think Ford breaks their sales data down by specific model.
350/3500 trucks get weird because on one hand you have DRW cab and chassis that get turned into dump trucks and box trucks and stuff and those are basically indistinguishable from medium duty trucks as far as usage is concerned but on the low end it's still a single rear wheel pickup basically indistinguishable from a 250/2500 so you've really got two trucks there.
It also goes beyond just the total number of fatalities. Just like we don’t accept DUIs, we shouldn’t accept negligence or laziness from autonomous vehicle developers even if their product is safer than human drivers.
It is an emergent property of our political system.
I'm not seeing any evidence of the other half of the US society not accepting school shootings.
If people truly cared about it, you'd go out on the street and protest, and waging a general strike in school and related areas until something is being done about it.
Instead 99% of the population seems complacent, and do mostly nothing about it, everyone (mostly) is still sending their kids to schools, teachers are still going to work and everything is business as usual.
It helps that other countries have some solid foundation for doing general strikes, particularly when they have strong unions that make people able to strike yet survive and get food and shelter.
But the upper-class seems to have anticipated this and fostered a really strong anti-union culture in the US, so now people have to suffer because there is no way of protesting, and there is no way of changing the status quo.
Pulling their kids out of school? Quitting their teaching jobs? I'd say not so much.
Strikes are also iffy.
I'm from France so, you know, I'm down with strikes, protests, and all that.
I also lived more than half my life in the US and, as you wrote, it's just different (and not accidentally so).
I'm sure most of the population wants it to end, but also most of the population isn't doing anything about it, that's why I say most of them are complacent.
The group of people least likely to think guns are too easy to obtain are firearm owners, but even so 38% of them think it's too easy. 34% of Republican/Republican leaning people think it's too easy.
What we can say is most people think it's too easy to obtain firearms. And yet - the issue persists. I'm not trying to make it a partisan issue, I'm suggesting it's (as I wrote) an emergent property of our political system. Majorities can't get laws changed for various reasons.
Source:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/24/key-facts...
[1] https://ecre.org/mediterranean-rise-in-crossings-on-two-rout...
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/tunisia-thousands-of-migrants-being-du...
Ephedrine, anhydrous ammonia, syringes, drones/UAVs, fireworks, high powered laser pointers are just a few things that are misused by a small minority but are restricted because the bad actors create outsized harm
The question is: will turning all the cars into a collective Borg operated by Big Tech upend our indifference to auto fatalities?
Already we see that all the latest catastrophes from self-driving cars make much better press, so no, society will not give Waymo a “pass” for just killing a few people through a corporate cost-benefit analysis, particularly when those people never accepted the risk of dealing with Waymo in the first place. And you can substitute the name of any other car company there.
They have very low expectations of transportation operated by individuals. Much in the same way we have low expectations of other people in general.
That being said, I think Waymo is spot-on here. The US at least will accept deaths due to these machines - look at how we accept car deaths now - but the problem Waymo faces is that when these machines do kill someone it's not like automobile insurance today but instead it's a lawsuit every single time until/unless we construct a new regulatory framework to divest corporations from having real responsibility for the deaths caused by these machines. We shouldn't fight the technology, IMO, because I think over the long term it will be safer to be in an autonomous car. We should instead ensure that if such deaths occur, businesses don't get to step away from their responsibility and have to pay rather large sums.
All that being said, all of the above is a complete waste of time and civilizational level resources. Most people should be walking, biking, and hopping on an automated rail line to get around. It's cheaper, healthier, and better in every way. And then when you want to take the car for that road trip or Sunday drive you still can.
Why is that?
The staff and engineers at these organizations and all of the contracting companies make a lot of money building additive solutions to existing problems. They can’t build a rail line or a tram line because then they won’t have a job. Sidewalks crumble not because of a lack of funding, but because there is more money to be made widening a highway.
https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...
In Ohio in 2024 there were around 1,200 fatalities due to car crashes.
The Ohio Department of Transportation's budget is around $11 billion.
Multiple 1,200 by $13,700,000.00 and let me know what number you get. That's just Ohio.
None of these departments operate in any way other than to build and expand highways. If they actually had to be accountable for the number of deaths, they'd do the opposite. They would be tearing down highways and implementing safer and more cost effective alternatives.
How does it reveal any bullshit?
And we're just talking about deaths, not even other repercussions or cost including traffic degradation due to accidents.
If we were to take any of these numbers at face value, you're telling me my own state loses out on $16,440,000,000.00 of human lives on an annual basis and we're not doing anything about it but we're spending $11,000,000,000.00 to make the problem worse. Now multiply that across the entire country.
That's the bullshit.
VSL is counted, but it's far from the only factor. This invariably upsets some people, but I think it makes sense.
If you wanted to include some of those factors, including travel time and travel time cost, etc. you'd be even more disappointed in the performance of your state and local governments with respect to transportation both in how we move people and money.
And that's just direct costs, we can also start looking at other societal costs, whether that's pollution due to exhaust fumes, the destruction of small businesses, obesity, etc.
Going back to the article though for a second, the CEO of Waymo (or whoever it was) was exactly correct. Society will tolerate these deaths. We tolerate them and their costs en masse today. It's just a matter for Waymo and whoever to figure out liability for crashes and make sure that it doesn't fall on them and that society instead bears that cost like we do for highway crashes and death, etc.
If Waymo or a concurrent replace drivers, they don't get that free pass anymore, because the jury will not think it could have been them.
That would actually be a better situation to today's "free pass for everyone as long as no drug involved" that rules nowaday.
there's more than a hundred people on those vehicles though.
also I'm sure a lot of the safety is driven in part by customer demand - people would quickly stop buying airplane tickets if airplanes were crashing regularly.
if robotaxis were also crashing regularly people would stop using them at all.
What should the answer have been?
The standard is higher for these modes of transportation because the consequences of individual incidents are higher. People innately recognize this; we only have one life; one family.
There's a website tracking deaths associated with Teslas, including 61 autopilot fatalities. This has not deterred people from continuing to use autopilot, because using autopilot is a sensible decision. Use of autopilot reduces accidents sixfold in a trend that has been improving over time.[1] Waymo has better statistics and even better performance.[2]
These technologies are going to change the world in a huge way. I'd wager that within 10 years, every luxury car will be outfitted with Waymo sensor kits. Nobody will care how it looks. Within 20, you won't be able to buy consumer insurance for a car you drive yourself.
[1] https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport [2] https://waymo.com/safety/impact/
Nothing is completely safe, and it's just factually correct to say that there will be a fatal crash at some point that's the fault of an autonomous car (there actually have been already), but that Waymo's at least are already far safer than human drivers, and if that remains true, then society will "accept" it.
Also, the question was literally "Will society accept a death potentially caused by a robot?" which is not great, IMO. What does it mean for "society" to "accept" a death? There will be lawsuits, regulations, etc. Is the question whether self-driving cars will be banned everywhere after one fatality?
Seems more honest.
Is that really true? the only data I can find is published by Waymo or others who are obviously not independent of Waymo. Is there any independent data or investigators in this? Until then I need to be cautious. The big question is are they really safer, or are they just safer if you include a few outliers (alcohol) that among humans are significantly worse.
I'm not doubting the claim, and I've always though it is a matter of time before autonomous cars are statistically safer.
The same even stakes are not there with robots killing humans. For one side it's a life-or-death situation, while for the other side it's profit margins and numbers. Companies are usually very happy to increase yearly profit for something as minor as a decimal percentage rise in human deaths spread across society, that's not even controversial.
Heck, not only can you not put a robot in jail, you can't even stop it from driving the next day as if nothing happened because it's duplicate running the exact same software and hardware is all over society.
I still think robot cars is a good thing though, because they will have a lot less accidents than us humans who love to drink and drive, or speed for no good reason. Still, it will raise some big important questions.
We rarely put human drivers in jail even when they're clearly at fault. We often don't even take their license away.
Older article that I remember but still remains true based on news reports I read https://revealnews.org/article/bay-area-drivers-who-kill-ped...
The optimal amount of fraud is close to zero, but it's not zero. (He didn't say if they knew the actual number, but they probably do.)
I think the same logic applies to a lot of other things as well. You want to get as close to 0 as you can, without breaking everything else.
The classic case is road construction. Road design A will cost $120M and 3 people per decade will die. Design B costs $180M and kills 2 people per decade. Which one do you build?
The USDOT uses $13.7M as the "Valuation of a Statistical Life": https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...
That sounds like the amount of fraud is the thing being optimized for.
A person wants someone dead, so they hack into the system or hires someone to do so. Person is hit and dies. The heirs sue say "Waymo", but since death is "accepted", case tossed out and Insurance will cover it.
We already know, there is no serious punishment to companies that is cracked, this case will be accepted. Now punishment it is a slap on the hand, just a cost of doing business.
In this case, and others, we need these companies to be punished to the point where they are 1 step from bankruptcy and/or maybe the CEO and all their direct reports are jailed for a minimum of 7 years. And they can be sued in civil court.
Without that, it will be mayhem on the roads, just as it is for Personal Information being obtained.
* avoid crashing into pedestrian(s) but kill occupant(s)
* crash into pedestrian(s) to save occupant(s)
Real life trolley problem at work and programmed by someone somewhere
I'm not saying it's likely, I'm saying a human will make that call in the moment, and we may judge that human for the decision.
But how do you feel if a self-driving car is making that decision?
techblueberry•3mo ago