We already accept 40,000 vehicle deaths a year, 7,500 pedestrian deaths a year, 1,100 by police, 260 by train, and almost 50,000 deaths from falls.
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?
A big difference is that you can't put a robot in jail. Even though the person driving the car is usually not harmed by hitting somebody on foot, it's still a life-or-death level situation, they might be looking at multiple years in prison, a large portion of their life gone.
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.
At least in most parts of the US, hitting and killing a pedestrian does not usually result in jail time for the driver - unless the driver was driving under the influence or was driving recklessly. Most times their license isn't even taken away.
We have put CEOs in prison in the past. We could do so again. If a company really operates with blatant disregard for safety we should. Waymo's CEO makes it clear that she thinks their cars are better than normal humans, so long as that is really the case and she isn't ignoring issues she shouldn't go to prison for deaths their cars cost, but it is (or should be) an option if the company isn't careful.
The point of failure is probably not the CEO, though. They are rarely technical people directly supervising the taxis. If it can be proven that management skimped on quality, then, by all means, jail them. Otherwise, it becomes the fault of the people monitoring the systems.
A friend of mine works in a bank. He said, "Did you know, the optimal amount of fraud is actually not zero? Because first of all, you can't get zero, and second, if you try, you screw up the whole bank."
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.
In real life tradeoffs always have to be made, and some of them are tough for the public to know about.
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?
> but that Waymo's at least are already far safer than human drivers
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.
From what I can find, those 7500 are 7500 pedestrians killed by vehicle a year, so we might as well round it up de 50k vehicular death a year and be done with it.
This is not a controversial take, the evidence already exists.
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.
We see with trains and jets that the public does not accept deaths with the same benign resignation as automobiles.
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.
This is basically the opposite of how juror psychology works. Jurors in these cases tend to vote against defendants they identify with because they prefer to believe they’d never act like the defendant. Source: I’m a former jury consultant who researched and consulted on these kinds of cases.
Trains and airplanes are fundamentally different from cars. A car accident is unlikely to kill you. A plane crash will. A car accident is unlikely to kill your entire family. A plane crash will.
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.
A train or airplane is much less likely to kill me than a car. Just if there is an accident those two modes are more likely to kill, but they are massively much less likely to be in an accident in the first place.
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.
The question wasn't about "corporate cost-benefit analysis", it was simply (and vaguely) will society accepts deaths caused by robots, and the answer simply admitted the reality that no technology is perfect.
Auto fatalities are insane, and the US focus on build highways at all costs while out of the other side of their mouth parroting talking points about safety is one of the uniquely stupid things we do as a society. The safest car is the one parked in your garage. The safest driver is the one who isn't behind the wheel.
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.
That's pretty sad. That means the real question society wants answered before letting these things on the road is not how to avoid deaths, but who pays and how much when deaths aren't avoided.
That, unfortunately, is the reality. There are in the US probably 0 departments of transportation/highways including at the federal level that are focused on reducing car crashes and deaths. The only true focus is expansion of highways to ease congestion.
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.
The US Department of Transportation includes minimizing traffic deaths in their planning by assigning a cost of $13.7M as the "Valuation of a Statistical Life":
> It is kind of nuts that less than half of society accepts that
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.
Everyone is realistically able to though, if they're willing to sacrifice temporary pain. Many countries been through it before, and general strikes seems to have been the only non-violent way of getting wide-scale change enacted, and many of the people participating in those strikes "wasn't realistically able to participate" yet did so regardless.
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.
I don't think anybody accepts school shootings, and anybody accusing half of the population of "accepting" this obvious problem is likely making a bad faith argument attempting to paint their political opposition in a bad light.
I'm not attempting to paint any political opposition in a bad light, I was trying to paint the entire population at large in a bad light, as most of the people living there doesn't seem to do anything, not even weekly protests, even less a general strike.
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.
61% of people according to Pew research center think that guns are too easy to obtain. That includes some conservatives/republicans.
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.
American does not agree on what to do about school shootings, but to claim we accept it is a sever distortion trying to shut down the voice of others who do find guns useful (and would never shoot in a school).
The majority of gun owners use them for hunting animals that they eat. They also use them for putting holes in paper targets. Only a tiny minority use them for killing humans.
> Only a tiny minority use them for killing humans
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
I think you'll find societies are incredibly inconsistent in what they will and will not accept. For instance Europe is currently accepting constant death toll due to drownings of African refugees [1]. Hell, Europe accepted, without much complaint, that North African countries drove refugees into the desert and abandoned them to die, including children [2].
> The most interesting part of the interview arrived when Korosec brought on a thought experiment. What if self-driving vehicles like Waymo and others reduce the number of traffic fatalities in the United States, but a self-driving vehicle does eventually cause a fatal crash, Korosec pondered. Or as she put it to the executive: “Will society accept that? Will society accept a death potentially caused by a robot?”
“Society will accept deaths caused by vehicles, regardless of whether the driver is human, robot, dog, alien species, so that people with vehicles can go vroom vroom” - every car company since cars have existed.
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.
> 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.
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.)
The "simple" (as distinct from "easy") option is that anything fast gets a dedicated route that's physically separated - maybe by elevation or such - from everything around it.
> externality problems which we could solve or optimize if we really wanted to
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.
Death caused by automated vehicle is not the controversial aspect, the difficulty comes when there is a choice that the vehicle must make between possible outcomes:
* 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
It’s much easier to accept fatalities caused by other humans because there is someone to hold responsible. Will autonomous vehicle companies be held responsible when they cause fatalities?
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.
On the other hand we have very lenient punishments for damage, injury and deaths caused by drivers, and are often reluctant to actually apply them. As long as no DUI is involved we are willing to accept a lot of negligence from human drivers
Lets hope not, if so, here is a theoretical scenario:
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.
Americans accept pedestrian deaths caused by huge monster truck F350s every single day. Not that an AI powered car running people over is nothing, but nobody in the US gives a shit about pedestrian deaths
~20 fatalities per day. Even if you did all 3/4 ton+ trucks I doubt it's 1/day since they're less than 1/20th of the vehicles on the road except maybe in Texas or something.
I believe you're correct, but in the interest of drilling into this a bit - it looks like the models that cause the most pedestrian fatalities are pickups, but SUVs as a whole are responsible for more overall deaths (based on 2021 data): https://data.bikeleague.org/new-nhtsa-data-vehicle-data-show...
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 looks like the models that cause the most pedestrian fatalities are pickups, but SUVs as a whole are responsible for more overall deaths.
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 older 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.
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.
We already accept 40,000 vehicle deaths a year, 7,500 pedestrian deaths a year, 1,100 by police, 260 by train, and almost 50,000 deaths from falls.
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?
A big difference is that you can't put a robot in jail. Even though the person driving the car is usually not harmed by hitting somebody on foot, it's still a life-or-death level situation, they might be looking at multiple years in prison, a large portion of their life gone.
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.
At least in most parts of the US, hitting and killing a pedestrian does not usually result in jail time for the driver - unless the driver was driving under the influence or was driving recklessly. Most times their license isn't even taken 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...
> A big difference is that you can't put a robot in jail
We rarely put human drivers in jail even when they're clearly at fault. We often don't even take their license away.
We have put CEOs in prison in the past. We could do so again. If a company really operates with blatant disregard for safety we should. Waymo's CEO makes it clear that she thinks their cars are better than normal humans, so long as that is really the case and she isn't ignoring issues she shouldn't go to prison for deaths their cars cost, but it is (or should be) an option if the company isn't careful.
The point of failure is probably not the CEO, though. They are rarely technical people directly supervising the taxis. If it can be proven that management skimped on quality, then, by all means, jail them. Otherwise, it becomes the fault of the people monitoring the systems.
A friend of mine works in a bank. He said, "Did you know, the optimal amount of fraud is actually not zero? Because first of all, you can't get zero, and second, if you try, you screw up the whole bank."
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.
> optimal amount of fraud
That sounds like the amount of fraud is the thing being optimized for.
In real life tradeoffs always have to be made, and some of them are tough for the public to know about.
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-...
> but that Waymo's at least are already far safer than human drivers
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.
From what I can find, those 7500 are 7500 pedestrians killed by vehicle a year, so we might as well round it up de 50k vehicular death a year and be done with it.
Seems more honest.
This is not a controversial take, the evidence already exists.
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/
We see with trains and jets that the public does not accept deaths with the same benign resignation as automobiles.
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.
People give car fatalities in general a pass because it could be have been them driving.
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.
This is basically the opposite of how juror psychology works. Jurors in these cases tend to vote against defendants they identify with because they prefer to believe they’d never act like the defendant. Source: I’m a former jury consultant who researched and consulted on these kinds of cases.
Most of these cases never make it to a jury or result in felony charges.
I think the people expect more from things controlled by a central authority.
They have very low expectations of transportation operated by individuals. Much in the same way we have low expectations of other people in general.
Trains and airplanes are fundamentally different from cars. A car accident is unlikely to kill you. A plane crash will. A car accident is unlikely to kill your entire family. A plane crash will.
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.
A train or airplane is much less likely to kill me than a car. Just if there is an accident those two modes are more likely to kill, but they are massively much less likely to be in an accident in the first place.
>trains and jets
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.
The question wasn't about "corporate cost-benefit analysis", it was simply (and vaguely) will society accepts deaths caused by robots, and the answer simply admitted the reality that no technology is perfect.
What should the answer have been?
Auto fatalities are insane, and the US focus on build highways at all costs while out of the other side of their mouth parroting talking points about safety is one of the uniquely stupid things we do as a society. The safest car is the one parked in your garage. The safest driver is the one who isn't behind the wheel.
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.
That's pretty sad. That means the real question society wants answered before letting these things on the road is not how to avoid deaths, but who pays and how much when deaths aren't avoided.
That, unfortunately, is the reality. There are in the US probably 0 departments of transportation/highways including at the federal level that are focused on reducing car crashes and deaths. The only true focus is expansion of highways to ease congestion.
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.
The US Department of Transportation includes minimizing traffic deaths in their planning by assigning a cost of $13.7M as the "Valuation of a Statistical Life":
https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...
That's an interesting comparison...I think you may be right in the long-term.
America is a society that accepts regular school shootings. What society will accept is a low bar
It is kind of nuts that less than half of society accepts that, and yet the problem remains.
It is an emergent property of our political system.
> It is kind of nuts that less than half of society accepts that
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.
I think a very large portion of the 99% aren't complacent so much as they are not realistically able to opt out.
Everyone is realistically able to though, if they're willing to sacrifice temporary pain. Many countries been through it before, and general strikes seems to have been the only non-violent way of getting wide-scale change enacted, and many of the people participating in those strikes "wasn't realistically able to participate" yet did so regardless.
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.
I don't think anybody accepts school shootings, and anybody accusing half of the population of "accepting" this obvious problem is likely making a bad faith argument attempting to paint their political opposition in a bad light.
I'm not attempting to paint any political opposition in a bad light, I was trying to paint the entire population at large in a bad light, as most of the people living there doesn't seem to do anything, not even weekly protests, even less a general strike.
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.
61% of people according to Pew research center think that guns are too easy to obtain. That includes some conservatives/republicans.
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...
American does not agree on what to do about school shootings, but to claim we accept it is a sever distortion trying to shut down the voice of others who do find guns useful (and would never shoot in a school).
Guns are useful, to kill people with. Maybe we'd have fewer gun deaths with fewer guns?
The majority of gun owners use them for hunting animals that they eat. They also use them for putting holes in paper targets. Only a tiny minority use them for killing humans.
> Only a tiny minority use them for killing humans
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
I think you'll find societies are incredibly inconsistent in what they will and will not accept. For instance Europe is currently accepting constant death toll due to drownings of African refugees [1]. Hell, Europe accepted, without much complaint, that North African countries drove refugees into the desert and abandoned them to die, including children [2].
[1] https://ecre.org/mediterranean-rise-in-crossings-on-two-rout...
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/tunisia-thousands-of-migrants-being-du...
> The most interesting part of the interview arrived when Korosec brought on a thought experiment. What if self-driving vehicles like Waymo and others reduce the number of traffic fatalities in the United States, but a self-driving vehicle does eventually cause a fatal crash, Korosec pondered. Or as she put it to the executive: “Will society accept that? Will society accept a death potentially caused by a robot?”
Sounds like "perfect is the enemy of good."
Reality check: sounds like "who pays for this, and how much?"
“Society will accept deaths caused by vehicles, regardless of whether the driver is human, robot, dog, alien species, so that people with vehicles can go vroom vroom” - every car company since cars have existed.
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.
> 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.
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.)
The "simple" (as distinct from "easy") option is that anything fast gets a dedicated route that's physically separated - maybe by elevation or such - from everything around it.
This seems roughly equivalent to liability insurance.
> externality problems which we could solve or optimize if we really wanted to
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.
Well, of course they will since your army of lawyers will force us too, what choice will we have?
Death caused by automated vehicle is not the controversial aspect, the difficulty comes when there is a choice that the vehicle must make between possible outcomes:
* 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
It’s much easier to accept fatalities caused by other humans because there is someone to hold responsible. Will autonomous vehicle companies be held responsible when they cause fatalities?
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.
On the other hand we have very lenient punishments for damage, injury and deaths caused by drivers, and are often reluctant to actually apply them. As long as no DUI is involved we are willing to accept a lot of negligence from human drivers
Society will accept a lot of unacceptable things. That, ultimately, is the problem.
If society accepts unacceptable things, surely that means they're acceptable?
Society could also be broken. Society itself could behave in unacceptable ways.
Then why do they sue the DMV to keep their accidents secret?
We don't accept factory robots killing factory workers. Why would a road robot be held to a lesser standard?
Lets hope not, if so, here is a theoretical scenario:
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.
"Hope you enjoyed the ride, hehe!"
Americans accept pedestrian deaths caused by huge monster truck F350s every single day. Not that an AI powered car running people over is nothing, but nobody in the US gives a shit about pedestrian deaths
~20 fatalities per day. Even if you did all 3/4 ton+ trucks I doubt it's 1/day since they're less than 1/20th of the vehicles on the road except maybe in Texas or something.
I believe you're correct, but in the interest of drilling into this a bit - it looks like the models that cause the most pedestrian fatalities are pickups, but SUVs as a whole are responsible for more overall deaths (based on 2021 data): https://data.bikeleague.org/new-nhtsa-data-vehicle-data-show...
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 looks like the models that cause the most pedestrian fatalities are pickups, but SUVs as a whole are responsible for more overall deaths.
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 older 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.
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.
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