Comment by webdood90
20 hours ago
How many human drivers do you think would pass the bar you're setting?
IMO, the bar should be that the technology is a significant improvement over the average performance of human drivers (which I don't think is that hard), not necessarily perfect.
> How many human drivers do you think would pass the bar you're setting?
How many humans drivers would pass it, and what proportion of the time? Even the best drivers do not constantly maintain peak vigilance, because they are human.
> IMO, the bar should be that the technology is a significant improvement over the average performance of human drivers (which I don't think is that hard), not necessarily perfect.
In practice, this isn't reasonable, because "hey we're slightly better than a population that includes the drunks, the inattentive, and the infirm" is not going to win public trust. And, of course, a system that is barely better than average humans might worsen safety, if it ends up replacing driving by those who would normally drive especially safe.
I think "better than the average performance of a 75th or 90th percentile human driver" might be a good way to look at things.
It's going to be a weird thing, because odds are the distribution of accidents that do happen won't look much like human ones. It will have superhuman saves (like that scooter one), but it will also crash in situations that we can't really picture humans doing.
I'm reminded of airbags; even first generation airbags made things much safer overall, but they occasionally decapitated a short person or child in a 5MPH parking lot fender bender. This was hard for the public to stomach, and if it's your kid who is internally decapitated by the airbag in a small accident, I don't think you'll really accept "it's safer on average to have an airbag!"
The parent comment said the bar should be "significant improvement" over the average performance of human drivers.
Then you said, "this isn't reasonable", and the bar shouldn't be "slightly better" or "barely better". It should be at least better than the 75th percentile driver.
It sounds like you either misread the parent comment or you're phrasing your response as disagreement despite proposing roughly the same thing as the parent comment.
All depends on what you read as "significant improvement".
A 20% lower fatal crash rate compared to the average might be a significant improvement-- from a public health standpoint, this is huge if you could reduce traffic deaths by 20%.
But if you don't get the worst drivers to replace their driving with autonomous, that "20% less than average" might actually make things worse. That's my point. The bar has to be pretty dang high to be sure that you will actually make things better.
> In practice, this isn't reasonable, because "hey we're slightly better than a population that includes the drunks, the inattentive, and the infirm" is not going to win public trust.
Sadly, you're right, but as rational people, we can acknowledge that it should. I care about reducing injuries and deaths, and the %tile of human performance needed for that is probably something like 30%ile. It's definitely well below 75%ile.
The counterpoint, though:
> > And, of course, a system that is barely better than average humans might worsen safety, if it ends up replacing driving by those who would normally drive especially safe.
It's only if you get the habitually drunk (a group that is overall impoverished), the very old, etc, to ride Waymo that you reap this benefit. And they're probably not early adopters.
2 replies →
The bar is very high because humans expect machines to be perfect. As for the expectation of other humans, "pobody's nerfect!"