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0 pointskens6y ago0 comments

People die all the time from driving under a semi-trailer. Look up "Underride". Over 200 people die every year from underride crashes in the US, so this isn't a mistake made only by autopilots. In other words, if we switched to self-driving cars and three people died every week when the autopilot drove into a semi-trailer, that would be a big improvement.

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6 comments · 1 top-level

pjkundert6y ago· 5 in thread

So, your family would be ok that your car sheared you off in a quirk unnecessary accident, so long as the overall stats were better than average?

Non-ergotic stats are not comparable to ergotic (group) stats.

michaelmrose6y ago

Given 100 individuals who would have died in everyday accidents all would prefer a 99% chance of survival.

Given a population of a million all would prefer a 1 in a million chance of death under a semi to a 1 in 10k chance of being smeared in a more average fashion.

Your argument is the same one used against seat belts with people advocating a strictly inferior survival strategy to prevent a rare misadventure.

DrScump6y ago

Let's say your autodrive system replaces 100,000 driver-hours.

Let's say those driver-hours would have resulted in 3 deaths of others (in vehicles or pedestrians) but your autodrive results in 1 different death (which wouldn't have occurred with the human drivers).

Your stats are no comfort at all to the loved ones of your victim.

It's like the Trolley Problem but the humans are unidentifiable.

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masonic6y ago

It's essentially unheard-of that one's own failure to use a seatbelt results in injury or death to some other party hit by the flying driver/passenger who was unbelted. That's the appropriate analogy.

iso9476y ago

That’s not how it works for humans though. “Other drivers are terrible. I am above average. Other drivers underride. I don’t”

wutbrodo6y ago

Do you not fly in airplanes? People make tradeoffs like this ALL the time. It's why the term "freak accident" even exists. People trade off freak accidents against convenience and quality of life, let alone a _higher_ rate of non-freak accidents.

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