this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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So if we replaced every single car in the US with Waymo's vehicles the daily deaths from traffic accidents would drop from 110 to 11. That's 11 news articles every day to use as evidence about how self driving cars are "not safe" because Waymo has killed multiple people.
That's the absurdity my comment tries to highlight. It's all relative. Pointing to individual accidents is not a proof in itself of something being unsafe. This applies to Tesla FSD as well.
Fair point in the abstract, but in this scenario Waymo has killed zero people while developing self driving technology while Tesla has already killed several. The deaths have also not been caused by random unavoidable happenstance, but from driving full speed into trucks and medians.
It's entirely possible that by the time both are ready for actually full primetime and are both 10x safer than the average human driver, that Waymo's software will have killed zero people and Tesla's software will have killed several.
Both will lead to people getting killed eventually. It's near-unavoidable fact of reality. Better not let perfect be the enemy of good. The key is that less and less people are dying and getting injured.
This is a bit of a false equivalency.
There is zero reason to think that Waymo software, that has slowly and incrementally rolled out to new areas, and relies on cameras, radar, and sonar, will have the same fatality rate as Tesla's FSD software that just got pushed out to anyone with a Tesla, and relies just on cameras.
More to the point, we still don't know if Tesla FSD can actually outperform a human. It is again, based on cameras that are worse than the human eye.
This whole conversation so far has entirely missed the point.
The fact that a self driving car company has gotten people killed is a moot point. Even if we had a self driving car that is 100x safer driver than humans it will still get people killed. Saying "This 100 times safer than human car company has gotten multiple people killed" doesn't mean anything. Human drivers get 110 people killed every single day in the US alone. That's the starting point. Not 0 people getting killed. The only thing that's important here is being better driver than human. Not perfect - better.
Not sure if you read the above?
Why not zero intentional murders?
Let's hear your plan then.