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US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

(www.reuters.com)
410 points jjulius | 1 comments | 18 Oct 24 16:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source
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AlchemistCamp ◴[19 Oct 24 17:17 UTC] No.41889077[source]▶
The interesting question is how good self-driving has to be before people tolerate it.

It's clear that having half the casualty rate per distance traveled of the median human driver isn't acceptable. How about a quarter? Or a tenth? Accidents caused by human drivers are one of the largest causes of injury and death, but they're not newsworthy the way an accident involving automated driving is. It's all too easy to see a potential future where many people die needlessly because technology that could save lives is regulated into a greatly reduced role.

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jakelazaroff ◴[19 Oct 24 17:35 UTC] No.41889210[source]▶
I think we should not be satisfied with merely “better than a human”. Flying is so safe precisely because we treat any casualty as unacceptable. We should aspire to make automobiles at least that safe.
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1. kelnos ◴[20 Oct 24 10:33 UTC] No.41894433[source]▶
I don't think the question was what we should be satisfied with or what we should aspire to. I absolutely agree with you that we should strive to make autonomous driving as safe as airline travel.

But the question was when should we allow autonomous driving on our public roads. And I think "when it's at least as safe as the median human driver" is a reasonable threshold.

(The thing about Tesla FSD is that it -- unsupervised -- would probably fall super short of that metric. FSD needs to be supervised to be safer than the median human driver, assuming that's evn currently the case, and not every driver is going to be equally good at supervising it.)