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Waymos crash less than human drivers

(www.understandingai.org)
345 points rbanffy | 3 comments | 26 Mar 25 20:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.873s | source
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mjburgess ◴[26 Mar 25 21:19 UTC] No.43487426[source]▶
Waymos choose the routes, right?

The issue with self-driving is (1) how it generalises across novel environments without "highly-available route data" and provider-chosen routes; (2) how failures are correlated across machines.

In safe driving failures are uncorrelated and safety procedures generalise. We do not yet know if, say, using self-driving very widely will lead to conditions in which "in a few incidents" more people are killed in those incidents than were ever hypothetically saved.

Here, without any confidence intervals, we're told we've saved ~70 airbag incidents in 20 mil miles. A bad update to the fleet will easily eclipse that impact.

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ogogmad ◴[26 Mar 25 21:46 UTC] No.43487758[source]▶
> In safe driving failures are uncorrelated and safety procedures generalise. We do not yet know if, say, using self-driving very widely will lead to conditions in which "in a few incidents" more people are killed in those incidents than were ever hypothetically saved.

Can you provide some examples of what you mean?

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1. im3w1l ◴[27 Mar 25 05:28 UTC] No.43490615[source]▶
Volcanic eruption filling the atmosphere with ash. Acts of war or terrorism. Could be physical or cyberattack.
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2. ogogmad ◴[27 Mar 25 12:09 UTC] No.43492753[source]▶
The only way for this to cause tens of thousands of death by self-driving alone is for people to suddenly need to drive the cars themselves, and not being able to do it well. Unless I'm missing something.
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3. im3w1l ◴[27 Mar 25 16:55 UTC] No.43495520[source]▶
The system could go haywire and crash in such unexpected circumstances. They might also not. It's hard to know how they will behave.