Anonymous #1 2w

What if it was proven to be vastly safer, as the data is already seeming to show? Vibes wise I completely get it but if I could cut the risk of dying in a car crash in half or even better then It’d be hard for me to resist yk?

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Anonymous #2 2w

Yeah 100%, a lot of these companies don’t really have an explanation for how they want to support all the drivers they’d layoff. Still the lives that could be saved are hard to ignore. Would you support partial introduction with some protections for drivers or what? Or just no self driving cars?

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

It’s tough for me bc I hate the technocrats that are pushing this but at the same time we lose far too many people to preventable crashes

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

Even if it was proven to be far safer? Like double your survival odds safer? I mean we already put our lives in the hands of auto manufacturers to a large extent, same thing with aircraft manufacturers

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

Computers and software are just far too fragile to trust. Far too easy to manipulate, track, and be taken advantage of. I’d avoid modern cars with the computers they already have in them if I could. We’ve already seen how much of a standstill one company experiencing server outages cause on the Internet. Imagine if it’s the self driving cars’ system servers. Whole world just stops bc some bozo at Google sat on a button and turned off half the earth’s servers? Nah.

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

That’s scary for sure but what’s the alternative? 102 people dying every day like we have now? Also it’s not like these cars would need a single server, they’d be able to operate independently and with several redundant computers like aircraft have they’d be pretty resilient to computer glitches and hacking

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

Self-driving cars have onboard compute so it’s not like someone fat fingering something at AWS is gonna make your Tesla just start crashing into shit. Frankly I’d trust Waymos or the Tesla robotaxis on the road with me way more than a lot of humans

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

And say there are hacking incidents, even many of them. It wouldn’t even come close to outweighing all the lives saved.

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

I chose my current car bc it was made before they started getting pretty computerized, can’t stand that shit lol. But if it was something that actually worked and made me much less likely to die in a wreck I’d seriously consider it.

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

Ofc not. But I think it’s a dangerous line of thinking to entrust our safety with computers. Offloading responsibility to technology will make a society less capable, less educated, and more easily taken advantage of. It’s appealing, the promises of safety, but removes the humanity. Increase safety protocols and education, make it more difficult to obtain (and keep) a license, harsher punishments for driving without one, regulate insurance companies so it’s not a court system fight to get paid

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

How so? I mean most of the aircraft we fly on are unflyable without their flight computers. That didn’t make pilots any less competent it just made everyone much safer. We just aren’t great at driving. What’s so valuable about driving your own car? Is that value worth the lives lost?

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

And the reason I’m focusing on safety so much is because we spend a fuck ton of money on traffic safety and it has been terribly slow progress, our roads just keep getting more dangerous. I’d absolutely support more robust human driver safety efforts but that’d mean telling Americans they gotta be ok with smaller cars and they don’t want to buy those

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

I still wouldn’t. I personally am a very safe driver and don’t endanger others on the road,I should not be punished by having my freedom taken away because of the mistakes of others

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

Honestly I don’t fly so can’t help you with that one, and we’ve seen how airlines are going making it impossible to afford and worse conditions to travel. If we aren’t great at driving we need to teach people to be better drivers, not get rid of needing the skill at all by trusting algorithms to drive for us. Plus there comes the age old trolly problem: whose safety do we prioritize? Car owner? Pedestrian? Other drivers?

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Anonymous #1 2w

No particular shade towards you but everyone thinks that. Some people are more correct than others but nobody is perfect. If you spend enough time driving you will get in an accident. Statistically it’s pretty clear that humans as a collective are not good drivers, it’s a really hard thing to do perfectly 100% of the time.

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

And all that being said I didn’t bring up the idea of laws forbidding humans from driving because I just don’t think that’s realistic for America, even if it were far safer nobody would vote for that. I think if this becomes a thing it needs to show itself as safe and convince people to switch that way, forcing people is obviously wrong and will never work

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

Sure but those issues are economic, technology wise we’re doing extremely well with keeping air travel safe. The thing is you can teach people all you want, at some point they’ll fuck around with the radio for a second too long without looking up and they’ll get in an accident. Bc you do that 100 times and get away with it so you think it’s safe till it’s not. That’s why I say humans are bad at driving, it’s just impossible to be vigilant all the time.

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

Which is what computers excel at.

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

But your last point is one that I’ve been thinking a lot about and one I don’t have answers to. Who programs in those values? Some ford engineer or a panel of ethicists? Should they be uniform? What all should they consider in their decision making?

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

Personally I think that if this becomes a thing we should somehow decide on a panel of people who can make those decisions, people independent of car manufacturers.

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

If you want to trust a computer with your life, by all means do so. But I’m not going to, and I can’t think of a single IT person who would reccomend it either 😅 but moving responsibility away from people is an illusion of safety, not actual safety

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

Sorry but I’m gonna have to disagree with you there, the self driving cars on the road today are already showing themselves to be far safer than human driven cars and they’re still in early stages. Less fatalities per mile driven isn’t an illusion, we can measure these things

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Anonymous ___joker__ 2w

What makes you say the thinking power is inferior? I think as far as raw computational power goes computers are much better. And again there are cases where a self driving car might crash due to technological failures like a busted camera or LiDAR sensor, but is that enough to negate the huge number of lives saved by avoiding human error, which itself is extremely common?

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

AI at this point can’t really do rare edge cases. Yes, that does negate that fact. Maximizing aggregate safety over all other values like choice, agency, and liability is utilitarian, which I fundamentally disagree with.

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Anonymous ___joker__ 2w

So even though tens of thousands of lives would be saved every year, the loss of choice in how you navigate a crash event is a big enough drawback that the switch isn’t worth it?

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

You’re assuming that aggregate life-saving automatically justifies removing individual agency. That’s a philosophical claim, not a fact. It’s not about choosing to crash, it’s about whether individuals retain responsibility for their actions rather than being compelled to delegate life and death decisions to a system they don’t control.

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Anonymous ___joker__ 2w

Very well put, actually. Sums up my thoughts well, too

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

What can I say 🤷‍♂️ Utilitarianism fucking sucks.

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Anonymous #6 2w

Step 1: “Why don’t we just make self driving cars” Step 2: “Too complicated, why don’t we reduce decision making by the computer by putting it on a predetermined path” Step 3: “Complications with invisible pathing, why don’t we just put it on a physical track” Step 4: “T̸̖͔̓̀̅r̴̠͖̫͋̍̈́̈́̽ă̵̧̞̭̳̈́i̸̘̮̐n̴͈̈́͊͑͛͝”

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Anonymous ___joker__ 2w

I didn’t assume or claim anything as a fact. My comment was a question, I was asking you to elaborate on why you think about it the way you do

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

Where does control start and end for you then? Most planes you fly in are on autopilot a vast majority of the time. Almost all modern cars brake for you to a certain extent. How much is too much decision making delegated to a system you don’t control? Especially when the control is traded for proven safety improvements?

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Anonymous #6 2w

I mean yeah I’d much prefer that too but we’re Americans, we’re never gonna be able to part with cars. Not completely anyway

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

Autopilot isn’t “self-driving”, it’s automation. Cruise control is a form of automation. And you want to know what both of those have in common? Choice. Modern braking systems constrain execution, they don’t make decisions. They’re tools under supervision, not a replacement for agency. Mandatory autonomy, which is what you’re arguing for, decides when risk is acceptable and does so without your ability to have a say in the matter. The proven safety still doesn’t prove that it outweighs agency.

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Anonymous ___joker__ 2w

My point is that it’s on a spectrum. Referring to autopilot as self driving or automation is splitting hairs in my opinion, those systems will make decisions for the pilots in many situations. Although yes I see your point about lesser systems like assisted braking, you do have more choice there.

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

Also nowhere did I say anything about mandatory autonomy lol, you keep asking me to defend statements I haven’t made

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

Yeah we can build trains America once had many trains and walkable cities before these automobile bastards took over. Choo choo motherfucker

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Anonymous #6 2w

Ironically it’s less automobile and more air travel industry keeping us from having trains

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

Can I ask you to elaborate on the value of this agency you’re referring to? If we are looking at any given day of traffic fatalities we’ll have about 100 in the us. Say self driving cars become somewhat widely used (30% or so) and fatalities drop 30%, ie 30 more people are still alive. To me that value is really obvious, those people are alive who otherwise wouldn’t be. What in practical terms is the value of this agency for the other 70% of drivers that day?

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

This implies that our current small scale statistics are generalizable, and we don’t entirely know that yet

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

Cause I’m sort of confused if you’re speaking in a sort of macro sense about the societal impacts of not being able to assign blame when accidents occur or if you more mean that the ability to personally choose if you’re going to hit a school bus or a minivan in a split second decision is so valuable that it outweighs lives lost. As I’ve laid it out (and tell me if I got it wrong) I just don’t understand that tradeoff

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

Absolutely. I’m just hoping that for sake of conversation we can take that as roughly correct just so we can talk about it, I totally agree that these things might not scale like we expect them to.

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Anonymous #6 2w

For sure, I’m from Saint Louis originally and my grandma used to be able to take a trolley from the southwest side all the way to the northeast side in Illinois. Now we have one metro line that hardly works. We also are more than capable of building high speed rail to link regional hubs but as beer says cheapish air travel (subsidized ofc) makes that a bit difficult. My point wasn’t that we can’t or shouldn’t pursue rail, just that being a vast rural country we’re always going to need some cars

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

Air travel is NOT cheap, they just lobby the government to be anti train so we don’t cut into their profits

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

Dude I’m not a big Joe Biden fan but I was so excited and optimistic that he’d do something for our rail system bc he’s such an Amtrak guy :(

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Anonymous #8 2w

I’d argue there’s also plenty of instances where humans run people over where arguably an able person paying attention wouldn’t. Computers also don’t get distracted or drink or do drugs before they start driving. It’s definitely worth acknowledging there’s been some unfortunately bad errors but we have to acknowledge humans are nowhere near perfect drivers

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Anonymous #7 2w

I don’t either! It’s been tossed around here a lot but I never said anything about banning human drivers, I wouldn’t advocate for that and I don’t think it’s realistic. However this car to car communication is possible and able to dramatically reduce fatalities even with a majority human driven cars on the road

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Anonymous #4 2w

No but computers glitch, lag, vulnerable to hacking and interference, and currently even our most advanced tech requires human intervention to make some decisions for the computer. Theres still significant downsides to technology

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

*Cheapish! Compared to historical costs anyway. But yeah I feel like that’s two sides of the same coin, they lobby to win subsidies and government protection from litigation just like they lobby to undermine progress on rail projects

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

Yes there are problems we can name with these systems, but we can see already that they’re much safer overall. In all the testing we’ve done (100 million miles from Waymo alone) these cars have never even been close to crashing as often or as severely as human drivers. How much safer do they have to be before the trade off is worth it?

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Anonymous #8 2w

Although I agree with you that we should iron some things out before widespread introduction. Teslas autopilot flying past school busses and failing to see kids behind them is a great example.

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

Yeah and Waymo also drove up on the curb and killed a cat…for….some reason? Waymo has 1500 cars in their fleet. There are 291 MILLION cars registered in the US. God knows how many unregistered. We can’t reasonably compare statics from 1,500 to 291,000,000

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

But honestly? None. There’s no statistic you could show me that would make me give up human independence in transportation. I believe it’s just fundamentally wrong

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

How many cats do you think have been killed by human drivers? I’m not arguing that these systems are perfect, I’m arguing that they should be seriously considered as solutions to some of our problems because they’re vastly safer on average.

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

and I’m saying that’s such a lazy answer. “Just make it not our problem anymore” is a dangerous and stupid line of thinking

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

But yes, you can make reasonable comparisons even with a small number of vehicles. 100 million miles is a lot of data and that’s not including all the shared data that these companies exchange. You can compare this to many different datasets of human driven vehicles (taxis, fleet vehicles, government vehicles, newer connected vehicles…etc) to get a useful comparison between the two. There are also scaling methods people use to compare smaller datasets to larger ones with pretty decent accuracy

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

Can you elaborate on that then? If we can both agree that is is objectively safer and saves lives, what’s stupid or lazy about it?

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

It’s stupid to day the solution to human error is to just eradicate humans, instead of increasing education and skills to minimize human error. If automated driving becomes the norm, and computer errors become the majority of crashes will you then advocate for the erasure of self driving cars? Giving control back to a population that now has no driving skills as they never needed to learn as the machine did it for them?

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

ChatGPT makes less grammatical mistakes than people. Should we replace grammar school with language models? Calculators make less mistakes than people, should we get rid of all accounting departments in favor of an automated excel program? Irradiate the judicial branch in favor of an impartial automated law system?

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

Well again, I never said anything about eradicating humans. Personally I’d prefer an approach where the technology is included in regular cars sometime soonish and you can choose to use it or not use it. Then as people see that it’s safer more and more people would use it. I think you should always need to pass a drivers test to operate any car, self driving or not.

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

And we’ve done a lot of education. We spend billions every year trying to figure out how to educate and train people the right way. How to ticket and enforce the right way. Ultimately it’s just not something that humans are made to be good at. Never getting in a crash means never losing vigilance even for a second. Thats just not possible for any human being without a decent amount of luck

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Anonymous #4 2w

Yeah lol that’s why I threw in the arguably. I can see the benefits but frankly any accident with a self driving car at least currently is going to get hella backlash

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

And your scenario here where glitches account for the majority of crashes just seems like offering up a far fetched theoretical downside to oppose a very real existing problem of 100 people dying every day in car crashes. But yes, if these cars somehow ended up being much more dangerous then of course I’d advocate for them to be pulled from the roads

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

Well I mean let’s think about the differences in the value of a human as a driver versus a human as a working professional or educator. Humans as drivers have one relatively simple goal which is to move a vehicle in physical space and follow rules. Use physics and quick decision making. Computers are objectively better at that. Just like they’re better at calculating things which is why we don’t do math by hand.

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

However educating, doing accounting or judicial work…etc is extremely nuanced. Also human working professionals, unlike human drivers, are actually really good at what they do. There’s no benefit to replacing those people with computers, the things they do aren’t done well by computers. They’re entirely different applications

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

Is….is driving not nuanced? Have all the things we’ve discussed here not been part of the nuance of driving? I think your issue is driving has become so normal and regular to you, you are part of the issue of you are no longer consciously aware of all the calculations you’re doing to drive safely, follow traffic law, keep people safe

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

Compared to teaching a child or hearing a case in court yes, it is comparatively simple. There are clear sets of rules and if you follow them you will be safe most of the time. In instances where someting unexpected happens, the people who will have the best odds of navigating the situation safely are those who are the most vigilant and can react the quickest. That’s an ideal use case for a computer.

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Anonymous fuuuckyikyak 2w

Nobody is constantly aware of all the things going on around them when they drive, thats my whole point. A car equipped with 360 LiDAR has much better spacial awareness than human drivers do the majority of the time

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Anonymous og_beer 2w

That’s all true but I don’t think any of it is really as big a concern as you’d think. One of the biggest problems is actually “bullying” where people stand in front of the car and harass the people inside, and the car is stuck because it can’t hit the person. The biggest safety concerns with AVs, as compared to human drivers, really lie in the gray areas of what the “ethical” way to drive is (should you hit someone to keep your passengers safe, what should you hit if you have no choice, etc.)

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