this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
20 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
1397 readers
187 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Hmmm, for something that took so long to make, with such a visibly huge production value, I think the point is rather weak.
The video spends a lot of time on "but AVs cause accidents too", without ever opening a single page of statistics, just some horrible articles for shock value. Those few examples are then followed by "drivers kill 40k a year", which gives me entirely the wrong impression.
Then it veers off into plausible-sounding, but ultimate unsupported wild speculation, with only a single example about a town going carcentric getting ruined (I'd love a case study on that, it seemed far more interesting than most of the video).
For a channel that's normally very good about showing examples and supporting data i can't help but notice the stark contrast in this video. And that's not a good look, especially since the case could be made without proclaiming cybernet to be the end of walking.
What statistics? Self driving cars are, at this point, barely even a thing - and only in very specific places. Any sort of statistics on that matter, if they exist, would be heavily skewed due to the low numbers.
I'll add that such statistics are very much a moving target, since AVs are still "getting better every day". The software is (and will be) under constant development, and there will likely be tradeoffs between safety for pedestrians and convenience for passagers (e.g. how sensitive is the trigger for an emergency break?)
Looking at it as an ongoing relationship between AV operators, regulators and people makes a lot of sense to me. I agree with the points of the video, that operators will likely push for a "just safe enough" standard and try to offload responsibilities onto bystanders.
There's also a common argument that the problem in AV accidents is primarily the other human drivers, which is a classic case of "if everyone just immediately changed over to doing things this way it would solve the problem!"