Self-Driving Cars are (a) magical, (b) ready, and © should be allowed to kill people [mini post]
Ok, so obviously I don’t mean, like, first degree murder. More like manslaughter.
Having an early look at autonomy during my time at Google, and then as a seed investor in Cruise, I’ve been insisting for years that the challenge to adoption isn’t primarily in the technology but in our collective definition of what ‘safe enough’ will be. The below post from 2017 basic can be summed up as “do autonomous vehicles need to be more, less, or equally safe to today’s death rates?”
https://hunterwalk.com/2017/05/24/death-race-2000-how-safe-will-autonomous-vehicles-need-to-be/
Fortunately thanks to a recent study from Waymo and insurer Swiss Re, we’re starting to get more data — and self-driving seems to be safer than human-piloted.
“They found that the performance of Waymo’s vehicles was safer than that of humans, with an 88 percent reduction in property damage claims and a 92 percent reduction in bodily injury claims. Across 25.3 million miles, Waymo was involved in nine property damage claims and two bodily injury claims. The average human driving a similar distance would be expected to have 78 property damage and 26 bodily injury claims, the company says.”
This is even true when you normalize for car safety equipment/condition — ie it’s not comparing new Waymos with older vehicles. Also this should be a *low* point going forward — it’ll only get safer not just as the software gets smarter but as the density of autonomy increases and cars can talk to cars, versus needed to anticipate what human drivers will do alongside them.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is starting to respond with an improved regulatory framework.
NHTSA is promising “an exemption pathway that is tailored for ADS-equipped vehicles,” suggesting a less onerous, time-consuming process for the release of fully driverless vehicles.
In exchange, the agency is requesting more data from the companies that operate driverless cars, arguing that greater transparency is needed to foster public trust in the technology.
My cheeky post title is just to remind you that today’s cars (and their human drivers) kill thousands and thousands of people each year. To suggest that in order to be ‘safe’ our autonomous replacements should be error free ignores the improvements that can be gained versus the status quo. More than 40,000 Americans die each year in traffic accidents. If autonomy can save any of these lives, we should be moving there as quickly as we can.
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Originally published at https://hunterwalk.com on December 26, 2024.
