Comment by exanime@lemmy.today on Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked to hundreds of crashes, dozens of deaths

Hmmm I get you point but you seem to be taken the cavalier position of one who’d never be affected.

Let’s proposed this alternative scenario: AI is 50% safer and would reduce death from 40k to 20k a year if adopted. However, the 20k left will include your family and, unfortunately , there is no accountability therefore, nobody will pay to help raise your orphan nephew or help grandma now that your grandpa died ran over by a Tesla… Would you approve AI driving going forward?

A) you do realize cars have insurance and when someone hits you, that insurance pays out the damages, right? That is how the current system works, AI driver or not.

Accidents happen. Humans make mistakes and kill people and are not held criminally liable. It happens.

If some guy killed your nephew and made him an orphan and the justice system determined he was not negligent - then your nephew would still be an orphan and would get a payout by the insurance company.

Exact same thing that happens in the case of an AI driven car hitting someone

B) if I had a button to save 100k people but it killed my mother, I wouldn’t do it. What is your point?

Using your logic, if your entire family was in the 20,000 who would be saved - you would prefer them dead? You’d rather them dead with “accountability” rather than alive?

Do you know what a thought experiment is??

Your thought experiment doesn’t work. I wouldn’t accept any position where my family members die and beyond that, it’s immaterial to the scope of discussion.

Let’s examine various different scenarios under which someone dies in a car accident.

human driver was negligent and causes a fatal car accident.

Human gets criminal charges. Insurance pays out depending on policy.

human driver was not negligent and causes a fatal car accident.

Human does not get criminal charged. Insurance pays out depending on policy

AI driver causes a fatal accident.

Nobody gets criminal charges. Insurance pays out depending on policy.

You claim that you would rather have 20,000 people die every year because of “accountability”.

Tell me, what is the functional difference for a family member of a fatal car accident victim in those 3 above scenarios? The only difference is under 1) there would be someone receiving criminal charges.

They recieve the same amount of insurance money. 2) already happens right now. You don’t mention that in the lack of accountability.

You claim that being able to pin some accidents (remember, some qualify under 2) on an individual is worth 20,000 lives a year.

Anybody who has ever lost someone in a car accident would rather have their family member back instead.

Your thought experiment doesn’t work

The point of a thought experiment is to think about that proposition, not to replace with whatever you think makes sense

AI driver causes a fatal accident.

Nobody gets criminal charges. Insurance pays out depending on policy.

Now here is my concern… You are reducing a human life to a dollar amount just like Ford did with the Pinto. If Mercedes (who is apparently liable), decides they are making more money selling their cars than paying out to people injured or killed by their cars, what’s left to force them to recall/change/fix their algorithm?

PS: I also never claimed I rather have 20000 more people die for accountability… So, I guess you have to argue that with the part of your brain that made it up

PS: I also never claimed I rather have 20000 more people die for accountability…

You said it’s not a question of how much safer it is. You said it’s a question of accountability. So even if it were 50% safer, you claimed it was wrong.

And here’s the thing man, I understand where you’re coming from ij that you shouldn’t reduce a life to numbers. But how does AI driving fundamentally change the current situation?

Car companies already do this. They calculate whether or not fixing a safety problem will cost more or less than the lawsuits from all the dead people. There’s a famous documented case of this. Maybe it’s the Ford / Pinto thing you are referencing.

If you think of AI driving as a safety feature - like seatbelts - would you support it? I don’t know what the actual statistics are, but presumably it’s only going to get better over time.

Yes, unless you mean I need to literally sacrifice my family. But if my family was randomly part of the 20k, I’d defend self-driving cars if they are proven to be safer.

I’m very much a statistics-based person, so I’ll defend the statistically better option. In fact, me being part of that 20k gives me a larger than usual platform to discuss it.

No, I do mean literally your family. Not because I’m trying to be mean to you, I’m just trying to highlight you’d agree with a contract when you think the price does not apply to you… But in reality the price will apply to someone, whether they agree with the contract and enjoy the benefits or not

It’s the exact same situation with real life with the plane manufacturers. They lobby the government to allow recalls not to be done immediately but instead on the regular maintenance of the planes. This is to save money but it literally means that some planes are put there with known defects that will not be addressed for months (or years, depending on the maintenance needed)

Literally, people who’d never have a loved one in one of those flights decided that was acceptable to save money. They agreed, it’s ok to put your life at risk, statistically, because they want more money

If there are 20k deaths vs 40k, my family is literally twice as safe on the road, why wouldn’t I take that deal?

Read the proposition… It’s a thought experiment what we were discussing

The proposition is stupid. If you told me that ALL future accidents will be prevented if I agree to kill my family, I would still not do it, that’s just a bad faith trolley problem. Let’s alone just recuding it by half.

I reduced it to a more realistic experiment, where my family migth be killed, with the same probability as any other.

The proposition is stupid.

Oh the depth of reasoning in social media

If you told me that ALL future accidents will be prevented if I agree to kill my family, I would still not do it

That is exactly the point… Anyone would be 100% happy taking any proposition as long as they don’t have to pay the cost. I was just trying to highlight that

In this case, it was all about liability… We have not even come close to prove the current driverless tech is actually better than people’s skills… We all know that automated driving should be safer but we have no clue if we are even taking the right steps.to get there

Then it’s not a fair question. You’re not comparing 40k vs 20k, you’re comparing 40k vs literally my family dying (like the hypothetical train diversion thing), that’s fear mongering and not a valid argument.

The risk does not go up for my family because of self-driving cars. That’s innate to the 40k vs 20k numbers.

So the proper question is: if your family was killed in an accident, what would be your reaction if it was a human driver vs AI? For me:

human driver - incredibly mad because it was probably preventable
AI - still mad, but supportive of self-driving improvements because it probably can be patched

The first would make me bitter and probably anti-driving, whereas the second would make me constructive and want to help people understand the truth of how it works. I’m still mad in both cases, but the second is more constructive.

Seeing someone go to jail doesn’t fix anything.

Yes, it’s a thought experiment… Not a fair question, just trying to put it in perspective

Anyone who understands stats would agree 40k death is worse than 20k but it also depends on other factors. All things being equal to today, the 20k proposition is only benefit

But if we look into the nuance and details emerge, the formula changes. For example, here it’s been discussed that there may be nobody liable. If that’s the case, we win by halving death (absolutely a win) but now the remaining 20k may be left with no justice… Worse, it absolutely creates a perverse incentive for these companies, without liability exposure, to do whatever to maximize profit

So, not trying to be a contrarian here… I just want to avoid the polarization that is now the rule online… Nothing is just black and white

left with no justice

But they’d get restitution through insurance. Even if nobody is going to jail, there will still be insurance claims.

I agree that there is nuance here, and I think it can largely be solved without a huge change to much of anything. We don’t need some exec or software developer to go to jail for justice to be served, provided they are financially responsible. If the benefits truly do outright the risks, this system should work.

Tesla isn’t taking that responsibility, but Mercedes seems to be. Drivers involved in an accident where the self-driving feature was engaged have the right to sue the manufacturer for defects. That’s not necessarily the case for class 2 driving, since the driver is responsible for staying alert and needs to be in contact with the steering wheel. With class 3, that goes away, so the driver could legitimately not be touching the wheel at all when the car is in self-driving mode. My understanding is the insurance company can sue on their customer’s behalf.

So the path forward is to set legal precedent assigning fault to manufacturers to get monetary compensation, and let the price of cars and insurance work out the details.

But they’d get restitution through insurance. Even if nobody is going to jail, there will still be insurance claims.

And that’s where I’m aiming at… If Mercedes decides, like Ford did before them, that it’s cheaper to pay out the insurance claims they lose instead of fixing their bugs then innocent people will have to die so Mercedes can keep up their profit margins.

That’s exactly the point I’m trying to make

You seem to argue that, on the unproven premise that current AI is better than human drivers, we should let corporations test it out in the real world even if they are not criminally liable ever. For me, that’s a bad deal.

Now, imagine we go down this rabbit hole… It’s already 10x cheaper to lobby USA politicians to limit Mercedes liability than it would be for them to actually start paying wrongly death claims

In Texas, if you doctor shows up drunk for surgery and leaves you quadriplegic or kills you, the biggest liability exposure has been limited to 250k

I love tech and I do believe science, knowledge and the tech it can produce could improve our lives in unimaginable ways… But as long as our approach to it continues to be profit over people, socialise the risk - privatize the profit and corporation being citizens in all aspects except liability, we will never get there

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