
The slippery slope of accepting casualties caused by self-driving cars - imartin2k
http://meshedsociety.com/the-slippery-slope-of-accepting-casualties-caused-by-self-driving-cars/
======
gus_massa
I don't see the slippery slope, but I agree that the main problem is that we
use to blame someone in case of the accident and with an autonomous car we
don't have anyone to blame.

Anyway, there are already a lot of software in cars (and other applications)
that can cause deaths. In particular the airbags have a complex heuristic that
when it is wrong can kill someone. From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbag#Operation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbag#Operation)

> _From 1990 to 2000, the United States National Highway Traffic Safety
> Administration identified 175 fatalities caused by air bags. Most of these
> (104) have been children, while the rest were adults. About 3.3 million air
> bag deployments have occurred during that interval, and the agency estimates
> more than 6,377 lives saved and countless injuries prevented._

~~~
imartin2k
Interesting indeed. But I wonder whether all the (often accurate) attempts to
lay bare contradictions in human perception and judgement lead anywhere.

People might be comfortable with airbags despite them occasionally
malfunctioning and killing someone but uncomfortable with an AV that can make
its own decisions and that, in extremely rare cases, might make a wrong
decision and kill someone - without seeing any problem or contradiction.

~~~
cctt23
People have not always been comfortable with airbags, or even seatbelts. It
took many years of technologies proving themselves thousands of times before
they achieved widespread acceptance. It probably helped thst in both cases
they didn’t represent trillions of dollars in value to heartless technocrats,
but were just safety improvements to existing vehicles.

------
oferzelig
I so much don't agree with this conclusion.

AV accidents should definitely be investigated and the required hardware or
(most likely) software adjustments should be made.

But it's not a slippery slope; on the contrary: every accident will fine tune
the software algorithm, and collectively traffic will become safer.

A reality of autonomous vehicles is so much better for the human kind than the
current reality of human-driven cars, with all the errors they make.

~~~
imartin2k
I wrote the article. Your comment is not responding to what I wrote. My point
in the post is not "AVs are NOT better for the human kind". My point is
neither "AVs are a slippery slope" nor "AVs won't make traffic safer". My
point is that the acceptance of occasional casualties caused by AVs is a
slippery slope, which many people intuitively understand (whether they can
express it or not), and which in part might explain the discrepancy in the
public reaction to an AV killing someone and John or Jane Doe driving killing
someone.

~~~
oferzelig
The discrepancy I see goes the other way around. AV accidents get much more
media attention than regular vehicles' (man bites dog vs. dog bites man).

