• CheerfulPassionFruit@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    Ummm… no?

    I guess you’re a shill and are going to say that self driving cars have caused way less death than human operated ones. While true, statistically the deaths caused by each self driving car is much higher than by each human operated car.

    Also it should be argued that a machine should be held to a higher safety standard than a human.

    • AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
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      2 hours ago

      I looked for studies, but completely autonomous driving has too little data yet. But from A matched case-control analysis of autonomous vs human-driven vehicle accidents | Nature Communications, severe injury and fatalities are lower. I suspect “per driven mile” it’s even less and it depends on model.

      Not sure where you get your numbers shout DEATH AND DESTRUCTION!!! about self driving cars. I can only assume it’s out of your ass.

      It doesn’t even matter. 65 fatalities over a few years is nothing. What matters is how the technology improves in the next years and how the numbers look once there is significant adoption. That it’s as good as it is now basically means you’re already wrong.

      • CheerfulPassionFruit@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        First of all thank you for a more well reasoned answer.

        I do think that there are several issues remaining however. First of all the cited article states that in case matched scenarios autonomous vehicles are less likely to crash, however this does not apply in bad weather conditions where they are about 6 times more likely to crash.

        The above illustrates my point about failing gracefully, the autonomous systems work great under a huge range of conditions, the catch being that these conditions have to be preconceived. When encountering new conditions these systems tend to fail. These untested conditions might occur to bad visibility or water over camera lenses and so on. A human just is better at adapting to new situations quickly which is also confirmed in the above figures.

        Now to the point of the future development and mass adoption I am not really opposed due to safety concerns, it is possible to make these systems safe. However in order to make them safe you would have to make their surroundings extremely predictable. I.e. you would have to adapt the infrastructure to suit the autonomous car. If you’re building infrastructure anyway, why not built rail infrastructure? It’s proven, cheaper, more efficient, has a proven safety record and is environmentally friendly.

        Cars are great for situations where you need transport over areas that are quite unpredictable e.g. many rural areas with badly maintained roads. However autonomous vehicles are not suited for this unpredictability.

        The fact that autonomous vehicles are being pushed anyway regardless of the risks is stupid in my opinion as the resources and brain cycles could be much better invested.