this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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Apparently GM thinks killing a pedestrian every 10 million miles is acceptable?
GM saved like $2 on an ignition switch and killed 13 people. They knew about the issue for years. So yeah, GM doesn't care if a few people have to die in order to turn a profit
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/business/13-deaths-untold-heartache-from-gm-defect.html
What's acceptable?
Every 50 million? 100 million?
It will never be perfect, and there will never be no deaths at all, so if there is no acceptable limit you may as well ban self driving car research right now.
The rate of pedestrians killed in 2021 was approximately 1 in every 25,000,000 miles driven manually (8000 deaths and 203 billion miles travelled collectively. Should that be the minimum target?
It would be interesting to see what the actual stats are for pedestrian deaths vs miles driven for non autonomous cars. I'm willing to bet autonomous cars will ultimately be safer, but it will take time to get to that point.
Edit: Apparently, according to the transportation safety in the US article on Wikipedia, the average is 1.25 pedestrians killed per 100 million miles driven.
That page doesn't exclude commercial road vehicles or interstates, so the apples to apples comparison may be much closer to the autonomous rate. A 700 mile/day truck cruising I-40 through the desert is going to skew the data as safer while I bet a casual city driver will be an order of magnitude more dangerous. Maybe the best would be stacking it against taxi and other ride-hail drivers
Edit: Cruise didn't even cause the incident. A human-driven car hit the pedestrian into the Cruise. This sky-is-falling reaction was started by a human doing worse.
GM was just getting it out of the way, that's all. Nothing to see here. They operate better under pressure, see. Right? Sure they do.
But they recalling the vehicles so clearly not.
Unless you're suggesting that the software update is too make the cars more efficient at killing pedestrians?
No they don’t which is why they suspended all vehicles pending a software update.
Also, how does this compare to human drivers?
The best thing about this is that now the problem has been identified the software can be fixed and this particular problem won’t happen again. If a human makes this mistake you can’t push an update to fix all human drivers.
What's that rate for human drivers?
Around 1 per 100 million miles.
In all weather conditions. Autonomous vehicles only drive in optimal conditions, humans have to suffer whatever nature throws at us.
The irony here is that the accident occurred because a human driver hit this pedestrian first. So it ain’t like us humans have a clean conscience here…
It's a trolley problem of sorts. Currently it seems that we have higher standards for AI than humans. I bet that even if AI was twice as good driver, we'd still hate to hear about it causing accidents. I'm not sure why that is. I'm wondering if it has something to do with the fact, that there's really not anyone to blame and that doesn't fit with our morals.
Because corporations running AI means the first time actual human thought enters the picture is when the dividend check gets deposited.
And shareholder profits, sacred in law and the market, will push safety standards based on cost, not fewest deaths.
I want to believe you, but source please?
https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/traffic-crash-death-estimates-2022#:~:text=The%20National%20Highway%20Traffic%20Safety,42%2C939%20fatalities%20reported%20for%202021.
Just the sort of thing I was looking for. Thanks, internet stranger!
According to these numbers 1 death in 73 million miles. Which is much better than I thought.
Which includes trucks hauling through unpopulated areas
Not just GM, if you tried ro question the safety of these cars on even Lemmy before these revelations came out you would get brigaded by people claiming they were safer than humans statistically and thats all they needed to be in order to be acceptable.
This incident started with a human driving their car into a pedestrian. It's not exactly a smoking gun