Road safety is a bad example. That cause is advanced tremendously by “group rationality”. The global auto industry spends billions on making safer vehicles. Enforcement of speeding laws is, in practice, precisely the sort of market that you describe in your third footnote. (Edit: Auto insurance premiums are a better example than speeding tickets, actually)
This is also one area in which group irrationality is costing a tremendous number of lives. According to some friends from CMU’s robotics lab, autonomous vehicle technology is already good enough that autonomous cars could be far safer on the road than human drivers. Yet, getting them adopted is, politically, almost inconceivable. If you want to give an example of an irrational meme that causes tragedy, I think aversion to autonomous vehicles is a much better example than aversion to cryonics.
There isn’t enough data to say that autonomous vehicles are safer than human drivers. On the order of 10,000-20,000 fatal accidents a year out of, I don’t know, maybe 1,000,000,000 trips per year means you would need about ten million trips by autonomous vehicles before you have enough data to say anything. I also note that nobody AFAIK takes autonomous vehicles out at night or in the rain.
That said, I agree with your general point. A similar, but better, example is automated air traffic control and autopilots. We already rely on software to present all the data to air traffic controllers and to pilots that they rely on not to crash into each other; software errors or power failures can already lead to deaths.
No need to use made-up numbers when we have real ones. In the US in 2007 there were 37,248 fatal crashes and 3.030 trillion vehicle-miles driven. (Source). That’s one fatal accident per 81.35 million miles. So, solving a Poisson distribution for P(E|H) >= 0.95, where the evidence is the number of miles driven by autonomous vehicles without a fatal accident:
λ^k * e^-λ / k! = .05; k = 0
e^-λ = .05
λ = 2.996
2.996 * 81.35E6 = 243.7 million miles required for statistical significance.
This, however, is only frequentist reasoning. I would actually be inclined to trust autonomous vehicles after considerably less testing, because I consider P(H) to be a priori quite high.
I can’t agree. AI—yes, even mundane old domain-specific AI—has all sorts of potential weird failure modes. (Not an original observation, just conveying the majority opinion of the field.)
In this instance “weird failure mode” means “incident causing many deaths at once, probable enough to be a significant risk factor but rare enough that it takes a lot more autonomous miles in much more realistic circumstances to measure who the safer driver is”.
Automobile fatalities are only a small fraction of all fatalities, and smart cars for all would be more expensive than cryopreservation for only the people who actually died that year.
And when I’ve heard Sebastian Thrun talk about the altruistic case for autonomous vehicles, he doesn’t say, “We’re ready now,” he says, “We need to develop this as quickly as possible.” Though that’s mixing autonomous vehicles with human-driven ones, I suppose, not autonomous-only roads.
I think autonomous vehicles are a better example not because I think the EV is higher than that of cryonics, but because there are fewer ways to dispute it. There are a number of arguments, most of them well-known here, as to why cryopreservation is unlikely to work. It seems like a virtual certainty, on the other hand, that autonomous vehicles, if deployed, would save a large number of lives.
Edit: Also, you have your dimensions wrong on the financial calculation. The cost of autonomous vehicles should be amortized over their MTBF, not over one year.
Also, for it to be an unbiased comparison the two statements, “smart cars for all” and “cryopreservation for only the people who actually died that year” should be limited to the same domain.
If you compare different sets, one substantially larger than the other, then of course cryo is going to be cheaper!
A more balanced statement would be: “buying smart cars to save the lives of only the people who would have otherwise died by car accident in any given year would probably cost less than cryo-surance for the same set of people.”
Road safety is a bad example. That cause is advanced tremendously by “group rationality”. The global auto industry spends billions on making safer vehicles. Enforcement of speeding laws is, in practice, precisely the sort of market that you describe in your third footnote. (Edit: Auto insurance premiums are a better example than speeding tickets, actually)
This is also one area in which group irrationality is costing a tremendous number of lives. According to some friends from CMU’s robotics lab, autonomous vehicle technology is already good enough that autonomous cars could be far safer on the road than human drivers. Yet, getting them adopted is, politically, almost inconceivable. If you want to give an example of an irrational meme that causes tragedy, I think aversion to autonomous vehicles is a much better example than aversion to cryonics.
There isn’t enough data to say that autonomous vehicles are safer than human drivers. On the order of 10,000-20,000 fatal accidents a year out of, I don’t know, maybe 1,000,000,000 trips per year means you would need about ten million trips by autonomous vehicles before you have enough data to say anything. I also note that nobody AFAIK takes autonomous vehicles out at night or in the rain.
That said, I agree with your general point. A similar, but better, example is automated air traffic control and autopilots. We already rely on software to present all the data to air traffic controllers and to pilots that they rely on not to crash into each other; software errors or power failures can already lead to deaths.
No need to use made-up numbers when we have real ones. In the US in 2007 there were 37,248 fatal crashes and 3.030 trillion vehicle-miles driven. (Source). That’s one fatal accident per 81.35 million miles. So, solving a Poisson distribution for P(E|H) >= 0.95, where the evidence is the number of miles driven by autonomous vehicles without a fatal accident:
λ^k * e^-λ / k! = .05; k = 0
e^-λ = .05
λ = 2.996
2.996 * 81.35E6 = 243.7 million miles required for statistical significance.
This, however, is only frequentist reasoning. I would actually be inclined to trust autonomous vehicles after considerably less testing, because I consider P(H) to be a priori quite high.
I can’t agree. AI—yes, even mundane old domain-specific AI—has all sorts of potential weird failure modes. (Not an original observation, just conveying the majority opinion of the field.)
Yes, but humans also have all sorts of weird failure modes. We’re not looking for perfection here, just better than humans.
In this instance “weird failure mode” means “incident causing many deaths at once, probable enough to be a significant risk factor but rare enough that it takes a lot more autonomous miles in much more realistic circumstances to measure who the safer driver is”.
Yup, humans have weird failure modes but they don’t occur all over the country simultaneously at 3:27pm on Wednesday.
Automobile fatalities are only a small fraction of all fatalities, and smart cars for all would be more expensive than cryopreservation for only the people who actually died that year.
And when I’ve heard Sebastian Thrun talk about the altruistic case for autonomous vehicles, he doesn’t say, “We’re ready now,” he says, “We need to develop this as quickly as possible.” Though that’s mixing autonomous vehicles with human-driven ones, I suppose, not autonomous-only roads.
With that said you certainly have a strong point!
I think autonomous vehicles are a better example not because I think the EV is higher than that of cryonics, but because there are fewer ways to dispute it. There are a number of arguments, most of them well-known here, as to why cryopreservation is unlikely to work. It seems like a virtual certainty, on the other hand, that autonomous vehicles, if deployed, would save a large number of lives.
Edit: Also, you have your dimensions wrong on the financial calculation. The cost of autonomous vehicles should be amortized over their MTBF, not over one year.
Also, for it to be an unbiased comparison the two statements, “smart cars for all” and “cryopreservation for only the people who actually died that year” should be limited to the same domain.
If you compare different sets, one substantially larger than the other, then of course cryo is going to be cheaper!
A more balanced statement would be: “buying smart cars to save the lives of only the people who would have otherwise died by car accident in any given year would probably cost less than cryo-surance for the same set of people.”
Plus you don’t die. Which, for me, is preferable.