We discuss privacy issues and the like daily on HN. If software is driving your car, does someone have access to the data on where you go? Can your car be shut down or driven to the nearest police station by a third party? If you are Black, gay or any number of other things, are you cool with giving up such control in an openly hostile social climate? How much cost does it add to the car? If a software update is buggy and you not only can't drive, but it is illegal for a human to drive, does your wife give birth at home while we wait for Google to fix the bug and update the software because you are neither allowed to drive her to the hospital nor is there any such thing as human ambulance drivers anymore?

Etc ad nauseum.

If it can save 40k lives per year it’s in any case a no-brainer. Ask all the millions of people that have a relative killed by a car if they would care at all. Edit: also it is pretty curious that you are against testing self driving cars because they might kill someone during the testing, while you are perfectly fine with 40k people killed per year and you are concerned about the privacy of the people. I’ll tell you a secret. A dead person couldn’t care less about his privacy.

You know, someone made a real cavalier sounding remark about how you need to break a few eggs to make an omelette. I replied to that with saying, basically, I understand that attitude for making peace with training deaths in the military but I don't think it's justified for driverless cars. I tried to make it clear later that part of the difference in my mind is that people die in military training because people are being trained to do dangerous things. But if you are training a driverless vehicle, there's really no reason that absolutely has to involve endangering anyone's life.

And, wow, has that gotten tons of push back while people go to great lengths to frame me like I'm some extremist lunatic. Meanwhile, the person cavalierly brushing off training deaths is making rather extreme comments about how driverless vehicles can completely replace all human drivers, etc and most people are not arguing with that. No, I am the one being argued with.

It's starting to look to me like people are basically looking for some silly reason to argue with me in specific. Because I really did not assert a lot of the stuff being hung on me here.

Again, yes, if we can save 40k lives. That's a very big if. It assumes a 100% reduction in mortality. That implies that you expect driverless vehicles to not merely be better than human drivers, you expect them to be perfect and to have flawless performance.

And it's that sort of ridiculous unstated assumption that has me rolling my eyes and going "Wow, people on HN sure are just looking for crazy reasons to argue with me." Because I don't think that's a remotely defensible position.

Yes, because you keep making this statement that it’s not necessary to endanger lives when testing driverless cars. That statement is false. Endangering some lives is a necessary condition for testing driverless cars. Now, maybe we shouldn’t test them and that’s fine, but you are trying to have it both ways.

> If it can save 40k lives per year it’s in any case a no-brainer.

This is a pretty big assumption without any evidence to support it.

There are many solutions that can potentially save even more lives, such as treatments and cures for heart disease and cancer.

However, I do not see anyone arguing to test these potentially life saving miracles on random people who happen to be walking down the street, like we are with autonomous vehicles.

Certainly, if we relaxed standards on testing cancer and heart disease treatments, we'd rapidly accelerate the development of life-saving cures. The more people we test them on, the better data we'll have to build better models, much like with autonomous driving.

If it can save 500k lives per year from cancer and heart disease, would revoking the need for informed consent to test these potential cures be a no-brainer?