>a fairer comparison would be contrasting Waymo rides to trips conducted by the Ultra Safe Even If It's Slower Chauffeur Company.
no, comparing them to real alternatives is the fair comparison. that they've got their settings tuned in favour of safety stats is the whole point, not something that you should be trying to factor out of the comparisons.
> they've got their settings tuned in favour of safety stats is the whole point
For now, yes. My point is that there's very often big gap between "how safely does it work in a lab when the people running it are trying to play up its safety" versus "how safely will X actually work once we start using it everywhere."
Manually-driven vehicles could be a lot safer if they were being prototyped under strict guidance as well!
If we want self-driving cars to retain the same safety later, there needs to be something which prevents humans from flicking the safety-versus-speed dial a little bit over and over in order to make quarterly earnings projections.
> But they [manual vehicles] aren’t [being operated by a corporation with a very strong incentive to publicly demonstrate safety]. These [automated vehicles] are.
Uh, yes, you're kinda repeating my thesis, and two copies don't cancel each other out.
> Planes could be less safe if pilots flew them into cliffs on the regular, but they don’t and so are not.
I don't understand what you're trying to convey with this tautology.
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Imagine two fleets of cars/planes/whatever with utterly identical equipment and expertise. The only difference is that for one of them, the management is being pressured by politicians to demonstrate a high degree of safety.
For that scenario, wouldn't you agree that the better-safety comes from temporary external cause? And also agree that the better-safety is unlikely to persist long after the incentive disappears?
[TLDR] Some portion of Waymo's safety-stats are due to the investor/regulatory context in which it currently operates, rather than the underlying technology; the effects of that portion will not be permanent; this should affect how we do comparisons.
Isaac Newton: "Did you see that apple fall? Now imagine that both an elephant and a feather were to begin falling at the same moment, in a place where the atmosphere was--"
Your ancestor: "No, we don't need to. I could also imagine them underwater. Those are suppositions. You're comparing actual and hypothetical falling."
*headdesk*
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How about this: Which parts of the final TLDR do you disagree with?
I disagree that "the effects of that portion will not be permanent". The safety level can be set to whatever is desired by governments, since governments control how much liability Waymo has. We haven't seen cars get less safe, we've seen governments force car manufacturers to make them more safe. (As well as institute seatbelt requirements, speeding cameras, etc.) I expect the same to happen with self-driving tech. The benefits to driving more aggressively are also likely to be pretty small to the company - I don't think I've ever been in a Waymo ride that's spent more than a minute waiting for pedestrians. So even if they were twice as aggressive, that's saving 30 seconds per ride. Probably not going to have a huge impact on the bottom line.
Also, if you want to include the speculation that they'll make their cars drive more aggressively, you should also include the speculation that the technology will become better and the driving tech will become even safer than they are now.
no, comparing them to real alternatives is the fair comparison. that they've got their settings tuned in favour of safety stats is the whole point, not something that you should be trying to factor out of the comparisons.