dfranke comments on Individual Rationality Is a Matter of Life and Death - Less Wrong

24 Post author: patrissimo 21 March 2009 07:22PM

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Comment author: dfranke 22 March 2009 01:29:32AM *  5 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 March 2009 01:50:21AM 1 point [-]

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.)

Comment author: thomblake 02 April 2009 01:23:10PM 1 point [-]

Yes, but humans also have all sorts of weird failure modes. We're not looking for perfection here, just better than humans.

Comment author: ciphergoth 02 April 2009 01:44:18PM 2 points [-]

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".

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 April 2009 01:57:26PM 3 points [-]

Yup, humans have weird failure modes but they don't occur all over the country simultaneously at 3:27pm on Wednesday.