You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

MrMind comments on Make your own cost-effectiveness Fermi estimates for one-off problems - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: owencb 11 December 2014 12:00PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (15)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: MrMind 15 December 2014 01:32:05PM 1 point [-]

It could be interesting to look at self-driving cars. This could be defined as any car that doesn't depend on human input for things like speed, driving accuracy, etc. I estimate that a self-driving car would reduce car crashes by something between 50% and 80%.

Since there are already pretty successful self-driving cars, I expect that the goal above would reached within 10 years if research were 10 times greater than today.

Try to give an estimate with:

  • R(0) in $;
  • B either in QALYs of the life saved or $ saved by medical insurance companies (or the government, where appliable);
  • I would put p at 0.8, with y/z at 10
Comment author: owencb 17 December 2014 05:11:03PM *  1 point [-]

Seems interesting. Paul Christiano looked into some of these figures, and without deeper investigation I'm happy to use figures from that.

It suggests R(0) = $0.5b, and B = $200B. Putting that into the spreadsheet gets a benefit:cost ratio of about 140 to 1.