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Notes -
New executive order just dropped.
This seems, on first glance, wildly better by my libertarian sensibilities than anything I ever expected out of the Trump administration. I am slightly in shock, which is not unusual following an EO, but this time it is a good shock, which is unusual.
So a couple of things
Am I wrong in reading there seems to be reasonable wiggle room built into the EO?
There's built in discretion to maaaybe adopt a different mens rea standard for criminal regulatory offenses. One hopes that the AG only accepts reasonable defenses of different standards of criminal enforcement, but there are probably many reasonable, wiggly exceptions.
"Excuse me, AG Bondi, in 98% of cases the US Forest Service targets Big Criminal Forestry-- these jerks are always finding ways to wiggle out of their illegal logging. If we lose strict liability standards for this enforcement they will claim ignorance every time, in every forest, and likely get away with their illegal logging. By the way, Mrs. Bondi, I have it on record we protested this. We aren't going to eat this story when the time comes."
Apply that to less reasonable, but similarly wiggly enforcement. Requiring a defense of different standards is good, but there's got to be thousands(?*) of these, and a safe political decision would be to defer to the agency if they request a different standard. This EO wasn't blasted out with political vigor. It was dumped on a Friday with barely a peep, so there may not be a big Trump backing to hide behind any unpopular decisions.
I may just be negative. This seems good, generally. If done intelligently, better. There are likely real trade offs in losing flexibility with higher burdens for enforcement, but still seems amenable.
** Many, many thousands. Hundreds of thousands. I forgot we don't actually know-- which is why step one makes agencies plainly list them. Yuge!
Federal regulations are codified, although you are probably right that nobody has explicitly tagged the criminal provisions. DOGE would do this by having an AI parse the CFR, and it would work.
...about as well as Full Self Driving - good enough for you to put your guard down, and then drive you right into a truck it misidentified as a bridge.
Is full self driving more dangerous per mile than having a human drive? Otherwise it might be the case that having an AI parse the CFR would work better across the board than having humans do it, but would fail a few times in highly surprising and attention-grabbing ways.
Waymo has a lot of data, and claims a 60-80% reduction in accidents per mile for self-driving cars. You should take it with a grain of salt, of course, but I think there are people holding them to a decent reporting standard. The real point is that even being 5x safer might not be enough for the public. Same with having an AI parse regulations/laws...
Waymo is an order of magnitude better than Tesla FSD.
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Is AI safer per mile than a slightly above average driver?
It's a legitimate question because it's entirely possible that the vast majority of traffic accidents are caused by unlicensed drunk drivers texting behind the wheel. AI does not do that, and it's kind of hard to see how it even could.
Yeah, it's a good question that I can't answer. I suspect if all humans somehow held to a (not perfect but decent) standard of not driving impaired or distracted, signaling properly, and driving the speed limit or even slower in dangerous conditions ... that would probably decrease accidents by at least 80% too. So maybe self-driving cars are still worse than that.
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I'm pretty sure it is, yes. Provably beating the average human, or even reaching the same level would be a huge milestone that Elon would be shouting from every roof. That ancient rationalist prophecy about truck drivers getting replaced by AI would have already come true.
Eh, it takes time for change to percolate, and truck drivers are sufficiently selected that we can assume they're better drivers than average- the average driver, after all, includes averages from lots of people who insist on driving drunk/high, texting while driving, etc.
Ok, are you actually saying FSD is as safe as a human driver right now, or are you just pointing out reasons why being as safe doesn't necessarily mean wide scale adoption? The former is an interesting conversation, but the latter strikes men a zero stakes one about angels dancing on a pin.
Same question @jkf.
I'm saying that the truly "average driver" as reflected in accident statistics does not really exist -- the famous "paradox" about how 80% of people think they are better drivers than average is actually kind of true. There are a certain amount of really bad drivers out there, and quite a lot more who are pretty good -- and they would be scared shitless by driving with a robot who drove like them 80% of the time, but like a drunken maniac the other 20%. (which would be as safe as the "average driver", statistically)
IDK whether FSD is even that safe at the moment -- I don't think it's knowable right now due to lack of adoption and/or public testing. Seems worse to talk about than dancing angels to me, unless somebody wants to bring some stats -- but if you insist, wouldn't people be, like, using this in prod if that were the case?
As I recall Elon promised to FSD from San Francisco to NYC 5+ years ago -- why hasn't he done so by now?
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And yet still insufficient -- the set of human drivers includes a lot of people who are drunk/stoned/distracted/angry at any given moment -- perhaps unsurprisingly, these people cause a lot of accidents, which brings the average performance down substantially.
All you need to do to be much safer than average is not do those things; for me to feel safe sleeping (for example) in a robot car, I'd want a couple std deviations better than human average at least. I imagine trucking companies feel the same way (maybe even less risk tolerant) -- particularly considering that with automated trucks they no longer have a human to throw under the bus when he does something dumb.
All you need to be much safer than average is not live near certain low iq/low conscientiousness/high time preference populations, and yet if you attempt to do that it's the second coming of the apocalypse and the libs cry foul to the moon.
Perhaps we need segregation for the roads, have an AI and Emergency vehicles only lane. Anyone else caught driving there unless they are gunning it for the hospital gets cited/jailed.
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While truckers who get in an at-fault accident will be immediately fired and not hired by any trucking company ever again, ambulance chasers don't go after them because they don't have the money to give a big payday. Trucking lawsuits usually hinge on getting a big insurance payout on the basis of 'you should be liable for hiring/overworking/undermanaging him'. There's no inherent reason a trucking company wouldn't prefer to have an ambulance chaser fighting Tesla's lawyers than State Farm's.
I'm more thinking of assuaging the public's lust for blood when a truck takes out a schoolbus or something -- the driver still wears the criminal penalties for any mistakes in a way that I don't think Tesla will be prepared to accept.
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