Defining the Win

By Lanaya Nelson

Why do people love sports? Why do people gamble? Why do people engage in war? Why did Homer write the ‘Iliad’?

Easy answers: risk, property and mortality (or, ahem, casualty). Sound familiar? Ah, yes. This answer is also why insurance exists.

People also love to win. What does it mean ‘to win’? More specifically, what does it mean ‘to win’ with road risk?

Universally and since the beginning of remembered time, humans have always held great interest in ‘the unknown’ and, conversely, ‘omniscience’ (the all-knowing). We have always spent a tremendous amount of time, effort, and resources toward advancements in the predictability of risk to better protect both our own property and mortality and that of our kin — and also to prioritize loss aversion and the circulation of information on how to do so.

My boss, Motion Insurance’s co-founder and CINO, Daniel Weisman nudged me to watch the movie, based on a true story, Moneyball. (And by ‘nudged’ I mean it was practically a requisite to beginning my work. He’s the best.) The plot and point of the movie is a great example of how an advancement in the predictability of risk in the sport of baseball has changed the sport, and many sports subsequently, forever. Decisions were made by the head coach, Billy Beane, that ‘seemed’ risky to other decision makers in the sport whom had, and had always, based their decisions on experience and intuition. (Okay, maybe there were some uses of stats thrown in the mix once in a while, but my intuition tells me those stats were slanted by preference.) In actuality, these ‘risky’ decisions were rooted soundly in math, logic, and statistical modeling of aggregated and historical data.

In using this statistically baseball math, sabermetrics, this particular underdog baseball team, the Oakland Athletics (the A’s), went on to gain 19 seemingly inconceivable, consecutive season wins. If that is not loss aversion for you, I don’t know what is! (Billy Beane, former pro player himself, is still with the A’s as the team’s EVP of baseball operations and a minority owner.)

Math is the winner of predictability, but winning is different for every game.

Circling back to last week’s blog post, The Queen’s Gambit and Insurance?, in the game of chess, there is a winner, a loser, or there is a situation of stalemate (a tie if you will). A win in a chess game is determined and conclusive (as well as with its possibilities of events!). This is precisely where last week’s analogy: ‘a game of chess is to winning that game as road risk is to 100% predictability’ …went completely awry.

First of all, road risk is not a game nor a contest — both of which require some sort of intention and will to want to participate, and usually to win. Most of the time drivers drive out of necessity, habit, and/or, quite literally, just to get from point a to point b as a means of functionality. Secondly, if you are not racing, there is no winner, loser, or stalemate. No one ever comes home safely and celebrates, “I won!”. Would be pretty funny, though.

One of the scariest aspects of road risk is its reality has become somewhat of a ‘de facto’ that drivers accept every time they get out on the road. We, the drivers, accept the dark and stark truth that road risk and the mortality, injury, and loss rates are way higher than they should be with the technology and access to information that we have today. But do drivers actually know how unsafe our roads are? I think if people glanced at the statistics and learned about the clear paths to eliminate certain risks and lower overall road risk, most would be appalled and angry. Current road risk is not something that should be accepted as de facto, and folks should be weary every time they turn out of their driveway.

If you knew you were going to get into a car accident before leaving the house, would you have stayed home?

Of course you would have! You have common sense. And you’re no fraudster. (I hope!)

As the world is, has been, and, perhaps, as it always will be, certain events and risks of events cannot be 100% predictable. Like road risk. Events and risks of events, however, can be moved closer to predictability than ever before and on a much more elevated scale of accuracy than how they are being predicted now.

Life is not a [chess] game

A point from last week’s analogy that in a game of chess, a ‘win’ can be predicted with algorithms because the rules of the game are fixed, the possibilities and probabilities of events or moves are fixed, and perfect information is always revealed. It was concluded that the risk of the game lies in the players alone and the risk of randomness or information unrevealed is null.

In other games in which sequences of events are non binary and elements of ‘randomness’ and/or ‘hidden’ information is at play, like the game of poker, the scale of predictability drops down significantly. This is not to say that sophisticated engineering has not accelerated exponentially since AlphaZero as it was used in context of last week’s discussion. It has. And is shattering the ‘laws’ of binary logic, or how we thought we knew them.

The name’s Pluribus. It is an AI-bot that is the first processing machine to beat professional poker players at 6-player, no limit games of Texas Hold’Em. When I asked last week if AlphaZero’s beating a top chess player/grandmaster in a game of chess was a big deal, I answered with ‘kind of, and also, kind of not.’ Is Pluribus a big deal? Yes.

Life is much more like a complex game of poker than it is like a game of chess. (If you are interested in learning more about the depth of Pluribus, this is a great article for you.)

Bringing it home for the win

A win in road risk is a collective effort. It is the lowering of overall risk of every road for everyone.

Road risk has been in a position of stalemate for a long time and this is not because people are not trying for this win. A significant stalemate cause is because integral players haven’t showed up to the table to make this win possible. It would be like if Brady and Belichick never showed up for the Patriots.

Who is showing up?

Here is a peak into some award-winning state initiatives that are going on right under our…tires.

The state of Connecticut and its Transportation Safety Research Center (CTSRC) affiliated with UCONN, is on the cutting edge of road safety bringing together technology, civil engineering, data science, psychology, simulation, state-of-the-art mapping, among many other areas of expertise and research. Eric Jackson, executive director of CTSRC, is a BIG WINNER in road risk.

Now if we can get others to show up like Brady-ies for road risk prevention, we would all be heading down the right road. Ok… fine, and the Brees’ and the Rogers’ and the Wilsons, too.

Auto insurers, for instance, are the biggest culprits for felt absence. Every driver on the road needs to have auto insurance. Actually, that is false. If your vehicle is registered in the state of New Hampshire, it’s live free or die, baby! It is not required by law that you have car insurance to drive, but you do need to prove that you have enough money in the bank to cover damages incurred by an accident. If you want to learn more about NH’s… interesting, for lack of a better descriptor, policy, see here.

Back to the point, most drivers are required, by law, to carry proof of auto insurance. That’s over 227.5 million people in the U.S. alone (I have not subtracted the bada$$ folks from NH livin’ the dream, but this stat is from 2018, so I’ll play like an old baseball scout and call it even). So, the insurance industry alone has access to over 227.5 million drivers and it has not shown up to the ‘how do we work together to lower road risk’ table?! …I can certainly tell you who the losers have been so far.

Neither here nor there, onward to putting ‘the win’ in motion.

To lower overall road risk, eliminate certain risky events, and to help inform citizens and encourage their participation, all integral parties must show up to the table. This means public and private sectors alike, the mobility industry, the government, academic researchers, investors, insurers, techies, auto manufacturers, the telecomms industry, and especially citizens (and there are many others that are needed, but these are the main conduits).

Just like Billy Beane changed the game of baseball, we can work together, e pluribus unum, to change road risk and make our roads safer for everyone, collectively.

Ok, cool, you’re on board. ‘Put me in, coach!’ But, how do we actually win this thing?

We need to work together to build the coolest, most sophisticated technology that is regulator- not just approved- but celebrated, and citizen-accepted/adopted. What is this technology? It is building incredible models and infrastructure, using contextual, historical, observational, and other types of data to better calculate and understand road risk.

“In this future, calculating the relative risk of environmental factors becomes most important. Imagine if AlphaZero, which has been described by Grandmasters as watching a supremely intelligent alien play chess, were stepping in to help Beth Harmon [the main character in the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit] with her Grandmaster games… in that case Beth’s skill at the board is now much less important than just showing up and listening to AlphaZero’s suggestions.

Mobility becomes more fluid, and risk goes down dramatically…but accidents and acts of God still [and will always] happen. A tree rotted with fungus falls on your parked car. A deer jumps in front of your vehicle before your emergency braking system can fully respond. Some risks will never fully disappear.” -Daniel Weisman, CINO, Motion Insurance

We will never fully and accurately predict all risk, everywhere, at any time, and at any given place, but we can be leaps and bounds from where we are now. As Weisman described above, this technology should be a ‘grand’ tool to help aid the grandmaster in securing their win. Let’s use technology to help all of us in our win of lower overall road risk, in decreasing losses, and, most importantly, in saving lives.

And there you have it folks, the definition of winning in road risk. Let’s play tech! …and save lives. Collectively.

E pluribus unum.