You can't get to a failure rate of 0, but I can understand people wanting the car to drive at least as well as a human who was in, say, the top 5% of human drivers.

Who'd want an autonomous car that's merely better than the _average_ driver, when every driver knows they're above average :)

Of course, and I acknowledge that accidents will happen anyway. But we cannot have a car that is on the road with "autonomous" driving functionality when it is known that the sensors can't detect an obstacle above half-pillar height(like in that famous tesla crash), or that the lane detection can fail in intense sunlight(like dozens of videos on Youtube show). It should have no known failure states upon release, and then ones which are found should be fixed later. I'm just worried that we're in such a rush to release autonomous cars on the road that we are ignoring known issues for the sake of improving average safety on the road - literally no other industry works like this.

Isn't your argument why we have the saying that "the best is the enemy of the good"? You seem to be dismissing any automated product that is not perfect even if it is demonstrably already much safer overall than the manual human equivalent. Surely this can't be the right policy if the goal is to maximise safety.

This is not to say that current autonomous vehicles actually are much safer than the human equivalent. Indeed, everything I've seen so far suggests that they have a long way to go before crossing that threshold, so personally I'm a sceptic about claims that we will see viable fully autonomous vehicles any time in the next few years. But this doesn't seem to be your argument here.

> Isn't your argument why we have the saying that "the best is the enemy of the good"?

Regardless of the OP's position on this, I do think the reality is that in practice it's difficult to sell or legalize anything that isn't significantly better than 'the average driver'. Whether it makes sense or not, we seem to demand any 'AI-powered' system to be better than the average human. I personally wish this wasn't the case, but it appears to be so.

For example, I personally marvel at the abilities of Siri and Google Now, at the very least when it comes to understanding what I'm saying. It's quite possible, in fact, that both are often objectively better at understanding me than most people around me: more than once I said something to Siri where I immediately realized that it was mumbly enough for any real human in my vicinity to ask 'what?' (often only to right away act on what I said, indicating that they did manage to interpret what I'd said). And yet Siri or Google Now actually transcribed what I'd said.

Being as good as the people around me would not be good enough, because every time Siri fails it makes me shake my fist at the whole concept of 'personal assistants' on my iDevices, rather than sigh at the umpteenth person around me saying 'what?' and then obviously acting on what I'd said, which is much more common.

I've not studied this properly, so I might be wrong. But I get the impression that I hold my AI to a much higher standard than I would my human interactions.

How many other industries have such a high potential for saving lives by improving average safety? Traffic kills more than 80000 people every year in the EU.

Would you rather have a large chance of your car driving into something it couldn't detect and a slightly smaller chance of being seriously injured or the status quo? Keep in mind that the odds of being seriously injured in a car crash in one's lifetime are already fairly low. How many people do you know that were seriously injured in a vehicle crash?

Most of the safety of AI comes from it being implemented in vehicles that are already far safer than average.

I'd rather have the solution with fewer serious accidents, even if it introduces types of accidents that don't happen with human drivers. I know a handful of people who were seriously injured in traffic.

I think accidents in traffic will be completely 100% solved by brake assist and collision prevention systems - I think they are meant to be mandatory in all new cars sold in US by 2020 if I remember correctly? So not long now. AI solves a different category of problems and isn't really necessary to solve crashes when there is a lot of cars driving close to each other.

I'm looking forward to those things as well. But bicycles don't have brake assist. It takes a very sophisticated collision detection system to prevent right-hooking a cyclist.

Electric assist bikes/mopeds will let most cyclists safely keep up with traffic in the kinds of places where you have to worry about those kinds of collisions, bike lanes will go the way of the dodo and car traffic will no longer have to take right turns across a lane of (bike) traffic.

Having a traffic pattern that requires a right turn (or left for certain countries) across a different lane of traffic is shitty and when a better solution shows up it will probably be implemented.