Re:Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
by aetherson on Monday March 19, 2018 @01:30PM
(#16620585)
Lots of people imagine both: that the system will never be distracted and also that it will have superhuman reaction time.
And, like, once the systems are mature and hardware has evolved and so forth, I think that's right. It will. It might today under certain circumstances, like if it gets a really unambiguous sensor input (or it might not).
But I've never heard anyone actually associated with a driverless car program assert that their vehicles have superhuman reaction times today, and the vehicles drive extremely cautiously. I think it's likely that due to their difficulty in understanding their sensor readings, if you look at total time necessary to make a course correction from the point when an obstruction first could be noticed by an alert human driver, driverless cars are not winning and may be substantially losing in at least some cases.
The argument I've always heard is that an autonomous systems will outperform humans mostly by being more vigilant (not getting distracted, sleepy, etc.) rather than using detectors with superhuman reaction times. Obviously, whether or not this outweighs the frequency of situations where the autonomous system gets confused when a human would not is an empirical question that will change as the tech improves.