The criterion (really the only criterion) for whether or not automatic vehicles "should be on the road" is whether or not they are safer than the alternative. And that certainly doesn't include "being as good a driver as jdavis703 was in this particular anecdote".

Being engaged in a particular role relative to a situation can (I believe) alter one's capacity to perceive and respond to it.

This isn't to say that for definite the instructor would have had the insight described in the parent post, but it is to say that you can't rule this out just based on the information that as a passenger they didn't have the insight.

That's a senseless digression though. Again, the criterion to use when deciding whether autonomous vehicles are safe is whether autonomous vehicles are measurably as safe as human drivers and very much not whether we can "rule out" the possibility that the machine might be subject to failure modes that human driver are already known to have anyway.

For every scenario and hypothetical like this one you can imagine where an autonomous vehicle would fail, I can come up with an equally hypothetical reason why they're better (hell, just read any of the media coverage of them). Both arguments are meaningless without numbers and analysis, c.f. this very article we're discussing.

In terms of your agenda, it might make no sense. It just irks me when I see simplistic assumptions about human information processing that don't take the "situatedness" of the processor into account.

I have no views, and did not attempt to comment, on machine information processing in this instance. I just wanted to point out that you can't simply go from the instructor's actually missing the inference as a passenger to the conclusion that they would have missed it as a driver. Thats it :)

My outlook on the transition period is not very optimistic. Humans are good at anticipating crazy behavior. Fatalities increasing (before they eventually decrease) is currently just as likely as the promised miracle in my mind - we don't have enough data to sway my mind either direction just yet.

There was also staying in between the lines, following road signs, and integrating with traffic. Do you think you might have failed not because you weren’t pegged at the speed limit, but instead because you weren’t capable of driving safely?

I wasn’t there, so it could’ve been because you really were just driving too slowly. But maybe it was more than that.

I agree there's still a lot of work to be done, but my point is that the problem is the driving system itself, and a lot of people dies because of it. AI can't directly change that, but if it can still do better than humans (in a few years), then it's worth it.