An alert, attentive, sober human will be a better driver than a self driving car for some time to come.

It's the exhausted, distracted, drunk ones you need to look out for.

And we could install some cheap device in each cars to detect when a driver is tired and keep him awake, and detect a drunk driver and stop him drive or perform some other action.

Until most of people will afford a self driving car you would still have to face the drunk, or the ones that text so you will not remove those of the roads.

There are luxury cars that attempt to detect when a driver is falling asleep, and people are sometimes mandated to have an interlock on their cars that prevents starting if they have alcohol in their breath. So if these things are not universal, presumably it's because of cost-benefit analysis, not because they need to be invented.

I was involved back in 2003-2004 with an Australian company called SeeingMachines (I worked for a UK redistributor).

These guys made a remote video face-and-eye tracker that they sold to automotive companies wanting to research different dashboard designs -- they would look for blinks and head-nods to measure how fatigued a driver was, and to optimise the dashboard design to keep the driver awake.

I'm sure they are now selling their technology to automotive OEMs for placement in driver-facing camera ECUs.

Their technology worked OK back in 2003. I'm sure it is very robust and mature by now.

Not a bad idea.

They are also better pilots than self-flying planes. And better writers then self-writing blogs.

And so on. There, of course, are many examples of things in which computers have outpaced human capabilities, and it's certainly plausible that some day this could apply to cars. But it hasn't happened yet and it's also more than plausible that none of this will happen in the lifetime of anyone now living.

Which is why they aren't quite legal yet. And it's arguable anyway, given the noise in the signal (a tiny handful of fatalities to compare with the ~100k "normal" traffic deaths over the same period).

But like all new technology, it's improving. People aren't.

For some values of 'human' e.g. alert, sober. Which is sadly, a minority?

Its arguable that self-driving cars are better already. What we need to do is, secure the roads so they won't get confused (fence them & remove pedestrians/bikes). I know, we can't do that everywhere but we could do it for long-haul etc. Like freeways already do.

>For some values of 'human' e.g. alert, sober. Which is sadly, a minority?

I think the vast majority of human drivers are alert and sober. It's the long tail of drunk / aggressive / distracted drivers that causes crashes.

>Its arguable that self-driving cars are better already. What we need to do is, secure the roads so they won't get confused (fence them & remove pedestrians/bikes). I know, we can't do that everywhere but we could do it for long-haul etc. Like freeways already do.

I mean as a human driver, I obviously love limited access roads (and human drivers perform very well on limited access roads). We won't have more of those though - the cultural paradigm for urban planning is one of tearing down freeways, adding bike-lanes, and ensuring pedestrian friendliness for maximum walkability.

So at what point will automation become better than humans at this task? Are you saying "never"? Or just "not now"?

The key part here is "until now"