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A comment on Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow. Parent comment

Re:Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow by bluGill on Tuesday September 18, 2018 @09:28AM (#18015062)
We already know that the assumption is correct for a lot of cases. Self driving cars have logged millions of miles on the road.

The only question is can we make them work in situations that are hard.

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Re:Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow by Piskvorrr on Tuesday September 18, 2018 @02:58PM (#18018117)
Meanwhile human-driven cars have driven billions. The only question is can we make them (humans) work in situations that are hard?

In other words, "it works until it doesn't" is tautologically true, but useless precisely for that reason.

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Re:Self-Driving Cars Can Handle Neither Rain nor Sleet nor Snow by telchar on Tuesday September 18, 2018 @03:47PM (#18018521)
The answer to your question is basically "no". Humans aren't getting better at driving in the aggregate - new ones are born, learn to drive, get better, then get worse, then die off. On average humans are as good as they're going to get (with small variations due to culture and different training programs).

On the other hand the self-driving cars are just getting started. It's entirely reasonable to suppose that they may surpass the average human in the next X years. And they won't get old and confused and eventually replaced with new cars that have to learn from scratch -- they should get more or less monotonically better. I think the optimism is warranted even if the timeline and technology is uncertain.

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