2 & 3) Yes there are some edge cases that you can't train for, but same with humans. What do humans do in an edge case like a torrential downpour? Simply pull over.
Even if there are edge cases, consider that humans are pretty bad drivers on average, over 1.25 million deaths per year, and 50 million injuries in the US alone.
Suppose that in a couple years, self driving cars are not perfect due to the edge cases, and still cause 250k deaths / year. Would you allow them at that point? Even with those stats we should consider only allowing self-driving cars and begin to outlaw human drivers.
Edge Cases: Humans use their brain and adapt. Self driving systems have no concept of adapting, hence the result is undefined.
> over 1.25 million deaths per year, and 50 million injuries in the US alone.
In US in 2016 there were 36,750 fatalities[0][1], so much much lower than the 1.25 million number you're using.
So, no, personally I will not prefer self-driving cars if they are not perfect due to the edge cases, and still cause 250k deaths / year
And the reason is simple, and why throwing statistics is now the right approach: I'd rather have my life in my hands and my driving where I can take a corrective defensive action than rely on an AI model where it is unpredictable when the lightning will strike and a bug/untrained edge case will kill me. I will prefer to be in control.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... [1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Self driving systems however do adapt. Most companies are using neural networks which can be retrained based on their mistakes. Unlike a human, they can also be trained on each and every crash for which sensor data is available.
That's the problem with NN's. You can't say anything about them explicitly except that they meet the specification for their training datasets. Fitness for a task outside of that is not guaranteed. Humans, on the other hand, are constantly adapting, because they never stop "learning". This has the inverse effect in that you can say that a person can be trained for a task, but at the moment may not be.
When you apply an NN on an industrial scale, you can't just throw it out there without being willing to accept the liability for the destruction you cause as a result.
Why not?
Think of it this way, do you take auto insurance for a cab ride, no you don't, because you're not driving it.
My topmost comment said these are open questions, as in undefined.
I, as in IMHO, highly doubt it would be like you're describing, but it is equally likely that it may be like how you're describing, it's just an open question.
In fact, a couple of years ago there was a small event at Tim Draper's Draper University in San Mateo about how auto insurance would look in the world of self-driving cars and it was very clear that at least till that point there was no consensus. I haven't seen anything to suggest if that has changed since then.
In my various conversations on this topic around the bay area, people are generally overly optimistic, who believe it'll happen in next couple or so years, and people who are overly pessimistic.
Possibly a gross generalization but generally the people who are overly pessimistic are the ones who are or have till recently been engineers, while the people who are overly optimistic are the ones further away from engineering - with the farther they are the more optimistic they are.
Moreover, in addition to what you wrote there are a lot of other open questions, not necessarily in any order and definitely not a complete list:
1) Auto Insurance (cars below refers to fully autonomous cars):
1.1) What happens to auto insurance? Do I still need to buy it if I'm not driving it, or does it come bundled in the car price?
1.2) Does everyone pay the same auto insurance for the same car model/year.
1.3) Do cars with different autonomous models have different auto insurance?
1.4) What happens in the case of car accident between self-driving and non-self driving car?
1.5) What happens in the case of two self-driving cars' accident
1.6) What happens if a person is killed due to the Car's fault. Who is liable? The insurance company? The Car manufacturer? The self-driving module manufacturer?
2) Some Edge cases
2.1) What happens if on a 4-way stop 4 self-driving cars come to stop at the same time? Do they know how to handle that, as in which car is moving forward and which one is allowing other cars?
2.2) What happens in an emergency? Can I force my car to drive rash to the hospital or will it follow the speed limit to the T.
2.3) What happens if the Car runs into a situation which it is not trained for?
3) How are the cars tested?
3.1) As a consumer do we know that the cars are fully tested to handle ALL edge conditions?
3.1.1) What is the definition/definitive list of ALL edge conditions?
3.2) When will we know that the threshold has been passed, and the car is truly autonomous?
4) Security
4.1) Assuming the cars will need to be connected, how will the security be?
4.2) Can the cars be Pwned? I'm sure they can be.... so this is the rhetorical question
4.2.2) If the cars can be pwned, will the fully autonomous cars become the next WMD (Weapon of Mass Destruction) -- if you don't agree, close your eyes and imagine a fleet of hundreds of thousands or millions of fully autonomous cars under the control of a rogue entity hell bent on causing damage/killing people.
4.2.3) How do we protect against that?