On the other hand, there is a lot of hype and promises being made without the results to back them up.

Yes, there is.

You can debate the exact figures/circumstances, but the numbers are good, and improving all the time. Humans are just not very good at guiding tons of metal around at high speeds, which isn't very surprising when you think about it.

One accident for every 4.34 million miles is already pretty good (compared to 500k miles for humans) - if it were rolled out today across all cars it would probably save thousands of lives in the US. Yes these quarterly numbers are in the best conditions and supervised, no that doesn't invalidate them, particularly as they show dramatic improvement at the same time as they keep expanding the conditions in which autopilot functions.

There will always be a long tail, but computers are getting very close to good enough for highway driving, known truck routes, and known taxi routes.

https://electrek.co/2019/10/23/tesla-autopilot-safety-9x-saf... https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport?redirect=no

That is exactly what it does: it invalidates them. Comparing apples to oranges is an invalid comparison.

Let's compare the numbers again when there's sufficient data for self-driving tech driving in all environmental conditions without supervision and without human assistance jumping in whenever it gets rough. At that point, a comparison is valid. Until then you're comparing someone who aces tests with someone who is just doing good, but the first guy is only solving first-graders' multiple-choice tests and cheats by asking a friend who graduated at a university whenever a question pops up that isn't "choose one of these three", while the second guy is on his own in the middle of his college education.

A human interferes in precisely those situations in which the machine either decided to surrender or - worse - started doing something stupid and the human caught it quickly enough to prevent an accident. It is safe to assume that the human has a much better safety record in such situations.

And who does the human surrender to when he fails at driving? Should we also not count human accidents that could have been prevented if there was a world-class race driver ready to take over when the actual driver makes the failure?

Are they better than average humans in average conditions already? Yes.

They don't need to be all powerful AGI which can replace humans in all circumstances to be useful and save lives.

I think average conditions do matter, and supervised computers will continue to take over driving until humans are simply not required. Of course they will not replace humans this year or next, but at some point humans will be passengers, not drivers.

Creating an AI that only functions on dry sunny days is basically useless from a safety perspective.

...though it does save people time since they can be doing something else while in transit!

By quoting an average, assuming those numbers hold when scaled up, you are compressing the actual distribution into a single number. Overall that high-level number may be correct.

But at the same time, the kinds of people that get into accidents will be a different distribution.

How you drive factors a lot into how likely you are into getting in an accident, even allowing for the other drivers.

If the distribution becomes essentially random then you might actually have a higher chance of getting into an accident than before, if you were a very careful driver.

(Obviously those that benefit the most are the bad drivers since they'll no longer be bad)

Just remember that whenever you summarize a distribution into a single number like an average, you loose a lot of information in the process.

Most people are simply not careful drivers all the time. This is one major advantage computers have - they don't get tired or distracted.

Time will tell as we get more data about supervised driving, but I think it's inaccurate to say we don't have data yet, it is imperfect of course, but it does point to computers being safer than humans in some very common conditions over millions of miles.

Also keep in mind the outrage factor. The reason airplane crashes are so feared is because of the loss of control. Meanwhile alcohol and cars are much more dangerous but much lower outrage because you still feel like you have some control.

That's a vacuous statement. Evidence would be a deployed self-driving fleet. At which point it would be mission accomplished and we wouldn't be discussing this.

Now if you want theoretical considerations instead of evidence, then consider the lower reaction times of machines.

Meanwhile, Teslas run into the backs of car carriers because they only recognise the car it's carrying and not the truck bed extending behind it. It might react faster, but it needs to identify the danger first and up until now, it's much worse at that in many situations.

Yes, you're right, once it's safer, it's safer. That makes your statements just as vacuous as theirs.

And someone rear ended me the other day because they didn't notice cars were stopping. Yes, self-driving cars make mistakes, but humans make all sorts of mistakes, too.

The question is, do self driving cars have more accidents per mile (or more damage per mile/injuries per mile/ deaths per mile) than human driven cars?

"activating auto steer increased crash rate by 50%"

Tesla safety stats are ok when compared to the average car on the road. But that's because they are expensive, high quality cars driven by middle aged people. It's the safest car demographic on the road. When comparing auto drive teslas to equivalent luxury cars they look terrible. Though i think if you ignore the autodrive they're perfectly good cars.

They are absolutely not "less safe", because they are all human driven cars.

Why not say the rest of your argument with the fact that cruise control made cars "less safe than human driven cars" because people fell asleep at the wheel and drifted off the road.

Self-driving cars don't take risks when they make mistakes while humans are exposed to physical or legal consequences that are well understood by everyone on the road.

I know self driving cars feel different to us now, but they aren't really different in kind, just degree. I am sure people felt these concerns when cars were introduced in general.

It should matter if they have less, but in the real world it doesn't matter, because it's "scary" to be rear-ended by an unthinking machine, and business as usual to be rear-ended by a clumsy human, so people will always hold machines to a much higher standard.

Human makes a mistake, they could have been tired, distracted, got something in their eye, or anything else.

Machine makes a mistake, it becomes a question of why and will it make that same mistake every time?

This is very much a solvable problem.

If your standard is that self driving must be perfect then i'd argue you're being unreasonable.

If your standard is that self driving cars must be better than that is something that can easily be tested.

"Teslas" do not "run into the backs of car carriers".

I don't know where you are repeating that from, because you've clearly never driven one, but the core concept of autopilot is that the human should step in whenever a situation is confusing and/or dangerous. If the car does not recognize a situation it will always alert the driver to take over.

The parent poster was referencing this, which I found immediately using Google:

https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/1231834/tesla-mode...

That's just your opinion, while my comment is a statement of reality as it stands.

> Evidence would be a deployed self-driving fleet.

This is also just your opinion. Evidence could also be a self-driving vehicle that doesn't drive under the beds of trucks, run people over or is statistically safer than human drivers.

> Now if you want theoretical considerations instead of evidence, then consider the lower reaction times of machines.

Consider the high error rate of machine learning when it comes to novel situations that driving exposes drivers to. Human beings can understand situations they are in and adapt based on that understanding, whereas this generation of ML does not.

Computers have the theoretical potential for a lot of things. The internet had the theoretical potential for mass informational enlightenment, democracy and resource allocation in the face of dwindling scarcity of resources.

Instead, the computers and the internet have become tools of mass manipulation, weapons for totalitarian regimes, and despite an abundance of food, people still go hungry.

I understand that a lot of people are sold on hype, and believe promises that were made, however the results are just not there.

The relevant part is the last: "statistically safer than human drivers."

Every driving system that has existed or will exist will make errors due to extremely novel situations. Given the energies involved, such errors will lead to crashes, some of which will be horrible.

The standard for self driving systems is, at a high level, simple: statistically safer, by a fair margin, than human drivers.

Considering other utility unlocked by autonomous cars (e.g. less stress, life-hours freed up, helping the disabled) they could even be marginally less safe than human drivers and still provide a net benefit.

And not just that, but individually they have to be seen as safer. As in, I am not going to be happy with a computer driving me around that is merely safer than an average driver. Given that I'm middle aged, don't drink and drive, or drive while exhausted, etc, and I haven't ever caused an accident, I'm going to need a little more assurance.

I believe Elon Musk has talked about targeting '10x safer' than an average driver. My guess is that's a sufficient margin to cover the vast majority of better than average drivers.

No, perhaps I am to blame for incomplete quoting, but you're asking for evidence about the future, whether machine learning will be able to tackle this problem. So it's not just about current computers but also future computers. We can make predictions, but hard evidence would require a time machine or some first-principles proof that humans are the optimal arrangement of atoms for car control.

> however the results are just not there.

Well of course, but what information does that add to the discussion? That level 5 autonomy is an achievement that lies in the future is a premise of this thread and I think most people take this as fact. Bemoaning the absence of evidence for the results of a technology that's expected to only arrive in the future... doesn't make sense.

Reacting quickly except in emergencies is almost always worse and more likely to cause an accident in an environment consisting mostly of human drivers.

Tesla's self driving has resulted in cars swerving into gore points, for example.

That's assuming accidents are caused by complex and unusual scenarios instead of humans being inattentive during routine tasks. If machines fail at complex tasks but fail safely then that's not an argument against self-driving cars being safe, it's only one about their limited usefulness.

They don't, not at the moment. The software detects the situation is outside its capability space and says "jesus, take the wheel!".

For all practical intents and purposes the only reasonable way to interpret the current self-driving car statistics is to treat every single human intervention as a would-be accident. That rate is somewhere in the 1 per 10000 km ballpark. That's - for now - orders of magnitudes worse than human drivers.

Not necessarily. If the AI response is to stop the car when it can't figure something out, then the cost of each of those situations is the car not continuing on as quickly as it should (and maybe stuck cars if we dont have a way to override the stop/take control manually).

Every hand over to a driver is not an accident.

Not to mention that many of the times control has to be taken have nothing to do with other drivers or even other cars.

The reality is that a car can only be driven by a general artificial intelligence. We're nowhere in that ballpark.

It seems that most accidents are caused by human error and humans being distracted or under the influence of a substance.

Weather and complex situations would only rank at the bottom of the list and therefore could be considered a YAGNI problem.

If you remove the human element from the driving, already the top 4 causes of accidents on the road would be reduced drastically.

So at the moment a self driving car may not be able to handle some of the most extreme situations that a human driver could handle however, I would challenge that assumption and simply ask: does it have to?

This is a logical fallacy. You are inferring from a comparatively low incident rate that the condition must also be rare, which is not a reasonable conclusion to make.

#1 was speeding. Self driving cars would be trivially programmed not to do that, of course. But this one is tricky to interpret, because Americans habitually speed. That means two things: Speeding is trivially something that can be listed as a factor; it wouldn't be a lot less meaningful to say that bucket seats are a factor. And not speeding might actually be more dangerous. That leaves me thinking this one is equivocal for the purposes of the debate.

#s 2, 3, 4 and 6 are drunk driving, distractions, cell phones, and driver fatigue. Those are easy point for self driving cars, of course.

#5 is weather. This feels like an easy one in favor of humans, considering that all the major self driving car companies deal with weather by avoiding it. That's not much of a vote of confidence.

#6 is red light accidents. I would want to see more about override statistics before interpreting this one. It could be that self-driving cars literally never miss a red light. But, given that some of the intersections in my city have quite confusing traffic light arrangements - reflectors that make the light invisible outside of certain angles, lighted intersections spaced 40 feet apart that are separate lighted intersections nonetheless, printed signs informing drivers of non-standard semantics for that light, wildly varying yellow light durations, etc. - I have my doubts about self-driving cars being able to properly deal with the traffic lights. If there are any tests going on in a similar city, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that operator overrides are routine at lighted intersections.

Zooming out to the big picture, though - the ones that are a clear win for self-driving cars are all instances where the human's decisionmaking capacity has been impaired. Which implies that humans are really quite good at operating vehicles when they aren't being stupid. But it also implies something that I think doesn't get enough credit among many advocates of self-driving cars: the fact that, behind the wheel of every safe self-driving car, there's a highly trained human operator who is not drunk and not tired and not diddling around with their cell phone. And we've got evidence to suggest that, when the human operator is a bit more human, the self driving car's accident rate suddenly spikes considerably.

And that's a big deal. It's common to place those errors on the shoulders of the car's driver, but that's trying to have your cake and eat it too. You can't wave away every fatality involving a car on autopilot by saying, "Oh, that wasn't the car's fault, the driver was being an idiot," and also claim that we've got good evidence to suggest that we know how to make cars operate safely without relying on a human driver to act as a backstop for the fallibility of the human programmers. It may eventually come - I think we all hope it does - but given how, in AI, the last year or two's worth of R&D always ends up taking another decade or two before everyone just gives up on the whole enterprise and moves on to a greener field, a little skepticism is far from unwarranted.

As the number of situations where self-driving kicks in increases to include more complex environments, it's likely the numbers will shift.

That's why it takes years to enable city level (L2 and maybe L3 in rush hours) driving.

At the same time it really looks like Tesla will enable it this year, as Elon's predicted timelines are getting shorter.

I don't think your use of statistics is correct.

People said that about computers when it came to basic computations.

They said it about computers when it came to landing on the moon.

They said it about computers when it came to electronic tax returns, digital currencies, music, movies, video games and everything else in the history of the world that computers once couldn't do, but now do with ease, and much much more accurately and faster than the old way of doing whatever it is.

With sub-millisecond reaction times and eight cameras and radar instead of only two eyes, it's blatantly obvious computers will be better drivers than humans.

It's just a question of when.

Does it matter though? If it drives like my grandma, I can still do other things while in a car and hate commuting/traffic jams a bit less.

So you can't do other things while in the car.

But then again, I am actually able to discern what is a bridge and what isn't, and thus don't have the need to suddenly cover my eyes and scream, "I'm confused and I don't want to drive anymore!"

These vehicles have a superior sensor system to us. Our processing is better but sometimes their superior sensors are better.

Except arguably that's when the car is least effective! That is when pedestrians walk out or vans reverse with the wrong kind of shiny paintwork. Reaction time is less important at low speeds vs effective and accurate processing.

Actively driving results in my attention being engaged, all the time. Passively letting the car drive will 100% reduce my engagement, and when the car fails I will not notice. And sure, for now it's my decision, until it becomes mandatory on new cars alongside automatic breaking etc...

https://twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1202778123433119745

It's even fricking speeding up!

That may be very true, but are most of us fully present in the act of driving ? Where the ML is deficient we can make up for it by making the infrastructure more robust.

Can't make human behaviour inside that infrastructure more robust though. So we'd need to completely split human and autonomous traffic. That'll be about as big a challenge as creating the autonomous cars in the first place.

My guess is at least 15 years before we'll see any large scale adoption of autonomous vehicles. And that's for countries like the Netherlands which are already pretty well organised. Countries with chaotic driving styles and roads like Italy will take longer and the third world might take decades longer because of the lack of rules in many of those countries.

I remember when credit cards, caller ID, online shopping, tax software, etc were all new. Each was loudly denounced as evil for various reasons; eventually the benefits became so obvious that we all now use those techs with little concern - even though many/most of the concerns were warranted. Just became too convenient to use them.

Self-driving will be the same. Scary concept to hurtle down the road completely & existentially subject to a machine built of (per A.C.Clarke) pure magic. Once in one, and seeing how smoothly & smartly it transports you, people will quickly embrace self-driving cars ... especially when they discover how too darned convenient it is to use them.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And self-driving neural-net cars, to most, are flat-out magic.

If you gave a random sample Tesla-level autopilot with their current car and walked them through how to use if, I'd guess that at least 75% would want to use it regularly.

Familiarity and basic understanding work wonders on shifting the human mind.

I have one because I need it for online booking, my first one was revoked because I apparently cost them more by not using it enough. I practically don't see a significant benefit, most places accept other forms of payment.

> caller ID

faked and missing all the time.

> subject to a machine built of (per A.C.Clarke) pure magic.

As a software dev. I really would feel much safer with pure magic. I will buy your self driving car the moment Linux went a year without new significant bugs or exploits. Not even bug free, just no significant bugs. I do not trust the industry in its current state to produce a complex piece of software that can reliably control a car in an even more complex and constantly changing environment.

Most people find "swipe and pay later" far more convenient, "pizza shop already knows where to deliver" & "oh it's Joe, I'd better answer" far more convenient, etc. Yes they're imperfect, but the flaws aren't "all the time" - they're lost amid the overwhelming convenience.

Opposite your "complex piece of software that can reliably control a car" is "humans who damage/injure/maim/kill other drivers with alarming frequency" (but the aforementioned overwhelming convenience mitigates our concern). Sure we want "no significant bugs", but rapidly reaching the point where even the existing & concerning bugs are better than facing distracted/drunk/debilitated/dumb human drivers.

As I said most places accept other options of payment and the pay later part seems completely irrelevant unless you have money management issues.

> "oh it's Joe, I'd better answer"

Usually it fails for people I know. Which makes it anoying since I usually can call back my mother later as she tends to call every few days, but have to answer when its my landlord who only calls when I missed something important.

> but rapidly reaching the point where even the existing & concerning bugs are better than facing distracted/drunk/debilitated/dumb human drivers.

Amount of drunk drivers I face daily on average: 0.0001. Amount of self driving cars is see daily if we adopt them completely: ~500.

I would still take my risk with running into that one drunk driver over several thousand buggy cars daily.

There's a big difference between seeing and interpreting. The car sees literally everything and can maybe identify most things, but a pedestrian window shopping across the street isn't really that interesting and neither is a bollard. As humans, we filter out the unimportant stuff to focus on the important stuff. We can also pickup on subtle clues in posture, through eye contact and even through the driving style of another person. The car will see all this, even in people across the street, but it won't be able to interpret it.

Humans are still way ahead of anything close to autonomy in most situations and it will take years for anyone to get close to covering 95% of situations. Removing the steering wheel needs way more than 95% covered.

I think this is what a lot of people take for granted. Driving anywhere where there is another vehicle immediately becomes a social activity. There is a tacit agreement to work within the framework of the enforced driving laws, but beyond that there is a social agreement as to who is doing that. Even which driving laws we follow when and were is fluid, but relatively cohesive among drivers.

It's why pedestrians try to make eye contact with drivers. It's why drivers make eye contact when there is even an iota of ambiguity on who has the right of way. It's why almost no one drives at the posted speed on a high way and we usually go as fast as the fastest lead driver. It's why we gesture, flash our lights, honk, and sometimes curse. We've built vehicles to communicate as much as possible, but that is still not even an ounce of what we can communicate with our eyes.

And sure, when vehicles communicate with each other, that will be even better. In the meantime you've got different actors using incompatible protocols.

I do this so I know they've seen me, otherwise I've almost been run over. If cars would stop because generic object was in the way, that special social cue wouldn't be needed.

As one example, let’s say you have a right turn a few hundred yards ahead of you. There are no cars behind or beside you, but there is a long row of parallel parked cars next to the right lane.

An average human driver, anticipating the danger of a car door opening, will stay in the left lane until the last minute, or at least slow down considerably. A current self-driving car will likely stay in the right lane and proceed at the speed limit.

Right. So the marginal benefit of a self-driving car to people who feel that they already drive on autopilot most of the time is low. Especially when they weigh that benefit against the risk of putting their life into the hands of a 4000lb machine controlled by what? A computational system programmed by the same group of people (in the general public's mind) that brought them clippy, the Hawaii nuclear missile scare, algorithmic flash crashes, bloated ad-filled websites, telephone bots, 8 remote controls per living room, and Flappy Bird.

What in the world? No it is not.

Yes, that's what's stopping local governments building more mass transit, it's all those regulations imposed by the pesky local government!

EDIT: Rate-limited, so read response to request to elaborate below

San Francisco has multiple entities involved in the process of policy relating to transit. So, while the SF MTA and Jeffrey Tumlin may want more rail (perhaps underground), more buses, and fewer car thoroughfares there are also supervisors in charge of local districts who may oppose construction on grounds that they will hurt constituents.

As an example, supervisors David Campos and Hillary Ronen at different times opposed the bus-lanes along Mission St. on various grounds including (paraphrasing) "speeding up transit does not improve things for the local community", "the transit lanes lead to gentrification", "local merchants will see decreased foot traffic".

That's just an example and the details are too numerous to list here but consider also that the SFFD opposes Vision Zero.

(Truly) self-driving cars are, inversely, completely outside the control of the "driver". Anyone who has considered it even briefly has realized that governments will inevitably mandate lockout systems preventing people from using their own car if they are a wanted felon/drunk/a dissident. Such restrictions are completely impractical on traditional vehicles.

The vehicle misclassified Elaine Herzberg so many times in the seconds leading up to taking her out at 40 mph - its clear to me that none of this is ready for public use.

We are so normalised to vehicular violence. This would never be allowed in any other sector, say healthcare for instance.

[0] https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Pages/2019-HWY18MH010-BMG.a...

There's no evidence a human driver wouldn't have killed Elaine. An intoxicated one probably would have and we have direct evidence that a distracted one would have. On average two bicyclists get killed every day in the US. [2]

[1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...

[2] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/bicyc...

[1] https://dms.ntsb.gov/pubdms/search/document.cfm?docID=477717...

At every change of identification of an object it becomes "static" again. That seems very stupid if you've already estimated the path of an object.

The human driver didn't do too badly I think. The auditory alert only came at -0.2s until impact, and they braked at 0.7s after impact.

From relaxing and playing with your phone to braking in only 0.9 seconds.

Of course they were supposed to be paying attention, but I fully understand how it would be difficult to pay attention for hours without having to do anything, then suddenly be expected to react immediately. That's the most dangerous thing about these half-driving cars.

The main argument for self driving cars is that they have better sensors and reaction time than humans, but clearly those things aren't enough.

That should trickle down during time, but the fact that a self driving car is still a car won't. We need better and efficient trasport and self driving cars won't chage that very much.

In contrast, self-driving cars scale quite well especially to rural areas. They are point-to-point and on-demand. Low cost to operate compared to traditional public transit means that even rural cities could have a self-driving car based public transit option.

I think few are “opposed” to self driving cars, but I’m not optimistic about when we’ll see the tech being widespread (level 5 self driving), and I think the ethical can of worms might delay it even further.

I’m optimistic about cars that drive very safely for 95% of the way on 95% of all trips, with equipment that isn’t very expensive

> if you look at this video and compare the amount of stuff the camera catches AND processes, with the things you are seeing & processing, it's really hard for me to see me being better at it than a computer.

Such a handwavy argument is worth exactly squat. What does this mean? Brains are hugely complicated machines which we barely understand in any reasonable detail. You see a handful of lines and text across the screen and it's sufficient to make you go ":o"? Enough to conclude it must be better than a brain?

So far I only see a world of promises and predictions of "self-driving cars are 5 years away", but no real tangible hard evidence that self-driving cars are better than humans. Point me to that, not to a fancy video, before we can have a discussion.

I think he's referring to selective attention. Can't comment on the validity of this "study", but I recall it catching me off guard the first time I saw it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

Southern California and the weather it experiences is a poor representation of what is required for self-driving to replace humans.

It seems as long as these machines are safer on average than humans, they're worth deploying.

Sure they can. During snow squalls, accident rates obviously go up (especially if the roads are icy or if it's the first one of the season), but most drivers are good at assesing risk and take appropriate actions.

Importantly, they have the ability to decide that it's worth the risk to go out on the roads to pick up Sally from daycare (for example). In any case, if the car computer decides it won't drive, do you really think people aren't going to drive the car manually so that Sally can come home for the night? Of course they will. And they'll be fine.

Have you ever been on the freeway during white-out conditions before the ploughs have gotten a chance to come by? People slow down, turn on their hazards if necessary, and if the road markings aren't visible, naturally form two lanes instead of three (straddling the lanes). In snowy climates, a simple snow squall is something to talk about, but not stop you.

People are awful in these conditions and exercise incredibly poor risk decisions.

Sure, a bit of rain doesn't help the safety stats, but you can't just put the whole city on hold when there's a downpour or some fog.

I lived in snowy climates for a decade. Your summary completely disagrees with what I experienced. In whiteout conditions there were always cars that had gone off the road. Even after years of driving in the snow, people get into accidents far more often than in dry conditions.

And don’t forget: most of the US population has little to no experience driving in winter conditions. If the Bay Area got an inch of snow, there would be more collisions than a demolition derby.

Businesses don't shut down just because the forecast says it might snow. Plows can't get out fast enough to clear the road to a point the lines would be readable/visible for a self-driving car. Humans may not be perfect but we find a way to get home in the snow without the massive casualties you're implying should be happening.

Seattle and Portland shut down because they rarely get snow. You might as well have listed Atlanta.

An example from my own backyard. My car is equipped only with ACC and lane assist. I already had a couple of situations where in severe rain the sensors are no longer able to „see”. The car throws a fit and I have to take over immediately. These things are not fit for purpose. They are not able to judge „a big surface covered with water, risk of aquaplaning” or „surface covered with snow, temp dropping, possibility of black ice” or even simple mud / sand.

Maybe if one lives in Nevada, Arizona, California, where it’s always sunny, rains once in ten years, one can get swayed into believing that these things work. However, rsin, dnow, black ice or a mix of those and it becomes very quickly obvious it does not.

These cars, today, they are just dumb machnines without judgement. Never I am going to sit in an autonomous car outside of a controlled environment like an airport / strict city centre. Outside of the city, no way.

Frankly, I'd trust a computer over the average human any day, given the horrible judgement I've seen most people exercise on the roads.

Only when they find themselves right on that surface. They’re not able to predict this before the situation occurs.

The machines are better drivers, in that they admit defeat and stop.

The real issue is decision pathways which you can’t depict in a video, and are the real issue with self driving. The sheer solution space is so massive that even simulating with current DL techniques isn’t feasible with current hardware.

Having freedom and control over a physical system that is bigger and more powerful than you, is a liberating experience for those whose spirit is used to a smaller, lighter frame.

Car manufacturers know this - they cater their interior design to appeal to this factor - and it is indeed a cultural phenomenon well and truly imprinted on Western society.

"Freedom means, freedom to drive yourself anywhere you want."

This 'liberation' has become a chain. Real human beings spend hours in these containers, driving themselves somewhere, feeling powerful.. driving to their work or home, or whatever.

2 to 4 hours a day, on the mobile throne.

When computers start to take that freedom, its going to tweak quite a few freak-outs. And really, why shouldn't it?

Ultimately, automotive industries are hedging their bets that cars will no longer be personal possessions, but rather something you summon on an as-needed basis.

This would be a highly desirable condition for the rent-makers/lease-share holders, who are really pushing this forward - along with their buddies in the insurance mega-industries, who stand to gain a great deal more control over their customers lives when it comes to computerised automation.

Myself, I'd personally prefer cars were user-serviceable and user-operable, under no conditions do I need a computer, just make me a better car. Preferably electric, simple as possible, and ships with a manual.

I wonder if the fear has more to do with it simply being different. The set of things that a CV system misses is likely quite different from the set of things that a human misses. A CV system is likely to make mistakes that a human would never make, and even if those mistakes are far fewer in number, they make it look bad to humans.

We've all seen electronic devices do this. When an Amazon Echo interprets the sound of a tea kettle as its wake word, we're left with no explanation, and no way to rationalize it other than to assume the device is, in some way, bad at its job. Surely a human would never make this mistake, we think, and so therefore the device must be dumber than a human at word detection. And yet, there surely exists a class of noises that a human would mistake for a word that an Echo would not - but that doesn't factor in.

Anyway, this means that a CV-controlled car would behave, compared to a human, strangely. When one's intuition about the car's behavior, tuned from years of experience both driving and observing cars, differs from the car's actual behavior, it becomes harder to make predictions about how the car will behave, and from here comes a fear and a sense of uneasiness. And when it makes a rare mistake that a human would never make, because it's perceptual system is entirely different, we assume its dumber than a human all-together.

This fits the bill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voice_phenomenon

By normal standards, it's insane to expect non-experts to maintain and operate heavy machinery, in public streets, half asleep or half paying attention.

It's also a pretty absurd way of providing mass transport in most places.

So if you're going to throw out normal risk assessment as a starting point, where do you go from there? People know how bad quality software can be, how ubiquitous bugs are, and how often programs are deep morasses of strange and perverse hacks, and how it only doesn't (normally) kill people because the stakes are small. Then Uber's car actually did kill someone, and predictably, the familiar problem of bad, buggy software looms larger, as a risk, than the dull and more or less commonly accepted fact of cars hitting people all the time.

Very common threats, like pneunomia, poverty, or cancer, tend to get depreciated in comparison to symbolic, unusal threats - and I think it's pretty unsurprising that on HN, people feel threatened by the possibility of bugs not only ruining their day, but actually running them over.

For example, if it were the case that safe driving cars were on average 10% safer in most situations.

Wouldn't there be pressure to reduce deaths and injuries by banning manually operated cars.

What do you think about self-driving cars being a source of data for private and govertment organizations on where you are at any time, or your travel patterns?

Do you think there would be a time when people who displeased the government could be essentially stranded because they can't get access to the self-driving network?

I never expected the level of survailance and scanning happening in UK/China, etc.

Are self-driving cars (possibly with biometric face and fingerprint scanners), another possible entry point into survailance?

I've been wondering about the privacy / control aspects. What do you think?

I realized that no AI has any understanding of these things. Sure it knows not to pull out from other methods. But I knew it wasn't even safe to look.

Note - our roads are a bit tighter than most. You have to pull car lengths beyond the stop signs to know if it is safe to proceed.

Once you observe how these things behave in severe weather, you get a little bit more perspective on why it simply can’t work. Not with today’s infrastructure, not with today’s technology, definitely not in mixed human / autonomous driver traffic.

Consider it in terms of human agency: People expect the use of "consumer electronics" and "appliances" to be mostly unpleasant, frustrating, buggy, full of arbitrary restrictions, and overmonetized.

Also, it seems like the amount of drivers on their phones, texting and driving or what have you, is at an all time high today. I work in an urban area and the amount of times I've missed a light because someone is on their phone stopped in the lane with a green has begun to give me legitimate road rage that I have never experienced in my life until now in my late 30's. I would trust the car more than the average person at this point.

It’s ok if the human can technically do better, so long as the machine is more likely to avoid severe failure

I don't buy into the hype, and I certainly don't buy what Tesla is promising.