Humans can and regularly do so pretty safely.

Ask Canadians, Swedes or any other people living in a location with long winters.

I was once driving on a road I could not see at all. It was at night, in a blizzard on the road from Denver to Vail. It didn't take long until I was following the two red lights of the bus in front of me. As a human, I knew I could drive safely where the bus had been driving seconds ago. A self-driving car would have... tell me.

Pulled over, like you should have done.

I've been exactly where you were, driving the Coq highway in British Columbia at night in a blizzard, following two red dots in front of me. I had (mandatory) snow tires on a rear wheel drive BMW. I also had my family in the car.

It was probably the single stupidest thing I've ever done driving a car.

You can’t pull over in that situation unless you want to get your car stuck, be stuck in the cold all night, and potentially rear ended.

Are you sure those two red lights can see and know where they are going?

> I was once driving on a road I could not see at all. It was at night, in a blizzard on the road from Denver to Vail. It didn't take long until I was following the two red lights of the bus in front of me.

Perhaps you should have pulled over at this point? Maybe that's what an autonomous car would do.

Pulling over in a snowstorm to the side of the highway can be pretty dangerous too. Once you're in that situation there aren't necessarily great alternatives.

Yeah, I think people who believe that pulling over is an easy solution may not have been in one of these situations. It can come up quickly and there may be no exit for miles. Pull over into what? The snow bank on the side of the road? Now you are a hazard for everyone else coming along behind you. Sometimes you just have to make it work as best you can until the circumstances change.

Why is any traffic moving in conditions this bad? Just stop.

Again, I assume you've never experienced this. Storms can come up fast in the mountains and be very localized. As I, and the previous poster mentioned, it can be more dangerous to stop sometimes.

If you can't see, then it's always safest to just stop rather than driving on, potentially off the edge of a cliff.

How about "Dont use the self driving mode during a snowstorm. Make the human drive".

That sounds like it solves the situation nicely.

That definitely works. It just means that if there is a possibility of a snowstorm or other circumstance that self-driving doesn't work, you now require a driver who can take over control. Which is fine. It just eliminates the robo-taxi use case of self-driving which is what a lot of people seem to care about.

I lived in Boston for 10 years. People drive on snow-covered roads just fine.

People in San Francisco struggle to drive in the rain let alone the snow.

Ha, we joke about that in Oregon, too, and it rains quite a lot here. And after a long, rainy winter, it gets a little nuts for a few days when the sun comes out again, because it seems like everyone has forgotten how to drive on sunny days.

Because "something better than humans can do" is the whole selling point of self-driving cars.

And plenty of us humans can and do drive reasonably-safely in snowy/icy conditions. It takes practice, like anything else driving-related, but it's something that most drivers north of the Mason-Dixon Line likely have quite a bit of practice with and have to handle a significant fraction of the year. It's not unreasonable to hold self-driving cars to the same standard.

> Because "something better than humans can do" is the whole selling point of self-driving cars.

I don't think so. 'As good as humans can do' would be useful.

Nope, "as good as a human" shouldn't be allowed on the road or on the market. Errors that are allowed for humans should never be allowed for a machine.

> Nope, "as good as a human" shouldn't be allowed on the road or on the market. Errors that are allowed for humans should never be allowed for a machine.

I don't understand why you'd have that opinion. If it's no riskier and relieves people from having to drive then that seems like a net benefit to me.

For the same reason why when a human pilot makes a mistake it's a mistake, but when an autopilot malfunctions every single plane of that type is grounded until the issue can be found and fixed. Machines cannot be just as good as humans, they have to close to perfect when human life is involved.

As another example, imagine if you had a radiotherapy machine, when operated manually it randomly kills 1/10000 patients, but when operated by AI it randomly kills 1/100000 patients. Yet I'm 100% certain even though it's a 10x improvement over a human operator it still wouldn't be allowed on the market.

> even though it's a 10x improvement over a human operator it still wouldn't be allowed on the market

Hmm I don't agree I think people would go for that.

Then look up Therac-25, because that's roughly what happened

> Therac-25

That wasn't AI - it was a concurrency error, wasn't it?

You shouldn't discard technology because sometimes it's wrong. It can be better overall.

Why would it matter if it was AI or not? 99.9% of the public won't care if an "AI" killed their mum in a car accident or if it was a badly written for loop somewhere. Literally irrelevant. If a computer makes an error people will want blood(as in - they will sue the company to absolute death, just because a human would make the same mistake or worse is irrelevant).

> Why would it matter if it was AI or not?

I think people's idea of what a computer should be doing has changed a lot since then, due to the common knowledge of AI applications.

Perhaps we're close to the situation where when a person makes a mistake they're asked 'why weren't you using the computer?' I've seen this happen myself.

Your original comment asserted that a machine _shouldn't_ be allowed on the market until its performance is significantly superhuman, but your responses in this thread just repeat the assertion. What's the actual rationale for claiming that we should leave a net benefit on the table (eg if human-level driving performance improves transit efficiency)?

Exactly.

If we're willing to settle for "as good as a human" in autonomous vehicles, then IMHO all this expertise, R&D, time, effort, money, etc. would be better spent on the public transit and/or active mobility solutions of the near-future.

Unfortunately public transit is considered an epithet where I live because it brings crime from the city into my "idyllic crime free" suburb just 10 miles away from city center (no joke). I hate driving and have put my eggs into a self-driving (hopefully super low emissions) taxi service to come online.