> 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.