> we’re pretty bad at driving

Are we? I know it is a fashionable thing to say, but I am personally fascinated by the relatively low number of accidents given how omnipresent cars are.

For germany it's ~5 dead / 100000 motorized vehicles, and ~4 dead / 100000 inhabitants. [1]

More anecdotal: Growing up I lived near a pretty busy street and never personally witnessed an accident there.

Makes me think that we are actually pretty good at driving, even on average.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

When measured by deaths per passenger mile, passenger vehicles are, by a large factor, the most deadly mode of transportation[1].

1: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...

7 deaths per billion passenger-miles. To put that into perspective, if walking had a death rate on par with passenger vehicles, a small village of 150 people going on a walking trip for 60 years, at 3 mph for 16 hours per day, should have seen one death in that time.

I don't think we really quite appreciate how incredibly safe the modern world is.

It's a bit of both. We're pretty bad at minimising basic errors driving (at least until you consider we as a species spent a billion or so years of evolution travelling <20mph and generally picked up handling a vehicle in a few hours in our late teens) but so strikingly good at handling the sort of edge cases where people are at particularly at risk of death I'm not sure collision avoidance AI will catch up despite all its speed advantages.

Germany has WAY more difficult driving licensing standards than the US.

My high school English teacher father used to ironically remark about how students who failed his class repeatedly (often for all four years) somehow always managed to pass the drivers license test. Funny that.

Your calculation also neglects the cost of auto accidents in terms of wasted life. There will be an accident on I-5 between San Diego and Los Angeles every single day--generally multiple. When that happens, an enormous number of people wind up sitting in their cars for an extended period of time. That accident may not have actively killed someone, but it caused many thousands of people to waste an hour+ of their life. If a thousand people waste an hour every day, that's one "dead" year of human life every 9 days. And that multiplies across the entire city and then across every city. The cost of automotive fender benders and the time they waste exceeds the "death toll" of driving by quite a lot.

Humans suck at driving. It's a boring, repetitive task with sudden moments of sheer terror. As long as everything goes "normally", it's okay. When something unusual happens when driving, most outcomes are random. The lack of deaths and injuries due to driving is more due to automotive, traffic and safety engineering than it is due to active crisis decision making by human drivers.

> Humans drive with our eyes and we’re pretty bad at driving.

I disagree that humans are bad at driving.

Let me ask you this, how many miles would a fully autonomous self-driving car need to drive without a fatality for you to be able to reasonably claim that it's statistically a better driver than a human?

And feel free just to round to an order of magnitude here. 2.75 x 10^z <-- what is `z` here?

In 2013 in the US there were 32,719 crash related fatalities and 2.3 million reported injuries. So that must mean humans are bad a driving right? Well those numbers are tiny compared to the 3 trillion miles that humans drove that year.

Humans have about 1.09 fatalities per 100 million miles driven. The probability of a human causing a fatality for a mile driven is low: 0.00000109%

To show to a 95% confidence interval that a self-driving car is better at driving than a human it would need to drive 275 million miles flawlessly. This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles driving continuously for almost 13 years.

Not all humans are the same either

Some people can flawlessly do stunts with their car after driving for a few years and have a perfect driving record

Others make you shake in fear every time you sit with them as you see them fail to notice other cars when they change lanes, despite driving for 10 years

It’s a bell curve and I think the median is better than current car driving AI, even with LIDAR, can achieve

But combo AI (or just safety features) with humans and I think it shifts the bell curve up a lot

I think part of the problem is the lax licensing standards in the US. For everyone's benefit, we should have higher standards. There also can and should be regional differences. Someone who has learned to drive in a rural or suburban area has not necessarily had the training and experience necessary to safely drive in a city alongside pedestrians and cyclists.

I think we’re not really willing to up the standards because you need to drive to survive in a lot of places.

You can’t change your genetics, you can’t necessarily change where you live, and you can’t just fix transit without rebuilding an entire city that took 100+ years to build so the standards are just what they have to be

Over the last many decades, we’ve starting requiring things like backup cameras because cars naturally break down and so it’s something we can actually change on a short timescale (but it does add a lot of cost)

Fixing transit is a long timescale thing

A lot of cities were rebuilt in the 1950s to accommodate cars and car oriented design, destroying neighborhoods in the process. Before that they had public transport and better walkability. The real solution is to undo that.

Yes but how would you give a downtown Boston experience driving test in North Dakota?

I still remember the time my mom almost drove into a tram tunnel! She wasn't used to the city.

It wouldn’t have to do that much driving flawlessly - many crashes occur without there being a fatality.

It would actually need to be driven significantly more, see this report: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html

To quote:

> Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries.

> Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles — an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing them on the roads for consumer use.

There are lots of leading indicators that a car (or human) is bad at driving, so you don’t actually have to wait for an accident to know if you are on the right path.

E.g. keeping track of near misses / interventions can get you data points much more quickly.