Yeah we agree?
The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad.
Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.
Of course the US has dug itself in a hole where many places require being able to drive to get around, putting unsafe drivers in a bit of a bind...
Stopping dead on a road with nobody in front of you because your AI detected a hazard might be objectively safe and conservative driving, but it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems.
Sure, but less problems than if it just kept on going and hit something. While rare regular cars have unpredictable things happen and many of them are a lot worse than a car coming to a controlled stop on the road. As a driver you need to be able to handle that. When there is a catastrophic failure of the vehicle the other vehicles need to safely react.
Big is different, and scaling this kind of thing to majority of vehicles on the road can cause all sorts of interesting problems.
I’m not saying it’s inevitable; sure, we can and most likely will improve things on the long road to majority AV. This simply occurred to me and I hadn’t seen it articulated before so thought I’d share.
That said, I don't know if the average human drives acceptably, and I'm very skeptical of a "99%" estimate, but I will say that I would prefer a fleet that consistently drove at the 40%ile of human quality vs. the current human fleet that follows the normal distribution.
If self-driving cars reach 40%ile quality, and enable us to stop the 20% worst drivers from driving (or average drivers when operating at 20%ile due to being drunk or tired), that'd be a huge win for safety.
Right now it's socially unacceptable to increase the difficulty of getting your license, or to take it away for poor performance, because cars are a necessity or near-necessity in most places. If we could provide self-driving vehicles as a fallback, perhaps we could make it easier to permanently lose your license than—checks local laws—repeatedly killing people by driving while intoxicated[0].
[0] https://www.idrivesafely.com/dmv/indiana/laws/dui-and-dwi-la...
But I also recognize that many people, having the suspended license, must now choose between never leaving home or driving with a suspended license.
I feel like better public transit, more than Self-driving cars (which will be expensive to actually own) is the answer here.
We need to lower the cost to an individual of losing driving privilege, so that we can lower the cost to society from bad drivers.
Autonomous vehicles don't get drunk or sleepy, don't speed, don't leave the scene of an accident...
I've observed all the things you did (in fact, all of them on Sunday). But I don't do any of them, and you probably wouldn't either if you ever used a car.
I'm comparing self-driving cars to an average Human, who truly does drive acceptably. Over 99% of people drive acceptably. The 2 dudes on I-5 without headlights at dusk are a problem, but there are Hundreds of vehicles in sight driving very safely.