I think the core problem there is liability. I'm as good or as bad of a driver as I can be, but no matter what I'm responsible for the driving. If I get into one accident a year that's one accident a year.

A self-driving car might be 5x better than me at driving but logically I can't be liable for what it does. The company making it has to be. 5x better would be 0.2 accidents a year. But multiply by that the 100,000 cars the manufacturer has sold... they don't want that liability. That's why Telsa's autopilot is still supervised, because they want its mistakes to be your problem.

It presents a lot of thorny problems. If I am a persistently dangerous driver I can have my license taken away and be taken off the road. But if a self driving car is judged to be too dangerous for the road you'll suddenly have thousands of people who lose access to their car (assuming a future with self-driving only cars) through no fault of their own. What's their path to getting back on the road?

Your liability is covered by your insurance company. And it costs you on the order of $1000 a year for that privilege.

If the self-driving car company takes on that liability it'll save you the $1000/year. So assume they're either going to charge you an extra $10K up front or an extra $1000/year. For that kind of cash they should be quite willing to take on the risk or they can find an insurance company to do so, if their car is actually safer than an average driver.

This should work in most countries. Perhaps not the US with its pattern of massive punitive damage awards.

Right, but the companies still aren't going to if they don't have to. Otherwise Tesla would be doing it today.

OP said:

> self driving will be statistically significantly better than human drivers, but because it isn't perfect we won't allow it anyway.

My contention is that it's not that everyone is a luddite, it's that while companies are legally allowed to provide quasi-self driving they have no liability for they will do exactly that. And that is what will hold us back.

1. Tesla has been found liable in one case, there will be many more. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tesla-autopilot-crash-t...

2. There's $1000/year of potential revenue they're missing out on by not assuming liability. That's a pretty powerful incentive.

Didn't Mercedes-Benz begin assuming liability a couple years ago for accidents that happen while Level 3 self-driving is engaged?

I wonder if that's still the case, and if so how many accidents they've become liable for.

It can't just be better than the average human driver. it has to be some like 10x as good as the average human driver or on par with a race driver.

Everyone thinks they're above average, even people who know statistics! So if it's merely 20% better than the average driver a huge number of people will conclude "I am above average so I'll do a better job"

Will some of them be wrong? Of course. But tons of them will be right, too.

It can't be statistically significantly better, it has to be statistically overwhelmingly better. Not a part of a standard deviation but several of them.

Those stastics need to be figured out. You are on the right track - there are a few really bad drivers (and I'm not sure if race drivers are better on common roads - anyone have data?). We need to work through those issues. I didn't say average though I said better than humans and left the measurements open because I don't know all the issues to account for.

Correct The averages include teenage males, elderly, driving while texting, road ragers, people who drive late&tired and DUI enjoyers. Accident rates are extremely fat tailed.

If you aren’t in one of those categories you are immediately dramatically better than average. This is fairly easy to do before even considering being a “good driver” / defensive driver / etc.

So you want a better comparison for most people.

A better way to phrase it is it needs to be better than the average Uber driver. People have a less inflated sense of that standard.

At the moment it seems much more likely it will be significantly worse, statistically speaking, but because of massive lobbying it will be allowed anyway.

It is statistically safer for cars using LIDAR, like Waymo. Tesla’s system is sleeker, but involves far more human risk.

We don’t know that. All of the players, including Waymo give out only partial data that makes a sound analysis impossible.

Lidar has problems too. It works quite well if there is a limited number of cars that use it too. Of course if all of those were Waymos you could synchronize sensors to not interfere with each other.

Of course if that fails, perhaps they could use honking as backup sensor.

Lidar also destroys camera sensors. That might become a huge problem in the future.

Optical filters have been around for awhile, including anti-lasers for cameras, though only for a few years.

The difficulty isn't sensing, Lidar is overkill thanks to advancements in technology since the DARPA grand challenge.

This is a major flaw in decision making that some people have:

A new solution that has less problems is worse than an existing solution with more problems.

There's also a willingness to be less upset with humans making a mistake than a machine.

Edit:

Unknown problems may or may not exist so while I think that concern makes sense it doesn't matter until they come up.

I'm making the decision based on the current state. If additional issues come about then you reevaluate if the new solution is better or worse than the existing.

If you consider unknown problems then how can you make a decision?

X+Y > Z?

Where X is the weight of problems for the new solution, Z is the weigh for the existing solution, and Y is a value between 0 and infinity (unknown problems)

> A new solution that has less problems is worse than an existing solution with more problems

Don't disagree, but new solutions can come with unknowns

It's not an issue of having more or having less problems. The issue is having unknown, unfamiliar problems.

> There's also a willingness to be less upset humans making a mistake than a machine.

There's willingness to be upset at anyone with deep pockets who can be found accountable. And the motivations for that aren't emotional, they are purely material.

There's a reason why people have spent decades trying to find pharmacological cause for autism, in spite of the enormous amount of evidence that the condition is mostly hereditary.

And a very good reason why vaccines in America are exempt from the legal system.

We don’t know that it has less problems.

The distribution of errors is as important as the error rate.

Simply being sober, awake, calm and not texting puts you far above the average driver and are things you can control.

A self diving car which, apparently 10+ years into development is currently running red lights randomly 1% of the time is not in your control.

>A self diving car which, apparently 10+ years into development is currently running red lights randomly 1% of the time is not in your control.

It can be controlled however.

>Simply being sober, awake, calm and not texting puts you far above the average driver and are things you can control.

It's not important if it's possible, what matters if it happens.

It's conditional probabilities.

I am not elderly, do not DUI, drive tired, or touch my phone while driving. I put myself in a different risk pool by my behavior.

I step into a Tesla FSD car, I am in the same risk pool as everyone else in one when it decides to run 1% of red lights or whatever other stupid bug in the next release.

The point of FSD is to take control of the car makes an error (like running a red light). I am a better driver with it on.

The unsupervised "robotaxi" uses a different NN. It doesn't behave the same way as FSD.