I am a human driver. I do not feel safe around other cars.
Therefore, companies that want to sell self-driving cars are pitching them as safer. The fact of the matter, though, is that it remains to be seen whether self-driving cars are in fact safer.
While a self-driving car will not suffer from some of the shortcomings of a human, like getting drunk or sleepy, it will suffer from other shortcomings that humans don't, like bugs and getting hacked.
Ultimately the one thing we can trust about fellow humans in cars is that they want to survive their trip too. This is true with very few exceptions. The scary thing about self-driving cars is that they don't care if they survive.
I realize that what I wrote above makes it look like I'm saying that no person wants a self-driving car at all. As you point out, that's not true.
What I was trying to say is that, for most people, safety is a bigger consideration than self-driving capability. If a company said "our car drives itself but you're more likely to die in it," I doubt they would sell many.
While we might not know yet whether self-driving cars are /already/ safer than human drivers, it is virtually impossible that they won't become much safer very quick. Simply because bugs in software can (and will) be fixed, each car gets an update, and the accident in question won't happen again, ever. Humans, on the other hand, cannot be updated easily, if at all.
Aside from being vulnerable to malicious actors, self-driving cars make "cold-hearted" mistakes that don't make sense; mistakes that humans would never make. Sure, the total number of mistakes they make will be lower than the equivalent number of accidents caused by humans. However, having human life lost to the type of mistakes self-driven cars make is, in my opinion, an unacceptable price to pay.
If I must loose my life to a car-related indecent, I want the it to be caused by a human, and not some quirk or edge-case in an algorithm or neural net.
Edit: The driver ended up impacting a semi trailer that had been in front of us, with me leaving the lane for the safety of the grassy interstate median.
I do not in any way mean for this to be offensive or disrespectful, but would you still welcome self-driving cars had this incident been caused by a malfunctioning self-driving car as apposed to a reckless driver?
My point is that self-driving cars lack the common sense that humans have. A human would immediately halt if they hear a child scream near their car, a car would continue moving along as if nothing is happening if it isn't designed or trained to detect screams.
Until machines gain sensory and cognitive capabilities that exceed ours, and a working comprehension of human values, I maintain my stance regarding this issue.
I don't know to what extent they use sound as an input (makes sense that they'd do, given horns). But for what I've seen, self-driving cars are much better than humans at detecting pedestrians in their vicinity, including cases in which a child can't actually be seen by a human driver and he happens not to be screaming.
Hell, machines tend to fail even if the setting varies slightly from what they are designed for; just see the numerous ways self-driven machines failed recently for examples.
Machines must gain sensory and cognitive capabilities that exceed ours and a working comprehension of human values for me to trust them.
Where are you getting this from? An obstacle in the LIDAR is an obstacle, there's no common-sense or training needed for the car to know that.
> the numerous ways self-driven machines failed recently
I can only think of the Tesla crash, Tesla cars being notorious for trying to work around the need of LIDAR or similar (being deemed too expensive). What are the other, numerous examples?
> If a machine finds itself in an unfamiliar or unknown settings (or if its sensors fail in a way not accounted for in the design), it will fail catastrophically. A human will not.
Fail catastrophically how? Worst-case scenario for a well-designed car in a situation it can't understand is to park itself and refuse to go on unassisted. There's no neeed for general AI to implement such a behavior.
>Worst-case scenario for a well-designed car in a situation it can't understand is to park itself and refuse to go on unassisted.
All these are false positives. What I object to are the costs of false negatives; A situation where the car mis-recognizes an abnormal situation as normal, and then proceeds to act on it's failed understanding.
The Tesla is a good example of this; the car failed to recognize the obstacle in front of it and acted accordingly (namely, crashing full speed into the object). Regardless of the underlying reason, a machine did not recognize it was in an unknown setting, and thus failed to react correctly. A human, on the other hand, notices, and will generally use what capabilities they possess to at least attempt to handle the situation safely.
I do acknowledge that self-driving cars will likely be statistically safer, but until these cars completely exceed the all the capabilities of human drivers, I refuse to trust them. Regardless of statistics.
A car without LIDAR, only relying on camera.
>A human, on the other hand, notices
The camera didn't even doubt that there wasn't an obstacle in its path due to how it camouflaged against the background. I doubt the human would've seen it.
And you're speaking of a prototype hacked on a car barely prepared for self-driving situations (again, no LIDAR and early iteration) and being used improperly.
You're not making a good argument here.
Absolutely yes. Because if a malfunctioning self-driving car will cause an accident, this will be treated as a bug and fixed. Updates will be rolled out to every self-driving car, making it very unlikely the same accident will ever happen again.
Issues with human drivers, on the other hand, cannot be easily fixed with an update. Human drivers repeat the same "malfunctions" again and again (like driving too fast, driving while being drunk, not paying enough attention to the situation, ...).
Apples and oranges.