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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

They say "at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver". This is a low bar to meet - some human drivers are really bad. I know I would much rather trust my life to one of the Google self-driving cars than some of the people I got in a car with in college, for example.

It's also the wrong bar to meet, because lawmakers are going to be much tougher on AIs than on human constituents. It's not enough to be better than a human, you have to be so much better than a human that it'd be irresponsible not to mandate self-driving cars.

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Human drivers die at a rate of about 1 per 100 million miles driven. Waymo cars have only driven about 2 million miles, as I recall. Therefore, as it stands today, there is nowhere near enough public evidence to confidently believe that Waymo cars are less deadly than human drivers. Especially considering that much of that driving has taken place in meticulously mapped areas with good roads in daylight hours.

Personally, I would trust a human driver over a Waymo car until strong statistical evidence shows that Waymo cars are safe in a wide range of conditions.

I also don't think the bar should be "safer than a human driver", but "safer than than an experiended, sober, well-rested, defensive driver who doesn't use this phone while driving".

I think you're going to have problems finding enough people for that scientific study.

Why should the bar be any higher than the median actual human driver?

Adding vehicles operating at a higher skill level than the median to the pool of vehicles driving around should reduce incidents per mile driven.

And then if autonomous vehicles become prevalent, it becomes less punitive to raise the standards for licensing humans.

> Why should the bar be any higher than the median actual human driver?

Marketing. The western world is mostly afraid of robots so they'll need to be at least 10x safer in a hybrid (human/autopilot) environment in order to gain adoption.

The bar to meet will be precisely "as good as Waymo", because if Tesla's technology kills substantially more people, neither regulators nor consumers will allow it to exist.

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