Also there's a lack of compelling evidence that self-driving cars have a lot fewer accidents than people do, and this argument is always worded in a deceptive way to kind of quickly shoehorn that assumption in and hope nobody notices. Even measuring this metric reliably is hard, and it's not helped at all by the fact that most of these cars in the real world rely on a human operator as a backup. How do we separate their responsibility? And where's the robust, independent review?

Any system that requires a human operator to passively observe a boring process for hours at a time, yet snap to attention immediately and without warning to take control and prevent human deaths is simply insane. That's the diametric opposite of how a safe system should be designed. If the human is required for safe operation, they should just be driving at all times to maintain vigilance. I don't see people talk about that much. The assumption seems to be that AI will quickly get better and the human back-up will not be needed--that the human is kind of a temporary workaround. Well I've seen plenty of engineering projects where the temporary fix becomes a long-term pain in the ass because the difficulty of the real solution was massively underestimated and under-budgeted. We might get stuck with these terribly designed AI-human hybrid systems for many decades as AI keeps getting pushed into the horizon and we slowly realize that this is one of those hard problems that doesn't progress the same as most other tech does.

There are pure driverless systems out there, but they don't cope well with many of the incongruities and fringe situations which are an unfortunate reality on the open road in most of our country. I think they will be confined to niche uses for a long, long time.