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> Yes these quarterly numbers are in the best conditions and supervised, no that doesn't invalidate them...

That is exactly what it does: it invalidates them. Comparing apples to oranges is an invalid comparison.

Let's compare the numbers again when there's sufficient data for self-driving tech driving in all environmental conditions without supervision and without human assistance jumping in whenever it gets rough. At that point, a comparison is valid. Until then you're comparing someone who aces tests with someone who is just doing good, but the first guy is only solving first-graders' multiple-choice tests and cheats by asking a friend who graduated at a university whenever a question pops up that isn't "choose one of these three", while the second guy is on his own in the middle of his college education.

Are computers better than the best human drivers in all circumstances? No, maybe they never will be, but that doesn't matter.

Are they better than average humans in average conditions already? Yes.

They don't need to be all powerful AGI which can replace humans in all circumstances to be useful and save lives.

What doesn't matter is who wins in average conditions. Because averages are just that: averages. But actual driving is full of non-average situations, whether they are created by weather, other human participants in traffic, animals, whatever...there's millions of surprising non-standard situations happening each day in traffic, and current technology isn't even able to reliably detect when it's facing such a situation, much less capable of handling them entirely on its own.

Right. And that's why it's not rolled out everywhere yet. But it's clearly getting closer and closer. It's probably less than 20 years away.

And yet autopilot is doing millions of miles a year with fewer incidents than humans, and expanding in capability (for example taking lane changes and turns), all while constantly lowering the level of accidents.

I think average conditions do matter, and supervised computers will continue to take over driving until humans are simply not required. Of course they will not replace humans this year or next, but at some point humans will be passengers, not drivers.

As someone who works in insurance, I can tell you that the vast majority of accidents occur in adverse conditions.

Creating an AI that only functions on dry sunny days is basically useless from a safety perspective.

...though it does save people time since they can be doing something else while in transit!

The stats aren’t good enough to be sure yet. They’re encouraging, and if you’d asked me in 2010 I absolutely would not have guessed that a few billion miles of experience wasn’t enough to know for sure, but turns out we need more data.

It's not apples to oranges. If a human interferes then a human is now driving. That human has a worse record of non accidents than the computer. Ergo, that human is making the driving record worse not better.

You know that it's not the job of the human driver in experimental self-driving vehicles to just take control every once in a while, when he feels he'd like to drive a little?

A human interferes in precisely those situations in which the machine either decided to surrender or - worse - started doing something stupid and the human caught it quickly enough to prevent an accident. It is safe to assume that the human has a much better safety record in such situations.

And who does the human surrender to when he fails at driving? Should we also not count human accidents that could have been prevented if there was a world-class race driver ready to take over when the actual driver makes the failure?

It doesn't invalidate the numbers if they were in ideal conditions, but it certainly means you cannot compare them to regular human drivers. That 500k number is the average from all kinds of different driving conditions. You would have to find a set of data where the humans also only drove in ideal conditions and see if the rate is any worse. I agree with the original poster and that there's not enough evidence to say that machines will be better than humans with the current technology being used.

I think you meant "rate"...

Ugh, speech to text. Thanks for finding that in time.

No problem!

You are right and wrong and the same time.

By quoting an average, assuming those numbers hold when scaled up, you are compressing the actual distribution into a single number. Overall that high-level number may be correct.

But at the same time, the kinds of people that get into accidents will be a different distribution.

How you drive factors a lot into how likely you are into getting in an accident, even allowing for the other drivers.

If the distribution becomes essentially random then you might actually have a higher chance of getting into an accident than before, if you were a very careful driver.

(Obviously those that benefit the most are the bad drivers since they'll no longer be bad)

Just remember that whenever you summarize a distribution into a single number like an average, you loose a lot of information in the process.

Sure, there are various inadequacies in the data, Tesla is clearly not an unbiased source (though there has been some verification from gov agencies), but I think the rapidly decreasing accident rate is significant (even when compared to the same car without those features), and we'll see numbers continue to improve over time.

Most people are simply not careful drivers all the time. This is one major advantage computers have - they don't get tired or distracted.

Time will tell as we get more data about supervised driving, but I think it's inaccurate to say we don't have data yet, it is imperfect of course, but it does point to computers being safer than humans in some very common conditions over millions of miles.

Would you accept a higher risk of accident for you and your children, if it meant that an order of magnitude more other bad drivers would be saved?

Also keep in mind the outrage factor. The reason airplane crashes are so feared is because of the loss of control. Meanwhile alcohol and cars are much more dangerous but much lower outrage because you still feel like you have some control.

Everyone thinks they are better than average.