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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

> It's also not good enough for them to be better than average human drivers

Of course it is, because it means there will be less deaths per million miles driven, which surely is the goal.

yes, eventually we want them to be better than the average driver, then better then the best, then (hypothetically) perfect. But the reality is the day they're better than the average, we'll be saving lives if we all switch over.

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If you are talking about making it mandatory for everyone to switch, so human drivers are banned from the roads, I doubt you will be able to sell mere equality of performance by autonomous systems to the voting public. You can make as many greater good statistical arguments as you like, but you are still saying you are going to make many individual drivers and their passengers less safe.

This kind of equivalence is also ignoring the possibility of a catastrophic system failure that simply can't happen with human drivers.

I don't think any jurisdiction will ban human-driven cars in our lifetime, though I think it's likely they'll outlaw the sales of human-driven vehicles at some point, which means then it's just a matter time until there are no more human driven vehicles on the road. I have no idea if that point is 30 or 80 years away, but I think it will happen.

Exactly like what is happening with ICE vs. EV right now. Come 2030 there are plenty of places in the world you won't be able to buy a new ICE vehicle.. so a few decades after that there will be close to zero ICE on the road. Five or ten decades later there will be for all intents and purposes zero.

The irony of that comparison is that keeping some ICE vehicles on the road as EVs incrementally take over is actually helpful for the EVs since it limits the demand for related charging infrastructure that will take time to build. However, keeping some human-driven vehicles on the road as autonomous vehicles incrementally take over is very unhelpful for the AVs since humans introduce unpredictability and unexpected, unpredictable situations are the arch enemy of autonomous control systems.

no, it would only mean less deaths per million miles driven if those worse than self driving cars switch to it. If the best drivers switch to self driving cars, there will be more deaths per million miles. Duh

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