Self-driving cars are nearly there, except for all the hard stuff | Hacker News Reader

Self-driving cars are nearly there, except for all the hard stuff

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1 pointwilliamsmj7 comments

> Can you imagine a human saying “I can mostly drive just you know not when there are people around, left turns, or any place other than my home area?”

This is a false anthropomorphization. Yes, it would be weird if a human were in this place, but computers are not humans. They can do things we could never do, and things that are straightforward for us like reading a text CAPTCHA, are borderline impossible sometimes. Still, my phone is way better at remembering the story of my life than I am.

I'm not sure what you mean by "false anthropomorphization".

If you mean "it's not reasonable to hold all drivers, whether humans or AI, to the standards required to pass a driving test (left turns, sharing the road with bicycles and construction workers, rain)", then ... uh, I dunno what to tell you.

It’s kind of like comparing a dog to a baby, saying, “wow, a dog is much more sophisticated than a human, it has fear of heights, can accurately catch a ball, and has a lot more mobility.” These are all true, but that’s not the whole story. The human baby has far more capability, it’s just untapped at the moment. The dog, it’s basically peaked already.

I don't understand any of that is a gotcha or in any way relevant. The entity driving a 3000 lb vehicle on a road shared with bags of blood and bones should be held to the same standards, whether it's a human or AI. Right now, AI drivers do not reach these standards, by their creators own admission. "I'm getting better!" or "I can do other stuff really well" is not a compelling argument that you should be given a drivers license.

> held to the same standards

And they will be: accidents per mile. Or some variation on that that takes into account severity of the accident. We already revoke driver licenses if there are too many incidents.

Having a car give up 30% of the time when it encounters an edge case, but driving better than 99% of the other humans the other 70% of the time, is still better driving than a single human... the same way a human speaking and reading books at age 7 is still more advanced than the most experienced, cutting-edge dog.

A driving test is not based on accidents per mile. If you, by your own admission, cannot handle rain, left turns and construction work, you should not be on the road.

Your first sentence is correct, a driving test is a no-op, at least where I got mine in Florida, and then grandfathered into California where they didn't even do a driving test, just a written one. Licenses are revoked if you get in enough accidents within a certain time period, so it's effectively the same.

I can handle quite a lot, but I don't handle a lot of things that a self-driving car can like 360 degree vision at all times or lossless memory of millions of past trips. Nor can any other human.

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