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Comment by shkkmo | Hacker News Reader

> Robo-Perfection or Robot Lewis Hamilton is the bar for a sober person (especially guys) to let go of the wheel.

It obviously isn't as there are many people who have jumped through many hoops to get access to self-driving software that is much worse than Lewis Hamilton (i.e. Tesla FSD beta). Clearly different people have different standards for what they consider safe enough to let it drive for them.

It seems like you are redefining "perfection" to be whatever your personal bar is for adopting a self driving car (which would make your argument a tautology if you weren't also overgeneralizing your personal bar to everyone.)

I would also point out that the bar for personal adoption is not necessarily the one that we should use to determine which self-driving solutions are allowed to operate at what level on public roads. While this is a complicated topic, I don't think "Lewis Hamilton" is the only reasonable place to set those bars.

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I am not talking about these people using FSD on and off like it happens now with Tesla. AS it stands that would be a failure, it's just a glorified cruise control

I am talking about fully giving control to the car and preventing humans from interacting, after clear statistical evidence of autopilot being better than the avg. driver. Given that by definition the majority of drivers are avg. then society would be better off summoning Skynet and putting it at the wheel. It's a clear cut reasoning that works in theory.

Better than avg. doesn't mean that accidents won't happen though. Accidents will still happen and as soon as they start to happen the whole thing will be reversed. That's because people don't consider themselves the "avg. driver" and would rather bet on themselves being better than the avg. driver than the computer being better than that .

Even 95 yr old people consider themselves the local Lewis Hamilton.

You raised the example of FSD purchases, I cite you the counterexample of vaccines. Vaccines are much much much better than the immune system against COVID, if it were to be close you'd have much less adoption because skepticism is not linear.

When in doubt , people bet on themselves or the status quo. In this case the status quo is literally betting on themselves so you have a double effect there too

You are shifting your own goalposts here. You were specifically arguing that perfection is the only bar. You have now redefined "perfection" as meaning "above average", but even with that redefinition, your argument as stated still doesn't match reality.

People are already letting cars drive for them. They are doing it even when they are not allowed to take over for the car (i.e. Waymo in AZ). Clearly some people have lower bars so your claim that the above average safety is required for anyone to give up control of the vehicle they are riding in to a computer is false.

Reading between the lines of what you are saying, is seems that what you are actually trying to argue is more along the lines of "achieving (significantly?) above-average safety for self-driving systems is crucial to achieving mass adoption of self-driving technology." That's a much hard to disprove statement (and one I suspect it is at least partly true given varying levels of "cruciality").

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