Is it? I'm not so sure about that. I'm pretty sure you can't be sure of that too. Given how machine learning continues to surprise us, I think this is one of those questions that will only be clear in hindsight.
But we can’t let self-driving cars injure or kill even 25% as often as human drivers do, so we refuse to use them to their maximum capability.
Keep in mind this thread’s premise is us developing an intelligence that can navigate space and maintain all requirements of that for millennia. Not driving a couple miles on a clear stretch of highway.
My non-blind and somewhat functional 90-year old uncle can sit in a car and drive it quite legally at the moment.
I'm pretty sure self-driving cars are less dangerous on the roads than he is, but we're not willing to test that assumption.
Your standard for "maybe" exceeds the abilities of many humans.
AFAICT, the statistics for fatal accidents do exist, and suggest that car AI may be marginally better than average humans — the caveats to that include at the very least (1) it's within the margin of error; (2) that includes drunks, dangerously tired, teenagers, and people like my mother and grandmother when their Alzheimer's was in the early stages; and (3) I don't trust the impartiality of the source.
But the stats do exist.
Also, many self-driving cars are not so much unsafe as occasionally bad at the basics of driving in certain scenarios - such as massively over/under-steering in intersections, leading to the need to maneuver in traffic (I've especially seen this in Tesla FSD videos).
Also,
> Your standard for "maybe" exceeds the abilities of many humans.
I'm very curious what human driver is simply unable to do that task. In fact, the vast majority of human drivers could do this task, but 0 current self-driving cars could even attempt it.
I've heard a lot of conflicting reports about this with regard to Tesla's AI, but regardless your point is sound, my list is not exhaustive.
> not so much unsafe as occasionally bad at the basics of driving in certain scenarios
Indeed. It's one of the counterintuitive things about machine intelligence in general, that it can be wildly superhuman in domains that humans consider challenging while also being utterly pathetic in domains we consider trivial.
> I'm very curious what human driver is simply unable to do that task. In fact, the vast majority of human drivers could do this task, but 0 current self-driving cars could even attempt it.
A quick google suggested that the roads in the alps are often closed in the winter by the police because of the snow, so hopefully in such conditions the answer is "100% of humans cannot do this" :)
People are too quick to forget how many "unassailable" towers have already been toppled. They see how kind of obvious each problem looks in hindsight, "oh it was just this one trick", not realizing the irony that yes, one or two tricks, and we may be only one more trick from being in serious trouble.
No they don't. They managed to get impressive results, but it's still far from coherent because the algorithms still lack the ability to think
Given that these papers have actually been published, the papers they produce are at least as coherent as the state of the art in the field.
> but it's still far from coherent because the algorithms still lack the ability to think
Nobody knows what "thinking" is, as a functional process. For all you know, human thinking may itself just be the same sort of pattern matching as used in machine learning, just with a few more parameters. In which case these algorithms actually are thinking, just with more limited intelligence than us.