Based on what? Humans run in to cyclists too and although I have know idea about Waymo's tech, in a research setting computers are better than humans at figuring out what objects are based on visual data.
>I don’t need to wait for the kid to be in the street to start reacting and prepare for different possibilities.
Neither does a computer.
A human doesn't get random bugs every week from OTA updates. The human mind is not a viable target for hackers. The risks of human drivers are individual. The risks of computer drivers are systemic and massive. One bad bug or hack could kill millions if self driving cars become ubiquitous.
What bugs are you referencing exactly? Humans have something called emotions that are far more variable than bugs in a safety critical system and you're exposed to thousands of different flavors every time you get on the road.
>The human mind is not a viable target for hackers.
But it is, and not even sophisticated ones at that. One lane change and a middle finger from a fellow driver can induce a murderous road rage.
>The risks of computer drivers are systemic and massive.
Hypothesis. Reality: 45,000 people die every year in the US from human drivers. That is systemic and massive.
Your "just hypothesis" dismissal would carry a lot more weight if silicon valley hadn't been cranking out bug filled garbage for the last 20 years in their move fast and break things frenzy. Kyle Vogt was (in)famous for vaunting that culture at cruise so there's no argument AVs have somehow escaped the silicon valley rot. The tech industry need to stay far, far away from anything safety related
Every year, human drivers kill around 1.2 million people every single year (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...).
I don't understand what you are trying to say, but I don't think it aligns with the evidence you're providing.
>The captchas are just solved problems being used to slow down bots and spammers these days.
If bot are solving these problems faster and more accurately than humans, it’s not really slowing down the bots and spammers anymore. That is also a solved problem.
Without knowing the whole system there's too much hidden bias to claim the computer is more of less accurate than a commuter.
In fact, visual challenges like this are a mostly solved problem, and the real magic is the classification that happens behind the scenes.
I’m all for optimism, but these problems are clearly much harder than the futurists would like the public to believe. Elon said Teslas would be driving across the country to pick up their owners by 2018. 6 years later and what does it do, drive across a parking lot?
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/686279251293777920
Trains are also a solved problem, and seem like a much better solution to the problem. With rails, a vast majority of the complexity around driving goes away. They also remove traffic instead of keeping it the same or making it worse. Less traffic would likely mean fewer accidents, even if humans are still the ones driving. And batching transit together, with dozens of people in one vehicle is going to be far more energy efficient than everyone running their own vehicle. It also solves the issue of drunk driving, distracted driving, and bad drivers in general, as everyone is just a passenger.
So much money, time, talent, and energy has gone into this self driving stuff, and it seems like a massive misallocation of resources. They’re solving the wrong problem.
That's because you're a thoughtful, conscientious driver. A very large fraction of drivers are not, so society winds up with lots of dead kids. Humans are terrible drivers: some of them are OK, but too many are very bad, leading to catastrophic results, and because of this human drivers need to be eliminated. Alternatively, the society could become far stricter about which humans are allowed to drive, but that isn't feasible when the society has intentionally made it so that it's effectively impossible to survive without owning and driving a car.