The fundamental problem of AI cars--they have a set of rules rather than common sense. They will fare far worse than humans when given impossible directions.
In fact, literally today, I drove into the oncoming lane of traffic due to construction work. There wasn't signage or anything to do it, I just saw the car in front of me doing it and did it too. No idea if they did it for any sensible reason or not
I get to the spot where everyone veers right--and see a double yellow. On my *right*. We were going straight, the road zigged (45 mph road, at the time they were only widening it from two lanes to 4 when the property was developed. While the road was "straight" it zigged back and forth because of the patchwork development), the rain was so hard we couldn't see the lane markings.
For me, it is insane how many people need to die before anyone hold Tesla accountable for its autopilot [1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe...
This isn't a novel issue: the courts and legal system regularly deal with defective products, including vehicles, that cause injury or death. If a defective product causes damage, the injured party is typically compensated financially for their loss. They even have frameworks for determining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life in monetary terms.
The ethical issues when a driverless car kills someone cannot be solved in a reasonable way.
The question is which city/country will be the first to implement roads for driverless cars only ?
Given that human-driven cars, trucks, cyclists are already on the roads and will be for quite a while to come, and pedestrians already cross it, you would have to build a whole new road network, with crossing points for human-driven vehicles/pedestrian traffic. Which is simply infeasible, both in terms of money, but also simply space, especially in built-up areas where the space is already fully utilised.
Which begs the question: How are self driving cars ever going to be mainstream?
This is the present in Honolulu, as of last year: a fleet of self driving cars, operating on a closed road where only driverless cars are allowed, transports over 3000 people per day. The service is called "Skyline".
Fine for getting around different areas of the cities, but it's not going to drive you wherever you want to go though.
That's why you keep roads regulated, clean and orderly.
Humans don't always get it right. And things sometimes take out the temporary markings even if it was done correctly.
I've had to evade one of those big barrel cones rolling across the freeway. I suspect it fell off a truck rather than blew from road work, but there's no way to know. And would an AI car know that a barrel in front of it is a windblown hazard rather than an actual indication of a closed lane?
And I've clobbered one of the ordinary cones when a guy was confused by the construction zone and went straight from the left turn lane and I had to evade. Didn't see where it went and didn't think of trying to put it back. Again, is the AI going to be able to realize that smacking the cone was the right thing to do? (The cone was blocking off road in preparation for what was ahead, I didn't actually go into roadwork.)
Humans are far better than AIs at balancing things when faced with something having gone wrong.
AI--we put in a driverless bus on a short loop. It was in an accident within hours--any human driver would have understood to get out of the way of the truck or at least lay on the horn if that wasn't possible. The bus just sat there and let itself be hit by the backing truck. If everything is as it should be they probably already are better drivers than humans. It's just they aren't as good when confronted with things that are wrong.
I think in their current state, AI cars are a bit of a menace, but presumably they will improve over time, and I think it's evident we've reached a local maximum for humans, possibly even a decline as everyone is in ever more of a hurry, maybe let me just bend the rules a little this one time, it'll be okay.