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Comment by mahkeiro | Hacker News Reader

And so it’s ok to break traffic rules? In my country, as a human this will get you easily a one month license suspension.

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No, just a bit of perspective. I'm sure the video record of your car would be squeaky clean with no violations whatsoever.

If I said I've never had a driver's licence, can we get back to the topic at hand?

What's the thesis here, humans are imperfect drivers and therefore we should accept self driving cars driving into incoming traffic, and if anyone objects, focus on their faults instead?

We allow imperfect humans, we should allow similarly imperfect robots. The robots will get better. The humans, in aggregate, will not.

Humans on the aggregate can definitely get better, that's why Norway has 2.14 / 100k traffic-related deaths per year and the United States has 12.84 / 100k.

Norwegians drive half as much. Even if we ignore the other components of the gap, closing that 50% will require rebuilding 300000 square km of urban sprawl into dense urban centers with good public transit. It's a nice thought, but my money is on the robots.

Robots are not going to fix other problems with sprawl. People there are focusing on wrong solutions.

The "human drivers are shit" problem kills a million people every year. Solving it is good. If we let the great be the enemy of the good we will never fix anything.

It's not a binary. That particular case is pretty egregious since the car signals to turn, gets into the turn lane, actually starts turning, and then swerves back (across the oncoming traffic lanes in the middle of an intersection!) and tries to get back into the correct lane to drive straight, but only manages to achieve that after driving for a bit in the lane for oncoming traffic. That is a major fuckup. And this all happens on a road with fresh clear marking, on a sunny day with perfect visibility.

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