But it'll be based on risks introduced by preventable human error- hubris, etc.
All it will take is some viral video of a Tesla running over a child or something terrible like that.
Of course if that fails, perhaps they could use honking as backup sensor.
A new solution that has less problems is worse than an existing solution with more problems.
There's also a willingness to be less upset with humans making a mistake than a machine.
Edit:
Unknown problems may or may not exist so while I think that concern makes sense it doesn't matter until they come up.
I'm making the decision based on the current state. If additional issues come about then you reevaluate if the new solution is better or worse than the existing.
If you consider unknown problems then how can you make a decision?
X+Y > Z?
Where X is the weight of problems for the new solution, Z is the weigh for the existing solution, and Y is a value between 0 and infinity (unknown problems)
Don't disagree, but new solutions can come with unknowns
There's willingness to be upset at anyone with deep pockets who can be found accountable. And the motivations for that aren't emotional, they are purely material.
There's a reason why people have spent decades trying to find pharmacological cause for autism, in spite of the enormous amount of evidence that the condition is mostly hereditary.
And a very good reason why vaccines in America are exempt from the legal system.
The distribution of errors is as important as the error rate.
Simply being sober, awake, calm and not texting puts you far above the average driver and are things you can control.
A self diving car which, apparently 10+ years into development is currently running red lights randomly 1% of the time is not in your control.
It can be controlled however.
>Simply being sober, awake, calm and not texting puts you far above the average driver and are things you can control.
It's not important if it's possible, what matters if it happens.
I am not elderly, do not DUI, drive tired, or touch my phone while driving. I put myself in a different risk pool by my behavior.
I step into a Tesla FSD car, I am in the same risk pool as everyone else in one when it decides to run 1% of red lights or whatever other stupid bug in the next release.
The unsupervised "robotaxi" uses a different NN. It doesn't behave the same way as FSD.
Everyone thinks they're above average, even people who know statistics! So if it's merely 20% better than the average driver a huge number of people will conclude "I am above average so I'll do a better job"
Will some of them be wrong? Of course. But tons of them will be right, too.
It can't be statistically significantly better, it has to be statistically overwhelmingly better. Not a part of a standard deviation but several of them.
If you aren’t in one of those categories you are immediately dramatically better than average. This is fairly easy to do before even considering being a “good driver” / defensive driver / etc.
So you want a better comparison for most people.
A self-driving car might be 5x better than me at driving but logically I can't be liable for what it does. The company making it has to be. 5x better would be 0.2 accidents a year. But multiply by that the 100,000 cars the manufacturer has sold... they don't want that liability. That's why Telsa's autopilot is still supervised, because they want its mistakes to be your problem.
It presents a lot of thorny problems. If I am a persistently dangerous driver I can have my license taken away and be taken off the road. But if a self driving car is judged to be too dangerous for the road you'll suddenly have thousands of people who lose access to their car (assuming a future with self-driving only cars) through no fault of their own. What's their path to getting back on the road?
I wonder if that's still the case, and if so how many accidents they've become liable for.
If the self-driving car company takes on that liability it'll save you the $1000/year. So assume they're either going to charge you an extra $10K up front or an extra $1000/year. For that kind of cash they should be quite willing to take on the risk or they can find an insurance company to do so, if their car is actually safer than an average driver.
This should work in most countries. Perhaps not the US with its pattern of massive punitive damage awards.
OP said:
> self driving will be statistically significantly better than human drivers, but because it isn't perfect we won't allow it anyway.
My contention is that it's not that everyone is a luddite, it's that while companies are legally allowed to provide quasi-self driving they have no liability for they will do exactly that. And that is what will hold us back.
2. There's $1000/year of potential revenue they're missing out on by not assuming liability. That's a pretty powerful incentive.
Except, in both cases the risk, statistically, is clearly worth it.
It is the optics that suck.
But humans are easily influenced by perception and narrative, rather than rationality.
There's still no final storage in all of the US, so there's that.
Thinking total risk, end-to-end, including reduction of risks associated with other technologies.
Self driving has a similar issue where the value shrinks the more supervision it requires. Tesla is a new benefit in terms of effort but it can’t operate safely while the driver is asleep.
I think that's by broad policy and not by individual risk mitigation. Isn't it something like "if nuclear is cheaper than the average then it has to spend the difference on risk mitigation"?
3 mile island wasn’t a public health hazard but lack of maintenance cost billions by destroying the reactor. Thus prompting the industry to spend significantly more money on maintaining reactors. The problem is it’s really difficult to determine what’s overkill here.
There’s something like 600,000 US bridges and sometimes people look a failure and say it’s rare enough not to be worth doing anything about.
Suppose the accident rate for regular cars were 1 fatality every 100 million miles driven (it actually is in the US).
Suppose further a hypothetical self-driving car has a proven rate of 1 fatality every 1 billion miles (10x better). Except when that fatality happens, it is because the car suddenly incinerates when arriving otherwise safely at its destination. Something about the advanced AI technology makes this outcome completely random and completely unfixable.
Which do you choose? Drive yourself, 10x more dangerous? Or leave it entirely up to chance, but 10x safer?
The rational choice is to pick the self-driving car. Yet I suspect many people (including me, I admit) would choose to drive themselves.
How far apart do those numbers need to be before most people give up the steering wheel?
Our mental suffering is not because car is on autopilot. Suffering happens because WE ARE ON AUTOPILOT. So I chose to trade the 30x risk of death for a 30x reduction in mental suffering. Rational? God I hope not.
Is the manufacturer liable? Autopilot would be too much risk and the manufacturer would demand users can only activate it behind the wheel, needs both hands on the wheel while getting a coffee infusion. The tool would lose its advantages.
Power plants aren't insurable because it would financially destroy any company in case of a leak or operating costs would become so high, that nuclear cannot compete anymore.
We maybe will get it one day. Waymo probably did it correctly. Limited road network, careful approach, learn what the problems are and expand on that.
Meanwhile, if you have contract with more serious company, you wont have to spend years and thousands fighting them over liability.
>DRIVE PILOT can be activated in heavy traffic jams at a speed of 40 MPH or less on a pre-defined freeway network approved by Mercedes-Benz. DRIVE PILOT operates in daytime lighting conditions when inclement weather is not present and in areas where there is not a construction zone. Please refer to the Operator’s Manual for a full list of conditions required for DRIVE PILOT.
No one is going to regulate it this presidential term though so Tesla has some more time to work I guess.
You woound only need local people to grab the truck at a parking spot close by to drive them to the target location.
That alone would help long road truckers to see their familys and not having to sleep in their trucks. It would save costs and would make it saver for everyone if all the trucks drive automatically.
BMW and other EV developers can already drive on a lot of german autobahn hands free.
What i also don't understand, if i really want the benefit of self driving car, I only need it when i'm driving long or when i'm intoxicated. Tbh. let me just record the road from bar to my home, let me drive it for a few times until my car knows that direction and done.
Comma.ai is here today and does it for that. I highly recommend one for all of my friends! (Not being paid to say that, just a happy customer.)
We already have self-driving cars: look at Waymo, etc. look at chinese ride-hailing companies. What we won't have is private-use self-driving cars: a regular person will not be able to buy one.
While a good amount of functionality exists, the liability model and accidents are big road blocks to seeing this technology truly mainstream, not just select cities/routes/etc
I aspire to be a trillionaire. Does that count for anything?
> While a good amount of functionality exists, the liability model and accidents are big road blocks to seeing this technology truly mainstream, not just select cities/routes/etc
Waymo just started service at SFO airport last month.
What’s your definition of mainstream? Everywhere anytime like an Uber?
I rarely take an Uber or a taxi (probably single digit number of times a year) and, even if it were half the price, that would be unlikely to change my behavior much.
That can change consumer behavior around you dramatically , for example cut car ownership ?
Personal self-driving cars? Maybe less so because we probably want them to be well maintained.
Tesla-style, camera-only, dual-use (human and computer driven), safety-as-an-afterthought cars? Probably not.