What I fear is that self driving will be statistically significantly better than human drivers, but because it isn't perfect we won't allow it anyway.
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.
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 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.
Of course if that fails, perhaps they could use honking as backup sensor.