I have a 100% perfect safety record over probably hundreds of thousands of miles of driving a class B truck with my knees instead of my hands, using cruise control, on straight empty highways in Nevada, Idaho, and Utah, with perfect weather and good road conditions. There's nothing revolutionary about my ability to perfectly drive with my knees...I just very carefully selected the conditions where I was willing to do it.
You may have that perfect safety record, but other people don't.
People still crash every day in good conditions. That's thousands of lives that could be saved with our imperfect, sunny weather on the highway only self driving car.
You underestimate how bad human drivers are even in perfect conditions.
You are completely missing the point, so I'll try explaining via a Reductio ad absurdum hypothetical.
Lets say that Semi-Autonomous Cars are currently tested on about 80% of the tasks that humans currently face in the real world, and that through some feat of engineering and design we don't have to worry about the ridiculously messy transitions between Autonomous Mode and Human Mode.
And let's say that for those 80% of tasks, the Semi-Autonomous Cars have a 0.05% accidents/100k miles incident rate.
And let's also say that Humans on average have a 1% accidents/100k miles incident rate.
What you're telling me is that the Semi-Autonomous car has a much better safety record, so give us Semi-Autonomous RIGHT NOW OR WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!
But what I'm telling you is that you don't know enough to make that decision yet, because you don't know exactly how well humans do on the 80% that Semi-Autonomous cars currently handle, you merely know the average accident rate over the current 100% of scenarios. For all you know, Human drivers could have their average 1% accident rate as a result of a 0.0% accident rate for that 80% subset and a 5% accident rate on the remaining 20% that Semi-Autonomous cars can't handle. And if that were the case, then forcing us all to use Semi-Autonomous cars would actually increase the average accident rate from 1% to 1.004%.
Until you fully understand what Semi-Autonomous Cars are capable of, AND know how well human drivers do on that restricted subset, you can't definitively say that current technology is better than humans.
I understand what you are saying, I am just disagree with the facts.
"Human drivers could have their average 1% accident rate as a result of a 0.0% accident rate for that 80% subset "
No they couldn't, because they don't.
I am asserting that for this specific 80% of perfect conditions, humans are still terrible drivers. And that being better than them is EASY, because of just how terrible humans are at driving (even in "perfect conditions").
The numbers were deliberately exaggerated to make the point. The fact stands though that until you know what the numbers are, the best answer is not easy to come by.
> I am asserting that for this specific 80% of perfect conditions, humans are still terrible drivers. And that being better than them is EASY, because of just how terrible humans are at driving (even in "perfect conditions").
And I am asserting the opposite: that the appearance of safety of autonomous vehicles is the result of highly selective conditions with near laboratory levels of control, the likes of which are so monumentally easy to handle that even humans, as shitty and inattentive as they are at driving, can handle with comparative levels of safety. And I certainly think it's possible that computers will lag behind humans for another 20-50 years while we slowly develop the massive body of fast-heuristics research necessary to make NP-complete planning decisions with the speed and capability of even below-average humans.
