Bear case for self-driving: in 1 million miles of driving, roughly the number between major human accidents, do we really think these cars will not encounter one AI-complete problem.
Moreover, trucks sometimes contain hazardous or flammable materials.
So the answer to your question is a resounding no, in my view.
No kidding.
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2001-128/pdfs/2001-128.pdf?id...: The two most dangerous things in road work, accounting for half of all of the industry's fatalities, are industrial vehicles working on the site and passenger vehicles passing it.
So, yeah, you're right - there aren't any alternative systems that manage to avoid this problem. Even humans suck at it. And if even humans can't handle construction areas safely, how can you possibly expect computers to be perfect?
* Hitting a worker is very different from hitting a truck.
* Many of those fatalities are not in clear daylight.
The machine ought to be an error handler for specific failures of an active human driver (sudden braking of lead vehicle, lane straying, etc). This is the only way to get both machine and human to pay full attention. A person in a co-pilot role will struggle to react quickly enough to handle errors of the machine auto-pilot.
1. Technology should not make mind-bogglingly stupid mistakes like this, regardless of how rare they are in the grand scheme of things.
2. Because these systems use neural nets, they're black boxes and it's impossible to conduct a proper engineering analysis on them to find out when they will fail. Fuzzing the system with live humans is not engineering; it's callous disregard for human life and anybody who practices it should lose the right to call themselves an engineer.
I think few are willing to accept autopilots that are only as bad as (or as good as) humans. They must be significantly better than human drivers, simply because we don't accept their errors like we do human errors.
This is completely irrational when looked at purely from a safety point of view (Who doesn't want safer roads?), but this obstacle is very real.
Worse: that autonomous cars are better in many scenarios or aspects (they don't get sleepy, they are never drunk) doesn't mean we accept that they are ever worse in any other aspect, despite the total safety being better.
That is: autonomous vehicles must not just be as good as human drivers, they must be significantly better (or at least safer) than human drivers. And not only that, they must be significatly better in every aspect of driving, for them to gain acceptance.
Humans might have a judgment failure every so often, but they might realize how unsafe they are and change their behavior, or drive less, or get their license taken away. A machine consistently crashing cars has no self correction protocol, and will consistently make the same mistake over and over.
In general a car that doesn't see a pedestrian isn't a major accident unless the pedestrian also doesn't see the car. If not for that there would be a whole lot more fatalities with human drivers as well. A self-driving car obviously shouldn't do that, but neither should a human, and they do. Which makes it less hard for the computer to do it at least as well.
You can also expect the computers to improve over time by learning from each others' mistakes, which human drivers generally don't.
It's already the case that pedestrian/car collisions are usually written off as the pedestrian's fault until proven otherwise--the Uber self-driving car that killed a pedestrian is a great example of that in action.
It all has to go wrong at once. Mistakes are common but most mistakes aren't fatal.
And by choosing to drive a car, you are dramatically raising the odds that any mistake you make is fatal (not necessarily to you).
While my personal experience on the matter is thankfully limited, I strongly suspect that the vast majority of vehicular-pedestrian accidents are mostly (or entirely) the fault of the driver, where the pedestrian started an action where it was safe to do so and the driver rapidly caused it to become unsafe before the pedestrian could react.
https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuri...