This is clearly a development phase. 30-40,000 people a year die on US roads, almost all from driver error.
I don't think "this is a clearly a development phase" means anything when there's no guarantee self-driving cars will actually reduce deaths. It may be that the way forward is simply more advanced driver assist technology that better accounts for human psychology, and not fully autonomous cars. All these sacrifices for a future of autonomous driving may simply be a waste.
Personally, I don't think these cars should be on public roads until they get a lot better. We're just introducing a new class of accidents; human drivers generally make the same kinds of errors and other drivers can reason about what they're thinking. Computers are more likely to fail in (to humans) surprising and bizarre ways. What we have now is the worst of both worlds.
As an aside, if we really wanted to do something, I suspect the easiest way to save thousands of lives a year right now would be to implement mandatory functionality on all smartphones to shut off the screen when the phone is moving faster than 5mph. This would inconvenience people and passengers would be annoyed, but there was, after all, a time before smartphones.
I like this idea
Maybe need to figure out how to avoid shutting down the passengers' phones?
Yes, but the legal entity behind the driving of the car needs to be hold legal liable. (i.e. the AI provider)
Hand over to driver can be required but the driver needs to have reasonable time to adapt to the situation (multiple seconds).
Only with this can we make sure that companies providing driving AIs give their best to make sure they don't kill.
Else they will have just pressure to improve it to a point where it happens rarely and then stop there because its not worth the development cost.
As ever, perfect is the enemy of good. Are there currently zero fatalities on the roads because cars are 100% safe? Or have they been developed to an acceptable standard of safety?
But we need to set initiatives in a way that manufacturers will be improving over time. They won't do it out of goodness of their hart, and quite possible marketing and good PR will be more impactfull on sale than 0.5% safer AI
I have 0 trust that market itself will solve this issue.
We just would need to make it clear from the get to go that after that grace period the law will be strict even for cars sold before ;=)
I have even less faith for politicians to not extend grace periods in face of organized backslash(probably paid and bought by companies themself), making them infinite.
Of course. Otherwise you could just always hand over a few milliseconds before any impact and blame the driver.