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Shouldn't the objection be to anything less than Level 4, rather than Level 5? Level 4 requires that the vehicle can safely stop itself and wait for a human to take over when it is faced with a situation it can't handle.

(There's an argument that if you take away the routine parts of driving, humans won't be able to deal with anomalous situations, but that's a different argument than the attentiveness one.)

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If that is possible, yes. I'm not convinced it is possible to create an autonomous vehicle that only panics in situations where there is a safe pull-over, or, if such a vehicle exists, that it'll be considered "autonomous" when it can't go past 25 or 35 mph or something. There's plenty of driving situations that may be confusing where pulling over and stopping isn't possible.

(And, to be clear, I'm not asking for perfect safety, I'm asking for "human or better", and also understand that there may be some interesting fuzziness near the border where the two have different strengths and weakenesses but come out statistically the same. However, I don't feel like we're there yet.)

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