Self driving will always be dangerous unless overall traffic infrastructure is updated.
Can you imagine a train where the 100% of the onus of auto-baking falls on the train itself, without zero input from sensors and towers outside the train?
I don't see how people can propose this kind of thing with a straight face, when we live in a world where we can't even afford to replace the paint on the road when it gets worn away.
Yeah, sure, governments everywhere will be lining up to pay billions of dollars for putting up and maintaining new infrastructure to provide us with some low ROI shiny toys. And I have a bridge on a blockchain to sell you.
Well, actually more deaths would mean smaller healthcare expenditure. The dead can't get sick anymore.
In the case of Tesla massively failing to drive safely in a school area: If you cannot operate safely, don't allow autopilot to engage at all.
Logical extrapolation of that point left as an exercise for the reader.
I'm not hugely familiar with trains, but as I understand it, trains in the general case have a much worse braking distance to visibility ratios than cars do.
Roads are generally designed to be safely navigable in good conditions when their occupants are obeying the speed limit, without external sensors. Rail lines are designed to be safely navigable only with the aid of external sensors. That's why trains can take blind corners at speed.
I prefer to have the computers work for people, rather than the other way around.
I assumed computer vision had been solved and they had reliable enough detection of cars, so you could just plop a few cameras in the intersection to detect waiting cars and start the transition when safe.
Nope! Instead, large numbers of intersections are dug up and electromagnets are installed to detect cars. These are very sensitive (but can miss cyclists) and super-simple; a microcontroller can reliably detect a car as a pulse on a line.