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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

Do we think it's acceptable to target a level of driving proficiency for automation that could be featured in dashcam footage that gets uploaded to youtube because it's so extremely inept or are we aiming for a higher target that might be a middling amount of driving proficiency?

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Most autonomous failures aren't failures in a way that make good video though. It's like your grandma or 16yo daughter that gets stuck at a yield for no good reason. Nobody is gonna watch that so nobody uploads it.

A robotaxi that has a "low enough to be acceptable" frequency of the above failure mode is likely to have enough occasional "full send" failure modes to make for Youtube fodder when deployed at scale even if they're comparatively rare compared to humans or the other failure type, or some other standard.

That is a very disingenuous take on the comment. We should of course target a higher level of proficiency than that, but the point is that many humans make stupid driving decisions every day. We can hold machines to a higher standard, but perfection is an unrealistic standard.

I don't think I was being disingenuous but I did try to specifically call out aiming for a middling (and not perfect) proficiency. Driving onto tram tracks on a clear day is unacceptably poor performance. This is something that a good driver is unlikely to ever do in their lifetime and - if it happened - likely involved some extreme circumstances.

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