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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure humans have reached Level 5 autonomy either; many of them can't handle the full range of conditions humans drive in and occasionally need other humans to step in and help them.

Level 3 or 4 is more than enough to get most of the commercial benefits.

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IMO the "failure rate" is obvious enough to be tracked, but I worry that we won't be paying enough attention to differences in error type/impact/recovery.

We've learned a lot of ways to predict, mitigate, and recover from human errors, and the equivalent ecosystem may not exist for nonhuman ones.

Have you ever seen the videos online tricking "self driving" cars with fake walls? would you run into an obviously fake wall? would the average person? no

Level 5 means "people inside are purely passengers and never have to take steering wheel". For humans, being level 4 means that because of some road condition, driver gets out of the car and asks someone else to drive - either one of the passengers, or some sort of emergency 3rd party service.

I never did this myself (except while learning how to drive). And I don't think I've heard about my friends doing this either. Turn around because the road was impassable? Sure. Pass the wheel to someone else? nope.

That means a lot (most?) human drivers are "level 5 autonomous".

I do pass the wheel over on long trips. We take turns and we swap when someone feels to tired to remain sharp.

I'm thinking of a time I had to help someone with reverse parking for example. And most people aren't tested in extremes - if they think they can't conditions are harder than they want to handle they just won't go out driving.

Looking at the SAE standards document [0], I can think of a few people I know who only technically reach Level 3. Mostly older women, to be honest. They are only going to drive under certain well defined conditions and will put someone else in the hot seat the trip will be outside a limited comfort zone. They would need someone else to be able to step in at a moments notice to operate a vehicle truly safely. As an aside; the older men are more willing to be adventurous, but also more likely to kill themselves and/or run someone else over based on my experiences with accidents. And in an AI from an engineering perspective that probably bumps them more towards Level 2.

But a truck isn't going to be facing level 5 conditions in the vast majority of circumstances where it is generating economic value. It's probably going to be going in a straight line down a highway or parking in a loading bay.

EDIT And drug/alcohol affected road users probably deserve their own paragraph; but I'm not going to make time to type it up. Just because they might not ask doesn't mean they don't need someone else to drive for them.

[0] https://saemobilus.sae.org/standards/j3016_202609-taxonomy-d...

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