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Comment by waps | Hacker News Reader

There's a funny mention of this problem in "I, Robot". When will smith takes the wheel he is scolded for taking such a completely irresponsible risk. Given how those robots drive versus how he drives, we likely will have to agree with this at some point.

I wonder if real life will play out the same way : will controlling a car the human way become an unacceptable risk, and how fast will this happen ? Because we're likely to see both effects play here : first, humans will become worse at controlling vehicles, and vehicles will become better at it, likely having superior senses and predictive ability. So there should come a point where humans become a risk.

So there will come a point where we get to choose between new policies and letting humans drive. If we had self-driving cars and we could eliminate speed limits on interstates entirely, in trade for not allowing human drivers at all, would we do it ?

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I would not be at all surprised to learn that computers are better at driving now. One interesting (albeit expensive) way to test this out would be to put some computer controlled cars into demolition derby races and see how they fare in artificially hostile driving environments where the human participants are extremely risk-tolerant.

I'm very glad that California has legislation in place to allow this already, and think it's going to pay off in spades to be a leader in this area. My bet is that insurance will be baked into the price of the first generation of cars (ie subsidized by the manufacturers), liability rates will be extremely low, and there will be an avalanche of consumer switching over a fairly short period of 10-20 years.

They're citing >>300,000 miles under automatic controls with zero accidents. That's probably better than the human average. (Small sample, I know, but still.)

It looks like Americans average about 200,000 miles between accidents. I am not sure what the variance here is, e.g., depending on driver experience.

Still, the numbers are completely incomparable. Google's cars have always had a driver at the wheel, and we have no idea how many times a manual intervention has prevented an accident. Google's cars have also been driving in very limited conditions: they have not tried to drive in very bad weather, and they do not handle highway merges or difficult surface streets.

Finally, it isn't clear that "zero accidents" is completely correct. Google has said that their cars have been in accidents, but only while under manual control or while stopped at stoplights. But what does this really mean? Perhaps there was an accident caused by the self-driving car, where the human driver took control at the last minute. Or perhaps the car saw a yellow light up ahead, slammed on the brakes to stop, and was rear-ended by another car expecting them to go through. (Technically, the other car would be at fault in this situation, but it is still unsafe driving on Google's part.) There is no public information that lets us know the safety record of Google's self-driving cars.

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