Comment by Rudybega
15 hours ago
That's probably more a function of more people being in the road than people not understanding what object they're about to hit.
15 hours ago
That's probably more a function of more people being in the road than people not understanding what object they're about to hit.
Sorry, I was being oblique. Humans kill other humans with cars every day. They kill even more on Halloween. Let's start addressing that problem before worrying whether Waymos might someday decide it's OK to drive through ghosts.
Autonomous vehicles won't be perfect. They'll surely make different mistakes from the ones humans currently make. People will die who wouldn't have died at the hands of human drivers. But the overall number of mistakes will be smaller.
Suppose you could wave your magic wand and have a The Purge-style situation where AVs had a perfect safety record 364 days of the year, but for some reason had a tricky bug that caused them to run over tiny Spidermen and princesses on Halloween. The number of fatalities in the US would drop from 40,000 annually to 40. Would you wave that wand?
"The number of fatalities in the US would drop from 40,000 annually to 40. Would you wave that wand?"
This strawmam is bordering offtopic fiction. Only the 40k yearly deaths is based on reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...