[SFJulie]

Automation will work if and only if car operator can make themselves non liable for any accident resulting from bugs.

Accident are stuffs that cannot be predicted. A bug is something that can be avoided.

As far as I am concerned, 99% of the software industry is not able to write critical software that is able to handle with a correct costs the case of failures and/or "abnormal" behaviors.

Software will fail. It will eventually fail dramatically. And with software it can fail in a reproducible way. Nowadays all experiments are made far from worst case (congestion, interferences, extreme conditions....)

Who is gonna pay for the predictable accidents? And will self driving cars will be better at avoiding accidents than humman given a same operating cost on the long term?

My guess, is : hell no.

[yummyfajitas]

Accident are stuffs that cannot be predicted.

Car insurance companies do this on a daily basis and make consistent and reliable profits betting on the outcomes.

[SFJulie]

Well, they have been involved in quite a few regulation tricks to not pay their due or cheat on customers (especially on forgetting to give life insurance prime). I would not take insurance company as an example of mathematical honest success in predicting the future.

And, also, I would point out that their prediction are based on opacity and it is hard to audit their reasoning. I talked with some of them, and their mathematical reasoning are flawed towards using linear equations to predict non linear phenomenon. And when I ask them how it can work, they had no explanations, just "recipies everyone use". So well, I do not trust them.

What you cannot explain simply you do not understand.