[greendestiny]

"but in comparison it will never fail as often as human do"

Ok I know this is my little cause of the moment, but seriously why are computers apriori better at anything? Sure they don't make poor life choices but they are absolutely at the mercy of the quality of the algorithms, sensors, operating system, training data and physical computational hardware.

[doppel]

Better is probably a poor word, but consistent at least. Even good drivers may run the speed limit and be "perfectly safe", but the autopilot will always stay at the speed limit and will always make the same choices in a given situation - there's no emotion or influence (alcohol, drugs, bad mood, etc.). In short, they are boring but safe.

[greendestiny]

"boring but safe."

But seriously, the most important part of that sentence 'safe' is absolutely unproven.

[chriswarbo]

I agree. It's like arguing that autonomous weapons systems are better than human-operated because they don't get tired, whilst neglecting to mention that, say, their object detection algorithms can't tell the difference between combatants and civilians.

Autonomous systems, as a technology, are capable of performing better than humans; that doesn't imply that some particular autonomous system (e.g. Tesla's Autopilot) does so right now.

[leot]

Every decision a machine makes benefits from the accumulated organized efforts of hundreds (if not many thousands). In a sense, so too do human decisions, but in practice we can much more quickly improve the decision-making of machines, over time leading to them having the advantage, especially in routinized tasks.

[ishi]

Computers are not apriori better - you can always develop a stupid or buggy algorithm that fails often. But Tesla is working to PROVE (using real-world data) that autopilot is better than a human driver, and IMPROVE it constantly until it is ten times better.

[TorKlingberg]

Tesla seems quite willing to massage their telemetry data until it shows what they want it to show.

[dilemma]

As of today, there's much left to prove. AI remain ideology, not reality.