> 2) The robot helps you drive, you start to zone out, and plow into, let's just say as a random example, a truck crossing your lane of traffic.
This is my concern. How many days of sitting around for 12 hours not doing anything (because the computer is pretty good) does it take before the truckers who are supposed to be alert and ready to take over are completely zoned out. I would probably last about an hour.
that's the thing, at the point that the computer is already that good, missing that one accident isn't optimal sure, but it's definitely better than the current state of vehicle operation.
No it's not. People here have a really exaggerated vision of how bad human drivers are. Even the most pessimistic views of how common accidents are suggest that there is one contact collision every 75k to 100k miles or so.
An autonomous driver which was twice as dangerous as a human, then, would still go 37k to 50k miles between collisions. A human who was trying to backstop that robot's fallibilities would be required to pay close attention for weeks between actions. Which is inhuman.
I admit that I have no idea what the accident rate is in Uruguay or Brazil.
In the US:
The Department of Transportation gets reports of one accident per 250k miles (roughly). It is broadly agreed that many accidents are unreported, with estimates of the true rate ranging from 1/200k miles to about 1/75k miles.
For example, this document from the US Department of Transportation:
2) The robot helps you drive, you start to zone out, and plow into, let's just say as a random example, a truck crossing your lane of traffic.
3) You help the robot drive, while you are super, super, super drunk, and best-case you stop all traffic on four lanes of freeway.
4) Maybe we need to skip to this step.