[frahs]

One thing worth mentioning (even though I agree with the gist of your point) is that machines make the same mistakes consistently. This is pretty rare for a human. Imagine 10% of the cars on the road are autonomous and they all make this same mistake.

[mikeash]

There are a lot of road design features that come from the fact that humans do make certain mistakes consistently. For example, the US's love affair with four-way stops comes from drivers' inability to safely navigate uncontrolled intersections, even when there's no particular reason they couldn't. Stoplights usually have a delay between the red light for one direction and the green light for the next direction because driver's often run fresh reds, or get stuck in the intersection and need to clear out. There are tons of warning signs because drivers can't be trusted to notice something as simple as a sharp curve coming up.

Of course, the road system is designed for humans' foibles, not computers' foibles, and computers will have to deal with that. But the bar is low.

Computers aren't really as consistent as you say, either. Obviously, a deterministic machine will produce the same outputs for the same inputs. But when your inputs are camera data from the real world, you'll never get the same input twice. For example, my car sometimes misreads or fails to read speed limit signs, but it'll usually read the exact same sign perfectly fine the next time I go past.

[bluGill]

I wonder if in the future the law will say self driving cars can ignore all those signs when the car chooses to. Obviously there will be a lot of legalese about it, but most signs can be safely ignored already if you understand all the hazards - this is why people tend to just slow down at stop signs not come to a complete stop.

This is better for the environment, there is a lot of energy lost in a full stop for a stop sign that could be saved: less air pollution/CO2 to deal with.

[euyyn]

What models of car read speed limit signs?

[mikeash]

Teslas can (although the second revision of the Autopilot hardware doesn't do it yet).

[andrewaylett]

The rental Astra we had the other month did.

[MarkMc]

I think it's the opposite. Humans constantly make the same mistake like being drunk, tired, using a phone. With autonomous cars every single collision will be investigated - where the software is at fault a new improved version will be pushed to all cars, elimination the problem. This systematic improvement will mirror the improvement of airplane systems, but with a much faster time frame