[JumpCrisscross]

> the reality on the street is going to be a zillion different competitors cutting every corner, skirting ever regulation they can get away with, and just shitting out the worst "move fast and break things" hackathon bullshit code they can get away with that "sort of seems to work, most of the time"

Humans are terrible drivers. A half crap autonomous car might still be safer than the status quo. In any case, whether talking about consumer goods or services, this is a space markets work in. Calling for rules to be written before we fully understand the problem is a recipe for overregulation.

[stryk]

> Calling for rules to be written before we fully understand the problem is a recipe for overregulation.

I think s/he outlined, at least in essence, one of the (many) problems. This is an area where rigorous QA, test, re-testing, and re-re-testing should be paramount above all else -- including profits, at least at first until we get the software down pat. Do you want to trust your children's lives to some half-baked "ship it!" product? I don't.

[megy]

> This is an area where rigorous QA, test, re-testing, and re-re-testing should be paramount above all

Great, when are we going to do this for people?

[erobbins]

> Humans are terrible drivers.

Compared to what? We have some evidence that computers can do better in tightly controlled scenarios (limited access freeways) but that's always been low hanging fruit.

I think humans are pretty good drivers, actually. How many 2 lane undivided roads do people go zipping down all day, every day, with very few accidents? A ton. We're also very adaptable and good at handling outlier situations.

[sien]

Sober, rested, humans are great drivers.

The problem is that we also a bit too good at creating outlier situations (stoned, drunk, exhausted, angry at X Y or Z).

[astura]

Some just aren't good drivers when sober and rested - I've met many, and they let anyone with a pulse get a driver's license and even if you don't have one you're free to operate a motor vehicle all you want, nobody stops you from turning the key.

[TeMPOraL]

Sober, rested, focused humans.

We're also bad at maintaining constant focus for longer periods of time.

[TeMPOraL]

> Compared to what?

Compared to the potential machine driver. Yeah, one may say it's comparing reality to a dream. But it's a fact that humans have a ceiling on reaction time, focus and input processing, and machines of today all operate at levels much, much above that ceiling. That machines can be made to drive safer than humans is an extrapolation made pretty much of simple logic steps.

[InclinedPlane]

OK. So what? The key word here is "might" be safer than the status quo. We should ensure that we are measuring carefully and confident in our results (which also requires being confident that the systems are well behaved and well understood and thus the testing is valid) so that if they do show they are safer than humans on average it will be beneficial to move to autonomous driving as much as is practicable. And if, on a case by case basis, that is not true then we can avoid killing more people unnecessarily because we want to save some money on development costs.