[notahacker]

Yeah, I'm more sceptical about fully autonomous vehicles than most people, but the arguments presented in this article are bad

Even if fully autonomous cars remain impractical for real world commercial use cases because it can't match human capability to handle edge cases the investment in a programme pay off in terms of driver aids. And the fun of hands on a wheel can always be had on a racetrack.

But the goal of autonomous driving isn't "zero deaths" it's "sell cars", and convenience gets mentioned as least as often as safety as a selling point by its promoters. Since the errors autonomous vehicles make are different from those made by humans (and there's no reason to believe they will ever be zero), there's a strong argument that accidents can be further reduced by retaining an alert, responsible human driver, even if that driver's slightly less alert and responsible than they otherwise would be. That's been the case for Waymo's programmes so far (there's certainly no safety argument for making their backup drivers remote at this stage; that's all about a public show of confidence). The safety/convenience tradeoff isn't straightforward, because perfectly convenient fully autonomous vehicles means a safety benefit from fewer miles with inadequate or even drunk drivers having access to controls, but you probably wouldn't shoot for full autonomy and no controls if safety was the real goal. Frankly, even if the responsible human driver did absolutely nothing useful they'd probably net reduce road deaths simply by ensuring self driving technology doesn't massively inflate the number of miles driven per capita