No offense but this is exactly the attitude that inhibits progress and led the auto industry to languish in mediocrity for years. If you wait until the technology would prevent all accidents, you'd be waiting forever.
Your attitude is inhibiting progress. Everybody knows the technology is not ready and everyone is fine with it and willing to face the consequences of refining it. Everyone except Tesla that is, which insists their self-driving tech is so advanced they even call it autopilot encouraging people to treat it as such and refuse to admit any fault in this mess.
> Everybody knows the technology is not ready
And by what standards are you gauging its not ready? My point was if you wait until it becomes "safe enough", you'll be waiting forever because Tesla would be forever at the mercy of whose rules govern what "safe" means. Roads are hazardous places and unfortunately accidents are going to happen.
What I do know is that the Autopilot system will never be distracted, will never fall asleep, will never drive intoxicated or recklessly, will never disobey traffic laws like humans do. Tesla also has a financial incentive to improve their technology to prevent this from happening. Unlike humans who, for the most part, have far less incentive to drive more carefully.
I think you're setting up a dichotomy here that doesn't exist. It's not a choice between waiting forever or disregarding safety. Look at how Waymo is approaching the problem, for example.
As good as a human at what? It's 100% better at not falling asleep behind the wheel or driving while under the influence which statistically are the most common cause of traffic accidents.
We don't yet have evidence that Tesla's using Autopilot are any less safe than human drivers. We do have plenty of examples of traditional auto makers negligently ignoring safety regulations, manufacturing faulty vehicles and also causing fatalities. But somehow we don't hear the same pleas for sympathy for those souls.
We don't yet have any evidence that Teslas using Autopilot are any safer than human drivers. We do have plenty of evidence suggesting that humans are unable to pay proper attention when asked to do tasks like driving a level 3 automation of cars. There is plenty of reason to believe that this going to cause an increase in accidents, particularly of the fatal variety (say, running over a pedestrian at lethal speed).
The NHTSA found a 40% crash rate reduction from Tesla's autopilot. So how about you tell all the people who lives have been saved that you wish they hadn't been because you're an emotional reactionary
I believe many people have found issues with the data used and how they were prevented. Also it's worth comparing the common case of accidents - bumper to bumper, etc on a freeway which I'd except all self driving systems to instantly reduce the rate of just by increasing the distance to the next car - to the number of serious crashes - e.g. driving into parked vehicles, concrete pillars - those have entirely different failure modes.
That said, the reality is that the types of self driving systems currently deployed - Tesla or whomever - are all fundamentally flawed because they do two things:
* Require attention from the human driver at all times
* Cause driver inattention
The first is fairly clear, literally every one of these products is prefaced with "the driver is still in control of the vehicle and must remain attentive", and the latter is clearly demonstrated because of all of the different mechanisms that the manufacturers are deploying to try and deal with the fact that if you tell a human to pay attention to a specific task, but they aren't doing that specific task, they will not pay attention. Every system tried just increases the time required for a human driver to adapt to unconsciously managing the various "pay attention" alarms.
The solution is fully self driving cars. We don't have that yet. I fully expect them to be safer once we get there.
I don't disagree that levels 2/3 are a danger zone in self-driving technology, but I feel the need to point out that there are plenty of people who are disabled or suffer chronic injuries resulting from being rear-ended. Stop and go traffic can be plenty dangerous as well.