[philwelch]

The question is, which human drivers?

Let's say we have a self-driving car that is as safe as the 20th percentile human driver. Do we allow that self-driving car on the roads? Do we selectively revoke licenses from 1 out of every 5 drivers and replace them with a car that's at least as safe as they are if not probably safer? Do we replace breathalyzer interlocks for drivers with DUI convictions with an AI driver and just revoke their licenses permanently?

There isn't a trivial solution to this problem. At some point, some AI driver is going to cause an accident that would not have been caused by a 95th percentile human driver. At the same time, human drivers do shit like this all the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oidHSzukSss

[emodendroket]

OK, nice anecdote, but if you follow my link you can see that if we just blindly take the average of all drivers and accidents per mile driven and then compare it to AI performance AI is nowhere near average, let alone the 95th percentile. Here is another example of what I'm complaining about: an argument that simply takes as its premise something not yet proven to be true.

[philwelch]

Like what, “self-driving AI will never improve past the state of the art in mid-2018 so it’s useless to speculate about it ever doing so”?

[emodendroket]

It's not entirely clear it will in the foreseeable future improve to the point where it is a serious prospect to be safer than human drivers.