| I was quibbling about semantics. I am aware that cars can be dangerous. > and the damage it can cause on accident You are conflating (un)safety of a tool used in the way it is intended (kitchen knife = cutting a steak) with accidents (cutting a finger) and with malicious use (stabbing people). Those three categories are not the same for object-that-may-act-as-weapon and object-designed-as-weapon. Conflating them collapses the number useful things we can communicate. So are you concerned about Tesla intentionally building killing instruments? Or potential for accidents? Or the potential for intentional misuse? > The fact how dangerous cars is is very much underappreciated by people in general, as evidenced by the number of morons on the road. Cars also provide immense utility. If all they did were providing the thrill of speeding then they would probably be banned as too dangerous. One of the tradeoffs is the overhead of enabling people to drive. We could drive down the number of morons by requiring astronaut training for vehicle operators but again, that tradeoff seems too harsh and it's more efficient to occasionally let people die in traffic accidents than letting them die because nobody qualified as ambulance driver. > We have a for-profit race by companies, many of which can't be trusted with getting software right In the short term this may cause more deaths than necessary. But on the other hand it might be the quickest way to find a winner and then hold the rest to the same standard. As long as the experimental fleets are small they are just a blip in the statistics. Right now they should be equated to the yearly batch of first-year drivers who have an inherently higher risk profile due to lack of experience. We still accept them on our roads in the expectation that they improve. What is important is to make sure that they are as good as or better than humans once they roll out in large fleets. |
The latter two.
> We could drive down the number of morons by requiring astronaut training for vehicle operators but again, that tradeoff seems too harsh and it's more efficient to occasionally let people die in traffic accidents than letting them die because nobody qualified as ambulance driver.
I don't think this is the real reason. You don't need astronaut-level training for vehicle operators, just more than the ridiculously low standard of today, and more importantly, much stronger and harsher enforcement of traffic laws. I doubt that this will reduce the number of qualified ambulance drivers.
I suspect the real reason we tolerate so many morons on the road is path dependence. When cars first appeared, they were rare, slow and safe. In the couple of decades it took to get to the present density and speed of cars, it became a social status symbol, and something politically impossible to rein in.
> What is important is to make sure that they are as good as or better than humans once they roll out in large fleets.
I'm afraid that with self-driving tech based on neural networks, with no ability to inspect and verify what's going on, we'll eventually have to eat the risk and roll them out in large numbers before we know they're as good as humans.