[alkonaut]

> When self driving cars give up, they give you a second or less to assess the situation around you and avert disaster.

I don't think the problem will be any situation with short reaction times at all. Nothing at freeway speeds, or situations like the Uber accident. That I think is where autonomous cars will shine, because sensors never get tired and reaction times are great.

The weird things that will happen which I count to the "not going to solve any time soon" category will be when the car comes to a completely snowed over roadworks, in the middle of the night, with the diversion signs completely hidden in snow. Construction workers barely visible in the snowstorm. Are those guys roadworkers or pedestrians? Are they working? Can I pass here? Will I get oncoming traffic because they narrowed it to one lane?

When things this weird happens at highway speeds or anywhere else where reaction is important - humans probably fail too. And at that point it's not really a question of technology but one of trust. Can we allow autonomous car to kill tons of people every year, with the sole excuse that humans would have killed all those people too, and then some? I'm not convinced of that either - I'm only arguing that from a technological standpoint, it should be possible to reach the 99% cars within a rather short timeframe. Those cars may be left on the scrapheap of history because of legal or ethical reasons, however.

[tigershark]

The scenario that you described seems to me less intractable than the “woman in an electric wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom” that Waymo handled correctly.

[emodendroket]

One problem with this theory is that the Uber car sensors misidentified the woman who was killed and they were so erratic that they felt like turning them off made sense.