The average driver drives like 13,500 miles a year [1].
The average driver files a claim for collision once every 17.9 years [2].
That makes human drivers 16 times safer than Uber self-driving cars. This is concerning for people who think self-driving cars are right around the corner! Improved algorithms would need to avoid 94% of the collisions that self-driving cars currently get into in order to have the same failure rate as humans.
this is the thing about most of what we're doing with machine learning. It gets exponentially harder the closer you get to 100%; most of the things we use machine learning for where it works pretty well, 99% is really pretty great. 99% won't cut it for self-driving cars.
Which isn't to say that self driving cars won't get there, just that the fact that it looks like we are almost there doesn't mean as much as you'd think; we still have the really hard bits in front of us.
> That makes human drivers 16 times safer than Uber self-driving cars.
While that's a difference large enough to make wide scale deployment of those cars irresponsible, it is not large enough to make one pessimist on self-driving cars existing soon. It's the kind of difference that often enough go away with a few years of engineering.
And I expect those to be the worse stats for all the self-driving car companies around, since others seem to be doing things in a less "move fast and break things" way.
"The average driver" isn't our cutoff for allowing people to drive. Once the self-driving cars are safer than the most dangerous drivers that we allow, there's theoretically an advantage moving those people to self-driving cars.
Which isn't to say that self driving cars won't get there, just that the fact that it looks like we are almost there doesn't mean as much as you'd think; we still have the really hard bits in front of us.