[beat]

I am a safe driver. (My measure: two moving violations in nearly 40 years of driving, the last one 16 years ago. No accidents in 19 years, no injury accidents ever. And I've driven daily for the whole time.)

In the past couple of weeks, I've narrowly avoided hitting pedestrians three different times. Each time, the pedestrian was somewhere other than a valid crosswalk (once was on a highway exit). In each case, I think an autonomous vehicle could have handled it better than me.

[bradlys]

Maybe a "perfect" autonomous vehicle would've reacted better... But, I'm pretty sure that lady with her bicycle walking across the street in Arizona would say differently in regards to Uber's program. I mean, it was a perfect test case for such a system. The guy whose Tesla drove into the side of a semi-truck might feel differently too. Oh and the one in a Tesla who was driven into a barrier in Mountain View and the car caught fire... He died too.

A perfect autonomous car sure sounds nice - but will it ever arrive? Would it have just hit 1 of those pedestrians instead? Would it just go, ding, and suddenly you're in control? Would it kill 1 and then the company would have the data to know to not kill pedestrians in that one specific example? How many people would have to die as test subjects before the system would be better than people? And what if it never got there but you still killed all those folks anyway?

[Dylan16807]

The braking system was disabled in the Uber car. That's hardly representative of anything except Uber's carelessness.

And tesla's system is unable to see stationary objects. It would never qualify as an autonomous driver.

We don't need a perfect system to avoid hitting pedestrians. Current tech can actually do a good job. It just has to be a design goal of the system.