[abledon]

no one in government is qualified to really understand ML and to regulate that stuff. Does the government employ people at the level of Tesla in ML? Its quite the problem... when the best minds are in the tech enclaves are not working for the public interest.

[benzor]

We don't need any understanding of AI/ML in government to effectively regulate the autonomous vehicle industry. Design an appropriate set of tests, make companies run the gauntlet, only approve the ones that pass. The test criteria is simple: does this software meaningfully and statistically significantly reduce the risk of accident/harm/death compared to the average human driver? Add caveats and conditionals as you wish for conditions/weather etc. but it's fundamentally a black box test with no knowledge of technical internals required.

[kjksf]

> statistically significantly reduce

And how does one prove something is true "statistically"?

By doing it many times. So many times that you can be statistically confident of the result.

Statistically, there is ~1.4 deaths per 100 MILLION miles driven.

To prove, statistically, that software is as good, it would have to drive at least 1 billion miles. And yes, it would kill 14 people in the process (or more, if it's worse than humans; or less, if its better).

Tesla is already doing what you say car companies should be doing i.e. statistically testing the software

Except you don't like it and think there's a magic fairy test that will show something "statistically" without driving statistically significant number of miles.