[randomstring]

But hear me out...

What if we could make every car $5-10k more expensive instead?

</satire>

I once thought that using AI to make all cars self driving might be the key to making pedestrians and cyclists safe. Self driving cars are playing a game of Russian Roulette. The systems will get it wrong occasionally, with LIDAR or without. Not if, but when. Whether or not someone dies depends on the situation.

[AlotOfReading]

I work on self driving vehicles. I would also like more walkable, bikeable cities.

But I've also sat in those city council meetings and seen the inane opposition people have to any sort of positive reform in that direction. Self driving vehicles have the potential to actually improve road safety because local governments won't be involved.

[Gordonjcp]

> I work on self driving vehicles. I would also like more walkable, bikeable cities.

Two questions, then. Firstly, do you think that self-driving vehicles will ever get even close to human standards of driving? And second, what do you see as the big challenges to getting them to be acceptably safe?

[AlotOfReading]

I obviously can't talk specific numbers, but there are reasonable arguments to be made that in certain limited scenarios, we may already be hovering around or exceeding equivalent human metrics. Turning that into "unequivocally safer than humans all the time, everywhere" is still an open problem.

As for safety, that's both a big topic and a "I have explicitly told not talk about this in public by legal" topic. The teams and organizations I've worked for take it very seriously, but things can always be improved. Phil Koopman puts out some excellent information about where we are currently and where industry could broadly improve.

[Gordonjcp]

> we may already be hovering around or exceeding equivalent human metrics.

Okay, bearing in mind your second paragraph, what are the conditions under which they're safer? I've been in a few self-driving cars and I'd struggle to see how they would ever get to an acceptable standard - like, pass UK driving test kind of standard.

[alexashka]

The satire is at the heart of it all, innit?

Why think through and implement hard political decisions when you can throw money at nerds to make a profit instead?

[jeffbee]

That's fine actually. We (American cities) should adopt systems like they have in Singapore where the certificate of entitlement to purchase a car costs, buy itself, $70k-120k, on top of the cost of the car. The externalized costs of private cars are extremely high and it's completely insane that we have what amounts to welfare for drivers.