| > Would it contribute positively to our world if competent self driving existed? Define "competent". Existing isn't enough. In an ideal case of bug free self driving cars making up 100% of traffic on the road, yes the world is a better place with less vehicle related deaths. Short of that utopia, we have a reality where software bugs cause injuries and deaths and the ultra wealthy companies avoid liability. > What are the various approaches to get from here to there, and what are their relative merits and risks? I see no realistic path to the utopian ideal. Even if some company can deliver a truly safe self driving car, it will be a long time before they are ubiquitous. And short of that, you have issues where even if the self driving car behaves safely, it may be acting in ways human drivers do not expect, and thus cause accidents anyway. > Do the technically-savvy folks on this list think that a heuristic approach (i.e. a bunch of rules written by humans) could ever succeed at effective self driving in diverse conditions? Or is the machine learning + massive data approach more likely to solve it? Or do you consider it fundamentally unsolveable? Manually coded self drivint has too mant corner cases, so no, I don't believe it is possible. I don't believe it is possible via ML either. People have way too much faith in ML. I don't think truly safe 100% self driving cars is a realistic goal. > What interesting moral and legal questions arise if effective self-driving becomes available? How do we hold parties liable for the damage they cause? So far this doesn't seem to be happening. > What might be the economic and environmental ramifications of a world with ubiquitous “robotaxis”? It's not realistic so I don't think it's worth thinking about. It's like daydreaming about a world where nobody dies. Yes there are charlatans pushing this idea. No, it's not happening soon. |