[nerdawson]

There was a post recently with a video of a Tesla attempting to drive into the path of an oncoming train: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yxX4tDkSc_g

It’s not the big mistake at the end that stands out to me but the sheer volume of mistakes it makes along the way. Edging forward at an intersection when there’s a red light for example.

I don’t doubt that self driving tech will improve and be a safer alternative to a human driver eventually. It doesn’t seem like we’re there yet though.

[throwaway894345]

Yeah, I fully expect Autopilot to have different failure modes than human drivers, but what I’m interested in is the different fatality rates (deaths per hundred million miles, adjusted for different types of roads i.e., highway vs city streets). If Autopilot can save hundreds of lives annually to human-error mistakes like falling asleep at the wheel, etc but at the cost of one life annually due to obscure failure modes like driving toward a train, I maintain that we should not only allow Autopilot, but probably even mandate it on new vehicles. Sacrificing hundreds or thousands of lives annually because we don’t like the specific failure modes seems absurd. Of course, if it doesn’t save lives, then we should block its deployment on those grounds (but the particular kind of failure mode shouldn’t affect the calculus).