My litmus test for this is simple. Has the steering wheel been removed and the manufacturer taken all liability for at fault claims? Until then, I don't want a self driving car. If the mfg doesn't believe in the tech enough to own liability, how can I?
By the time the calculus includes the savings of the steering wheel, column and other components, and the gear selector, mirror adjustment control, brake and accelerator pedals, and all the other systems that used to be needed by a human driver, autonomous driving (hopefully) would be really really good.
the mfer doesn't assume any liability right now, so even if their self driving technology dramatically lowers your risk, why would they assume any of that risk? I see the point you're making, sure, if they assumed all liability it would make sense for me to accept that deal, but they're not going to and it could still be a very very good idea for me to adopt the technology.
> if they assumed all liability it would make sense for me to accept that deal, but they're not going to
Why not? Insurance companies will accept liability for my driving fuck-ups in exchange for a monthly payment. And doing so doesn't instantly bankrupt them or anything. Why shouldn't a self-driving car company do the same thing?
the insurance company makes money because you are willing to pay more to reduce your personal risk than it costs them to accept it (a dollar you lose is worth more to you than a dollar you gain, declining marginal utility of wealth; an asymmetry they make money on, especially considering a dollar lost to them is much less significant)
G*P didn't mention payments for accepting risk, he just said if they accepted liability.
That's an interesting perspective. Perhaps in the future, we'll have FSD car subscriptions that also include insurance, so if you're in an accident the car manufacturer will cover everything.
I use full self driving for long highway trips. I do however take the advice of the manufacturer and stay fully alert. It has caught situations where some bonehead is drifting into my lane or changing lanes without noticing me, and I didn’t notice them fast enough, and braked avoiding an accident. Like wise I’ve noticed it make mistakes and asserted control. My estimation is the joint probability of the model catching a dangerous situation and me catching it is significantly better than me alone. It also is able to navigate through confusing interchanges that I normally screw up by taking the second exit of four instead of the third or whatever.
I think a litmus test of “perfect” is a fair test, but leaves a lot of value uncounted in the mean time.
I think perhaps ignoring essentially everything Elon musk says and does and judge based on what’s in front of you is what works for me in not getting baited into the “is the Tesla FSD sentient and can do my taxes” hype cycle, with its requisite jadedness.
The technology is there. Waymo and Cruise have been testing self-driving cars in various US cities for years, and putting thousands of engineering hours into safety. You can take a driverless ride in a Waymo in Pheonix right now.
The problem with Tesla is that it was a rushed system built on the whim of a 50 year old nepo baby, and that real safety requires holistic sensor suites that include LIDAR and RADAR, as well as a fuck load of redundancy, in addition to cameras, which is the only thing Teslas have.
There were a bunch of articles a couple of days ago how emergency responders are having an increasing amount of trouble with Waymo and Cruise. The root issue seems to be that the cars can't handle exceptional situations on their own, and there are not enough human operators to deal with them quickly enough.
How then is that FULL self driving? Cruise and Wayno cars have driven millions of miles with nobody in the driver's seat and they have avoided killing anyone. They don't require a human being constantly alert and ready to take over. That is full self driving.
I wouldn‘t call it rushed, it works far better than most assisted driving systems. It will probably soon be rolled out as that and I would not be surprised if, eventually, it becomes good enough to be fully self driving.
Personally, I don't think it ever will as long as we're trying to mix human drivers with automated drivers using existing infrastructure. Seems like if it was 100% automated with a system for communication between vehicles to "ask" to change lanes of the cars around it, then we'd be a lot better off than having the car "guess" what a human is attempting to do.
Human agency to impart 782,000 newtons at will regardless of intoxication, skill, alertness, etc causes accidents that kill and maim an awful lot of people. I for one look forward to the day that idiot weaving through traffic at 80mph in an enormous SUV agency is banned for my, my families, and everyone else’s sake.
Do you also look forward to not being able to do anything else either? Because that's where things are heading if you continue to choose safety over freedom.
The bulk of our society seems to be losing the ability to be self-responsible and behaves erratically and dangerously and then blames everyone around them when it goes wrong. If that continues then the logical result is going to be the restriction of freedoms.
If you want to fix that, you need to do something about the rising narcissism and irresponsibility in society. If you just try to lecture people about safety-vs-freedom, then you will be losing your freedom.