[CamperBob2]

Yet self-driving cars are already competitive with human drivers, safety-wise, given responsible engineering and deployment practices.

Like medicine, self-driving is more of a seemingly-unsolvable political problem than a seemingly-unsolvable technical one. It's not entirely clear how we'll get there from here, but it will be solved. Would you put money on humans still driving themselves around 25-50 years from now? I wouldn't.

These stories about AI failures are similar to calling for banning radiation therapy machines because of the Therac-25. We can point and laugh at things like the labeling screwup that pjdesno mentioned -- and we should! -- but such cases are not a sound basis for policymaking.

[sarchertech]

> Yet self-driving cars are already competitive with human drivers, safety-wise, given responsible engineering and deployment practices.

Are they? Self driving cars only operate in a much safer subset of conditions that humans do. They have remote operators who will take over if a situation arises outside of the normal operating parameters. That or they will just pull over and stop.

[lomase]

Telsa told everybody 10 years ago self driving cars were a reality.

Waymo claims to have it. Some hackernews comenters too, I started to belive those are Waymo employees or stock owners.

Apart from that I know nobody that has even use or even seen a self driving car.

Self-driving cars are not a thing so you can't say they are more realible than humans.

[CamperBob2]

I've never been in a self-driving car myself, but your position verges on moon-landing denial. They most certainly do exist, and have for a while.

Yes, they still need human backup on occasion, usually to deal with illegal situations caused by other humans. That's definitely the hard part, since it can't be handwaved away as a "simple" technical problem.

AI in radiology faces no such challenges, other than legal and ethical access to training data and clinical trials. Which admittedly can't be handwaved away either.