[arcfour]

I absolutely believe that humans would drive on train tracks. There is no shortage of terrible, insane, ignorant, and purely self-interested drivers on the road. Just look at any dashcam video compilation!

The difference, of course, is that when a human does it we just say "what an idiot!" But when a machine does it, some people say "well, obviously machines can't drive and can never drive as well as a human can," which is silly.

[lesostep]

>> The difference, of course, is that when a human does it we Make him pay a fine? take his driving license? You can say to a person "hey don't do that or else". We know that most understand that and repeated offenses will show outliers that shouldn't be allowed

But waymos aren't like that. All the cars are driven by one program. And we told this program "don't do that" and this program is a repeated offender.

If there was a guy, just one guy, that drove hundreds a car a day, the same as waymo does, we would also push to take away his license even if he personally was driving safer then most drivers.

[drob518]

Of course humans have driven on tracks. The point was that humans driving on tracks is far more rare than driving the wrong way on a one-way street, so this sticks out.

[munk-a]

I think there's an epistemological issue in your statement. When a human does it we say "what an idiot" because the driver is performing at a level below the generally accepted proficiency for driving. I think our reasonable expectations for autonomous driving is around an average level of proficiency. I also don't think it's reasonable to delay implementing technology until it's better than the best of us - but this was an utter failure and is not within the bounds of acceptability.

I do think it's fair to argue that this is probably an oversight that can be corrected now that it has been revealed, though.

[arcfour]

But in many ways, self-driving cars are better than or equal to the average driver. If I make a mistake once but am otherwise an exemplary driver, am I a bad driver? Same goes with these. The question isn't are they perfect (which is unfair), it's whether they are in aggregate safer than humans, which is objectively true, but people making big examples of issues like this serve only to muddy the water and scare the public needlessly.

So, in the interests of avoiding needless regulation that would make us less safe, I think it's important to point out that these comparisons are unfair & examples are typically extremely rare edge cases.

[munk-a]

I agree that in many ways self-driving cars are better than average. And I selfishly want to accelerate the adoption due to the fact that I'll appreciate it the most when other drivers are using it to reduce the chances to getting hit by a drunk or highly distracted driver.

However, I think that driving on tram tracks is unacceptably bad - it is something that a good driver would simply never do outside of really strange circumstances (like complete vision loss due to heavy storm weather). This example shouldn't be used as a single example to bar autonomous vehicles but it should also be properly recognized as unacceptable to be repeated.