[aylons]

> If it wants proper validation of the safety of autonomous driving, it requires at least several billion miles of driving

No, it doesn't, the same way we don't need decades of testing to build an edifice or centuries of flying to test an airplane. Actually, as every human driver is literally a different person, by your logic we would need driving tests enduring several billion miles.

We can make tests using the worst situations, corner cases and even simulated accidents to see how the driving AI reacts. The problem is hard, but engineering is a finer art than what you imply.

[xfs]

Note that I was comparing with Google's methods of testing self-driving cars: idle roads, good weather, precision maps, human monitoring, no accidents. If Google's miles of safe driving mean anything, if means it has 99% more miles left before a level of validation. If you look at it for the effective miles where actual accident recovery happens, it will be much much shorter.

And yes, UMich/Ford's self-driving car project is making a testing field specifically designed for increased hazardous environment. But that environment is always artificial, and the hard part is to catch the last 1% situations, or the last 0.000001% in order to reach a level of billion miles safe record, because you don't even know what those are.

Autonomous navigation is fancy on all side (Yes I do this research), but all field experts know any security audit can probably reveal a bunch of failure modes because nobody has really worked on making it robust again adversaries.