U give far to much credit to human drivers. Capable human drivers as a subset of human drivers. A large subset to be sure,but nowhere near everyone. At least an av cant get drunk.
Wow. You are giving waaaayyy to much credit to the responsiveness of humans. Roughly 1 in 4 drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system. Lets also not forget distractions like cell phones, finding/selecting music, passengers, OTC and prescription drugs, et al.
From my perspective, I'm the only good driver on the road and everyone else needs to go back to driving school or have their license revoked. :)
You're making a classic is-ought fallacy here. Drunk, high, sleep deprived or "crazy wild aggressive reckless" human drivers ought not to exist, but they do, and thus it's absolutely fair to compared autonomous drivers against them.
Most people think they're a better driver than average [1], and I bet if you asked 100 people with a history of drunk driving, 90 would say it was a one-time thing, deny it, or argue that it wasn't really that dangerous because they were just going around the block.
The autonomous car doesn't get drunk. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't get road rage. It isn't in a hurry, and it doesn't need to text its girlfriend while going 80 mph. Whatever its flaws will be, they will be consistent.
It sucks to say it that way but we really need a driving assist that can compensate to the losses of faculties that comes with drunk driving. That's one third of all road crashes. People are always going to be idiots.
It's obvious. Most drunk people can get home without someone having to grab the wheel and help them. A few do require that, and they often get stopped by police.
Since almost any ai system currently needs SOME help on a 100 mile drive, yet most slightly drunk people would complete that drive just fine, you could argue close to that.
If you had a system that drove roughly as well as I do at my 90% best and cut out the worst 10% of my driving, and let me not have to deal with the road that'd be fine for me.
And I probably should have said "sober, undistracted and competent human" since some people just shouldn't drive, and some people shouldn't be driving under certain conditions (which may not be tired or drunk, but going through a rough break up with late night emotional blowups).
You’re going to compare self-driving cars to drunk drivers so you can grade them on a curve?
If you’re drunk you’re going to have pay for a ride either by a person or possible by program or you can break the law. I don’t see anyone who was going to drive drunk not do it because they could pay for a robot taxi over a real taxi.
Here’s my comparison. If your self-driving car kills or maims someone in a situation where a normal sober person driving wouldn’t have it shouldn’t be on the road.
1) Society tolerates a small amount of alcohol for most drivers.
2) Driving while drunk impairs your physical and mental ability to drive safely and only gets worse as you drink more. Obviously a manual driver has slower reaction times than an autonomous system but they are within a level that society tolerates and far better than someone who is drunk.
There are also risks with autonomous vehicles - the potential for equipment/sensor failure, software being unable to adequately handle bad weather, the potential for exploitation by hackers etc.
I'm currently in the process of buying a new vehicle and have been test driving vehicles with various sensors designed to prevent accidents (specifically the Subaru eyesight system). One of my first thoughts was that it would be easy to become reliant on the technology and have a serious accident when a sensor fails (particularly for blind spot detection). I'm still likely going to buy a vehicle with that functionality but am not sure how much I will trust it.
True, but they often run into the nearest stationary object because they're texting, or eating, or putting on makeup (an ex-gf of mine caused TWO accidents that way), or arguing with a passenger, or speeding, or driving tired after a long day of work, or driving after having a few beers but I'm totally fine I swear I'm cool to drive home, etc...
You're absolutely right that there are risks. But honestly, I suspect drunk drivers alone cause more fatal accidents than autonomous cars ever could.
I found literally the most conservative statistic I could for how dangerous drunk driving is - that someone whose impairment is literally on the threshold of legal is 3x as likely to have an accident than a sober driver.
I could have gone for a shock stat - 100000 people a year are injured in accidents involving drunk drivers. 10000 people are killed.
I could have taken the position that a typical drunk driver is probably actually 10x as likely to have an accident as a sober driver, based on those NHTSA numbers.
But I didn’t need to to make the point that a self driving car could be literally twice as likely as an average driver to crash and that would still be ‘better than a drunk driver’.
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