Re: Autonomous driving is months, years, or decades away
Computer-driven cars only have to be shown to be at least as safe as human drivers to be successful.
That depends entirely on what you mean by "successful".
If you mean the number of deaths/injuries on the roads has reduced, and objective measure of the success of the system, you'd be almost right. It would need to be, at a minimum, ever so slightly better than human drivers. That aside, I'll agree on that point.
However, if you mean "successful" in terms of the number of people trusting the system, uptake of self driving vehicles etc, they will need to be safer by a large margin. Think 100s, or even thousands, of times safer. The public is currently numb to the number of accidents on the roads but will not be numb to a "robot" causing those accidents. An RTC can be blamed on a "stupid driver" (not all drivers), where a collision caused by an autonomous vehicle will cause doubts in all self-driving cars. You can see it already: Every serious incident involving a Tesla on Autopilot is reported, even though (from what I've read) in terms of accidents per X miles there are less than for human drivers.
Look at it this way: There were 1770 deaths on the UK roads in the year ending June 2018. If 1% of people switched to autonomous cars and their safety level was the same, this would be 18 deaths in self-driving cars in a year, or more than one every 3 weeks. If people were being told of a death from autonomous cars every few weeks on the news, they would not be likely to buy or use them, even though 100 people had died in normal cars in the same 3 weeks. If you included serious injuries, that goes up to 27 per year or more than 1 per fortnight...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
