This is a false equivalence that I've seen a few times here and elsewhere. It's wrong because:
The majority of car accidents are correlated with someone's fault, related to altered state, inexperience, distraction, or bad judgment. Some types of people are prone to accidents, others are less prone.
But in the self driving car world it's all equal - it's completely arbitrary who is a victim of an accident.
Someone who has never run a red light or had an accident in their life because they are an alert, careful, experienced, defensive driver suddenly has all that stripped from them and now they are driving at just an "above average" level.
Why should the good, consistent drivers be punished? (And they absolutely would if we settle for just "better than average"). I'm all for driverless cars, but only with patience; no one should even entertain mass adoption of self-driving cars without a minimum of multiple years of testing in live traffic with zero accidents or major traffic violations (by fault of self-driving car).
Seeing the traffic violations at the start of the SF program, we probably ought to expect the mass adoption minimum 5 years out, more likely 10-15.
>But in the self driving car world it's all equal...
And that, my friend, is a very good thing. We slowly raise the bar and eventually get rid of bad drivers - because in the future only people with a near perfect driving record will be granted a license.
The majority of car accidents are correlated with someone's fault, related to altered state, inexperience, distraction, or bad judgment. Some types of people are prone to accidents, others are less prone.
But in the self driving car world it's all equal - it's completely arbitrary who is a victim of an accident.
Someone who has never run a red light or had an accident in their life because they are an alert, careful, experienced, defensive driver suddenly has all that stripped from them and now they are driving at just an "above average" level.
Why should the good, consistent drivers be punished? (And they absolutely would if we settle for just "better than average"). I'm all for driverless cars, but only with patience; no one should even entertain mass adoption of self-driving cars without a minimum of multiple years of testing in live traffic with zero accidents or major traffic violations (by fault of self-driving car).
Seeing the traffic violations at the start of the SF program, we probably ought to expect the mass adoption minimum 5 years out, more likely 10-15.