alt Hacker NewsSelf driving cars are not going to be accepted if they have only marginally better success rates than humans. Just look at the news. Every minor self driving incident is endlessly magnified by the media while millions of human-caused accidents are just a part of life. That's just how our brains work. All major decisions are made primarily based on emotion, not analytics.
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quantummagic • today at 5:33 PM
Maybe. But insurance rates, and the government's enforcement of laws, are based on analytics, and overcome a lot of human emotional bias.
Human accidents don't get treated as "just a part of life", serious human driving errors are often considered so egregious that the person making the error picks up a driving ban or even a custodial sentence.
So it's actually entirely rational that the bar for companies to be able to ship software that makes those fatal errors without consequence other than an insurance payout should be higher (especially since when fatal error rates can only be estimated accurately over the order of millions of miles, driverless systems are more prone to systematic error or regression bugs than the equivalent sized set of human drivers, and the cost and appeal of autonomy probably means more experienced drivers get replaced first and more journeys get taken)