Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
This is what&#x27;s going to happen. If you&#x27;ve ever seen a machine learning algorithm in action, this isn&#x27;t surprising at all. Basically, they&#x27;ll behave as expected some well known percentage of the time. But when they don&#x27;t, the result will not be just a slight deviation from the normal algorithm, but a very unexpected one.<p>So we will have overall a much smaller number of deaths caused by self driving cars, but ones that do happen will be completely unexpected and scary and shitty. You can&#x27;t really get away from this without putting these cars on rails.<p>Moreover, the human brain won&#x27;t like processing these freak accidents. People die in car crashes every damn day. But we have become really accustomed to rationalizing that: &quot;they were struck by a drunk driver&quot;, &quot;they were texting&quot;, &quot;they didn&#x27;t see the red light&quot;, etc. These are &quot;normal&quot; reasons for bad accidents and we can not only rationalize them, but also rationalize how it wouldn&#x27;t happen to us: &quot;I don&#x27;t drive near colleges where young kids are likely to drive drunk&quot;, &quot;I don&#x27;t text (much) while I drive&quot;, &quot;I pay attention&quot;.<p>But these algorithms will not fail like that. Each accident will be unique and weird and scary. I won&#x27;t be surprised if someone at some point wears a stripy outfit, and the car thinks they are a part of the road, and tries to explicitly chase them down until they are under the wheels. Or if the car suddenly decides that the road continues at a 90 degree angle off a bridge. Or that the splashes from a puddle in front is actually an oncoming car and it must swerve into the school kids crossing the perpendicular road. It&#x27;ll always be tragic, unpredictable and one-off.