Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality
I was just having this discussion last night as it happens. We sat at an impasse as everyone was quite inebriated and didn&#x27;t have any real empirical evidence to back any of our claims up. I was rather curious if the rate of deaths caused by human drivers would continue to dwarf those caused by edge cases of deployed self-driving cars if we scaled up the number of self-driving vehicles.<p>Presently human drivers cause an awful number of deaths with cars. However even despite the edge cases of machine learning, which can be adapted for relatively quickly, would drunk drivers still kill more people every year even if we replaced all of the cars with robot ones? We&#x27;ve been trying for decades to minimize the damage caused by drunk drivers but policies don&#x27;t seem to have much of an effect. Compared to the massive amount of data we could collect from robot cars in order to optimize them and adapt them... it seems like we&#x27;d be faster at making them safer than preventing humans from making poor decisions.<p>I think in the case of piloting a slow-moving bullet around crowds of humans... I&#x27;d trust technology more in this case. It did wonders for the aviation industry and while cars are more complicated to pilot in many cases I don&#x27;t see how we can make current human-piloted cars safer vs. optimizing robot piloted cars. We&#x27;ve been trying the former for decades with diminishing success.