Are self-driving cars already safer than human drivers?
I think the big issue with self driving cars isn&#x27;t that anybody doubts that they are safer in standard situations.<p>The issue is, that I can totally see a self driving car fuck a rare obscure situation up in the worst way — where even the worst drivers would probably do okay.<p>E.g. let&#x27;s say you are in a tunnel and there is a fire, you car blocks the fire truck. The normal line of thinking would be to throw all existing rules of traffic out of the window and so totally illegal maneuvers that might even damage your or other peoples cars. A self driving car might be able to do that, but it cannot make the judgement needed to know when to throw all rules out of the window.<p>Now in that example the driver (if they exist) could take over, but there are similar examples where there is less time to decide and&#x2F;or a switch to manual might not be feasible. Think of all situations where multiple dangers have to be weighed against each other, for example a rock slide where a street is partly blocked (enough for the AI to stop) but there is still rock coming down the mountain. A situation where a criminal gang blocks the road, in order to make you stop and rob you — this being a thing that could become easy game when self driving is wide spread enough.<p>The problem with self driving cars is that even if you statistically manage to be safer over the typical journey today, people still wanna know that it keeps them safe in very atypical conditions as well. And that as of now is not the case.