> It's ALL edge cases. Let's arbitrarily decide that 99.9% of driving time is made up of the "common" cases, and the rest (0.1%) is the "edge" cases. I'm pret

> It's ALL edge cases. Let's arbitrarily decide that 99.9% of driving time is made up of the "common" cases, and the rest (0.1%) is the "edge" cases. I'm pretty sure there are many more edge cases than common ones. Now let's further assume that whenever an "edge" case occurs (that would be a couple times per hours), the cars just slows down until it stops or stop being in that edge case. It's not very convenient, but I'm quite sure it is rather safe. > Do you understand just how good the computer would have to be to have any impact at all? From what I have gathered, computers are already good enough to work on sunny roads with few surprises. Including towns. Or maybe the google cars don't work as well as I though they did? I wonder how many times the human had to push the emergency shutdown button in their tests. > No they can't. Wireless internet service is not even remotely close to good enough to make that possible. Just use a regular cell phone, and communicate through the speakers. 56kb/s is more than enough bandwidth (space stuff like the Mars rover use way less bandwidth than that, and suffer from way more latency). > The self driving car has to be basically perfect or death is the result. We don't need computers to be perfectly safe. We need them to be safer than humans. If automated cars kill on average half as many people as humans do, that's already a huge win. Not enough to stop there of course, but more than enough to switch. Besides, I believe that abiding the traffic code and slamming the brakes whenever something goes wrong is not hard, and already safer than human driving (which take chances, speeds, rides too close to other cars…). Bugs on the other hand may prove most problematic (see Toyota's unintended accelerations). We may need Nasa like processes to ship that code on the road.