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Approximately 35,000 people died in car accidents in 2015. That's almost 100 people each day. Imagine you had self-driving car that was exactly as good as human
by sytelus 10y ago
Approximately 35,000 people died in car accidents in 2015. That's almost 100 people each day. Imagine you had self-driving car that was exactly as good as humans. This car will kill 100 people each day despite of being human-level competent. It has slim chance of surviving public outrage and lawsuits. This points to the fact that self-driving cars needs to be few thousand times better than humans. As in all machine learning problems, as you get along the curve, progress becomes much more expensive for next 1% improvement than last 2% improvement.
One way to circumvent this is establish special lanes for self-driving cars where things are much more controlled, well defined and cars in that lane can communicate with each other to avoid crashes. Long segments of highways might be great candidates. This can heat up the virtuous cycle where people buy self-driving cars to be in that lane which pressures authorities to make more lanes available for them and eventually most lanes are for self-driving cars.
- randcraw 10y ago35k die per year in the US alone. Worldwide it's more like 1.25 million. http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/traffic_deaths_number/en/ http://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/traffic_deaths_... You don't need autocars to be 1000 times better than humans. You just need them to be equally good as the average driver ALL THE TIME, such that they're never distracted, sleepy, driving unlawfully, etc. The occasional lapse in driver competence is the cause for the vast majority of crashes. I suspect the limitations of driver (or autocar) perception plays a small role in most accidents when compared to lapses. As residents of a developed country, with a very low death rate per mile driven, we also see traffic risks very differently than the world's norm. The annual death rate per 100k motor vehicles in the US is 13; in India it's 130 in Africa it's 574. In the more unsafe countries, I suspect driver error is the cause of 99% of accidents. Replacing human driver decisions with autocars would reduce worldwide driver fatality risk enormously, reducing perhaps 90% of global traffic fatalities -- about one million people a year.