It depends on the context. Humans may make a better decision if there is something else providing the information. Perhaps the manhole cover sits at the curb tr

It depends on the context. Humans may make a better decision if there is something else providing the information. Perhaps the manhole cover sits at the curb triggering immediate attention. Perhaps there are cones, only in the wrong place because some drunk guy moved them for fun. Such is reality. The problem is not so much availability of information (a sensor packed car has a lot more information than a human behind a windshield), but making sense of that information, particularly in those 0.0001% uncommon, strange cases. Humans can connect evidence (a manhole cover sitting next to a water filled hole) because they generally know how things work (aka common sense knowledge, long standing problem in AI). Humans can infer what happened and predict what could happen. These things are not really available to AI which is these days more like see-react, not see-anticipate-react. I have a specific post on this on my blog:http://blog.piekniewski.info/2016/11/03/reactive-vs-predictive-ai/ http://blog.piekniewski.info/2016/11/03/reactive-vs-predicti... The blog has many other posts on limits of todays approach and on some ideas to fix it in the future. I agree that some of these cases may be challenging to some humans (particularly inattentive), but we want the self driving car to be (much) safer than inattentive driver, so we need to set the bar high.