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"At fault" is one relevant metric, but not the only one. An autonomous vehicle should at least meet, and ideally surpass, human-driven ones in avoiding accident
by scarmig 10y ago
"At fault" is one relevant metric, but not the only one. An autonomous vehicle should at least meet, and ideally surpass, human-driven ones in avoiding accidents for which they're not at fault as well.
I'd be curious to know if Waymo vehicles experience more, less, or the same number of not-at-fault accidents per mile driven as human-driven ones.
- jacquesm 10y agoThat's a tricky one. Avoiding an accident for which you are not at fault could easily cause an accident for which you are at fault. Human drivers have a pretty bad record with that particular situation. Also, there are some network effects at play here, the higher the percentage of self driving cars the more rare that situation should become.
- scarmig 10y agoI agree that there's a tricky calculus involved in some scenarios, but I think there's a much wider domain of not-at-fault scenarios where autonomous vehicles should be able to surpass humans unambiguously. Example: an autonomous car being tailgated by a human-driven car, with a stop sign or light up ahead. Different braking patterns have different likelihoods of causing an accident. Autonomous cars really have to be able to handle these scenarios at least as good as, and ideally better than, humans: there's not a complicated split-second balancing act to worry about.
- willvarfar 10y agoTesla have stats saying their autopilot, for all its limitations, is already much safer than a human driver: https://electrek.co/2017/01/19/tesla-crash-rate-autopilot-nhtsa/ https://electrek.co/2017/01/19/tesla-crash-rate-autopilot-nh...