> If you have no clear idea how your driving software works, how are you going to make sure this doesn't happen? A lot of people don't know how typing "www.goo

> If you have no clear idea how your driving software works, how are you going to make sure this doesn't happen? A lot of people don't know how typing "www.google.com" into their browser works but DNS "just works" for them. There is software in nearly every part of our lives that could systemically go wrong in catastrophic ways - we do our best to plan and prevent them. > People have common sense, variability and adaptive learning to prevent things like that. Moreover, our traffic system, our cars and our driver education have been co-evolving for safety for the last 100 years. (Heck, some of it started with horses and carriages.) The complexity and size of the system have been gradually scaled up for just as long, and it's designed and refined to be used by humans. Isn't that incredible? The complexity goes up: we adapt. As self-driving cars are introduced we adapt and evolve and incorporate these changes in technology, the driving "environment", security, safety measures, and laws and regulations. > Traffic system isn't a board game. I didn't see any efforts at self-driving vehicles just say "ahhhh! this driving stuff is so easy!" Of course it comes with huge difficulties, an enormous amount of complexity, a baffling amount of data, a ton of edge cases, and now a wealth of tribal knowledge on the subject. When considering these things think of the systemic benefits as well. There was a story on the Google self-driving cars in Mountain View not taking a turn when the passengers of the car expected it would. Turns out that the IR sensors on the vehicle saw that a jogger behind a wall of hedges was about to enter the intersection to cross while jogging. Systemically implementing that change across a fleet of cars would then save untold numbers of injuries or lives. We adapt.