> My reasoning is that people will only trust perfection when it comes to riding in a self-driving vehicle. From what I've seen I think your model of human beh

> My reasoning is that people will only trust perfection when it comes to riding in a self-driving vehicle. From what I've seen I think your model of human behavior is flawed. Aircraft have been mostly fly-by-wire for decades and software flaws have led to some crashes (most recently those of the 737 Max), but that hasn't stopped people from flying in planes. People have already been killed by self-driving cars, but that hasn't stopped the testing programs. Tesla automation (though far from full self-driving) has led to a number of fatal accidents yet people still buy Tesla's and I haven't heard of any public outcry to ban them from the roads. I too am skeptical that we'll be seeing full self-driving cars anytime soon, but not for the reason you give. I think the real issue is that AI-like technology has a 90-10 problem. It's relatively easy to get to 90% of human level performance but that last 10% is much much harder - unpredictably harder. Unfortunately self-driving cars are an area where 90% isn't good enough, even 99% isn't good enough. You probably need to get to something like 5 or 6 9's to be acceptable for broad general use and no AI-like technology has yet gotten anywhere close to that. EDIT: I didn't mean to imply that the 737 Max is fly-by-wire, but the MCAS system that caused the crashes is a comparable technology.