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But humans too have life-threatening bugs, especially when combined with an automobile. Car+driver combinations have blind spots, for example. Human drivers

But humans too have life-threatening bugs, especially when combined with an automobile. Car+driver combinations have blind spots, for example. Human drivers get drunk, get distracted, and spill coffee in their laps. I think autonomous cars will kill people, and they will kill people in situations where human drivers would not. But I'm finding it increasingly easy to imagine that autonomous driving will save lives overall.

Silhouette 6y ago
Yes, human driving is far from perfect and sometimes that has tragic consequences. But there are two issues at play here. The first is whether we expect the autonomous vehicles to become safer than the population of human drivers they would be replacing under normal circumstances. This is a population measure, and it's about overall safety and averages, and given enough time and data it seems a realistic outcome. The second is the risk of a single catastrophic failure, which is a risk that doesn't generally exist with today's human-controlled vehicles. It is no exaggeration to say that the kinds of autonomous vehicle technologies we are conceiving here have the potential, if they go wrong, to cause more harm than any WMD ever deployed in war. And not only the theoretical potential, but given the current state of our software development abilities, a non-trivial chance of it actually happening in practice. Until we've dealt with the latter problem, which I don't believe we currently know how to solve, any arguments based on the long-term superiority of autonomous vehicles over the capabilities of any human driver is going to be fundamentally flawed.