The issue is even more intractable than this. The world accepts that occasionally, a semi truck driver will make a mistake and wipe out a family of 4. Right or

The issue is even more intractable than this. The world accepts that occasionally, a semi truck driver will make a mistake and wipe out a family of 4. Right or wrong, we accept that humans make mistakes. The world will not accept it when a self driving truck does this. Computers are supposed to be perfect, as far as the public is concerned. If a computer killed a bunch of people, there must be a flaw. The fleet must be grounded until the flaw is found and fixed. How much better than a human driver does a self-driving truck need to be before people will accept and trust it? 3x? 10x? Infinitely better? I tend to think the scale trends towards 'infinitely better'. I believe that for self driving vehicles (at least commercial ones) to truly find adoption there's going to have to be the perception that there's still a human supervisor, even if this is a 'polite lie'. Perhaps it will take the form of lower paid and less skilled human 'co-pilots' who are simple there in the truck or taxi cab as 'sin eater' to take the blame when something goes wrong. Or perhaps one individual can monitor several vehicles remotely (in a totally ineffectual manner). At the end of the day though, I think that for the public to accept truly self driving cars in the near-ish future, there's still going to have to be a human they can blame if something goes wrong.