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from the how-long-could-they-last-in-Boston? dept.
A little while back, I saw the following tweet:
I can print mostly. My wifi works often. The Xbox usually recognises me. Siri sometimes works. But my self driving car will be *perfect*.
The tweet has since been deleted, so I won't name the author, but it's a thought-provoking idea. At first, I agreed with it. I'm a programmer and know full well just how shoddy is 99.9% of the code we all write. The idea that I would put my life in the hands of a coder like myself is a bit worrying.
[...] The reality is that self-driving cars don't need to be perfect. They just need to be better than the alternative: human-driven cars. And that is a much lower bar, as human beings are remarkably bad at driving.
[...] Self-driving cars don't get tired. They don't get drunk. They don't get distracted by friends or a crying baby. They don't look away from the road to send a text message. They don't speed, tailgate, brake too late, forget to show a blinker, drive too fast in bad weather, run red lights, race other cars at red lights, or miss exits. Self-driving cars aren't going to be perfect, but they will be a hell of a lot better than you and me.
Related: The High-Stakes Race to Rid the World of Human Drivers
(Score: 1) by YeaWhatevs on Monday January 04 2016, @03:44PM
The analysis in the summary is not quite right. The burden of proof isn't that the cars needs to drive better than the "average" human, including drunk and distracted drivers.
Statistics aren't going to cut it.
To convince me that it's safe, it needs to drive better than ME.
To convince me that it increases road throughput, it needs to get me to work faster.
To convince me to use it at all, it needs to be completely disconnected from the internet.
Now if I'm perpetually boozed, that's a pretty low standard. I'm sure selling a self driving car to well off alcoholics is like shooting fish in a barrel.