And perversely, if accidents happened one tenth as often, they'd become news, and people would think they were more common and dangerous than they do now. The question is whether we can get to a point of no return with self-driving cars before that effect takes hold.
> The question is whether we can get to a point of no return with self-driving cars before that effect takes hold.
Insurance companies can take care of that too. Just charge a huge premium to drivers who want to drive by themselves. You'll see even the most confident macho driver submit to the AI overlords.
Unfortunately this is true, much like all the news about the Model S fire. Plus many people have an inherent distrust of technology. I would go so far as to think many people would see an accident caused by an autonomous vehicle to be somehow worse than a "normal" accident.
That said, it does seem inevitable; just a matter of time (perhaps a lot of it).
Finally, I suspect it will be necessary (more for PR than technical reasons) to require a capable driver ready to take over in case the autopilot were to fail, much like with commercial airliners, at least during the initial adoption period. And if so, it also seems inevitable that the majority of crashes ostensibly caused by these vehicles will in fact be due to drivers taking control and making poor decisions at inopportune times. You know when people complain about GPS because it led them astray, but it turns out the real problem was they didn't trust it in the first place, so ignored its directions?
I think most rational people would come to realize that even if the 1/10 of deaths are caused by computer errors then at least the problem can be fixed over time. With human error, there's not much you can do.
This is just it. Most people aren't rational, and they don't think statistics apply when they are causally involved. How many people have you met who think that "don't drink and drive" doesn't apply to them because they "can hold their liquor" or "have had enough practice driving drunk"?
The match up isn't even when you have "random thing happens and you die" on one side and "dangerous situation happens where your personal ability plays a small role" on the other. The only way I can see to spin it is to convince people that they don't want to be on the road with other human drivers.
> if the 1/10 of deaths are caused by computer errors then at least the problem can be fixed over time.
This only follows through if you don't introduce new technology and innovations to your software (and thus new bugs), which isn't going to happen.
If you look at air travel, the number of fatal accidents occurring each decade since the 1950s has stayed around the same, even though we've significantly improved automated systems and reduced the potential for pilot error.
The number of accidents has perhaps stayed roughly the same but there's a hell of a lot more planes flying every day now. So it's highly likely that the accident rate per flight has dropped dramatically. (Though I don't have the data handy to support either hypothesis).
This will be taken care of by insurance companies. If the data is there to show that automatic cars are involved in a lot less accidents than regular cars, the insurance premium will be prohibitively expensive for non-automatic cars. Only rich folks will be able to drive.
why would premiums be higher than they are now? Premiums for automatic should be lower. No reason for current premiums to go up. With all other automatic cars on the road, even a man driven car is less likely to be in an accident than currently. Premiums all around should go down.
