[LINK] Cars, again

[David]

On Wed, 15 Nov 2017 15:26:20 Jim Birch wrote:

>>> This is a complex task, but guess what? Computer systems can already drive cars, and they can do it well.
>>
>> Not when they T-bone trucks and kill the driver!
>
> Choosing anecdotal evidence seems wrong to me.  Personally I'd prefer a statistical approach.  Expert drivers have killed a lot of people too.  Hey, let's not let them on the roads either.

This report wasn't anecdotal, it was completely factual.

And no valid statistical conclusion can be drawn from one instance of a fatal accident involving a Tesla car operating in full autonomous mode when the total population of "Tesla cars operating in full autonomous mode" is also so small.

The Guardian article at  https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jun/14/statistically-self-driving-cars-are-about-to-kill-someone-what-happens-next  begins:  "One hundred million.  That’s the number of miles, on average, that it takes a human driver to kill someone in the United States.  It’s also the number of miles Tesla’s semi-autonomous ‘Autopilot’ feature had racked up by May this year [2016]."  Those facts are easily checked, although it's not clear how much human supervision was involved in the "Autopilot" mileage.

But even assuming the Autopilot mileage involved no human supervision and there was only one fatality in that period (the Tesla T-boning a truck), assumptions favouring the Tesla, it's certainly not clear the Autopilot accident record is any better than that of human drivers.

Let's review the situation when there have been 10 or 20 Autopilot fatalities.

David L.