From the article : "But it’s not enough to answer the most important safety question: whether Waymo’s technology makes fatal crashes less likely."
Wouldn't the most important safety question be "whether Waymo’s technology makes fatal crashes MORE likely?" Why assume Autonomous Vehicles have to perform better?
A significant proportion of the current fatal accident rate is based on incidents which involve driving so bad that humans implicated are severely punished for it, or at least banned from driving for a period.
Why would anyone set the benchmark for a commercial driving company lower?
Why do you assume "properly licensed" drivers will be better? My driving test in the United States was a joke. Many are the same. Nothing about it prepared me to be a good driver (which I am not). To me, the phrase "properly licensed" means nothing more than I hold a small card in my wallet that say I am allowed to drive this car. It says nothing about my skill level.
I disagree. Some people will drunk drive no matter the legal consequences, or in my case, I once rear-ended someone because I was drowsy but kept driving because I wanted to get home (fortunately no one was hurt, and yes, the accident was completely my fault). The comparison should be against the general population of human drivers because that's the reality on the road.
You really think the safety bar for running a commercial autonomous taxi service should be set lower than the average human legally entitled to drive!?!
because everyone thinks they're above average. If you're only better than the below average drivers, then everyone will think they're better off driving themselves even if that's not true.
Also, we've accepted and made legal frameworks around the concept that people sometimes kill each other with cars. Robots killing people with cars does not benefit from this carve out.
> hence I will not trust any system that does not perform at least as well as I do.
...which is a pretty big fallacy and, if implemented as law (which I am working to make sure it is not), will get a lot of people killed.
Literal drug addicts, people driving under the influence of alcohol, and people driving distracted are driving right now. Even AV that performs at the level of the median driver will massively reduce the number of those people actually making driving decisions, and therefore directly reduce road deaths.
Why? Because most accidents and deaths are caused by drivers performing at the low end of the spectrum. In the US, a full third of accidents are caused by drunk driving - which would be virtually nonexistent with AVs ("virtually" because the AVs aren't going to be perfect and are going to need manual intervention).
The bar is literally the average, because if everyone drove average, deaths would plummet.
And, unlike the American public, it's massively easier to improve AV driving behavior than average human driver behavior. A system that starts out eliminating the lower end of driving performance while improving over time is a deal too good to turn down if you care about human life.
I am a terrible driver -- so easily distracted. Almost zero men I have met in my life are willing to admit the same. (However, some women in my life do.) As a result, I try to avoid driving as much as possible and use mass transit.
Wouldn't the most important safety question be "whether Waymo’s technology makes fatal crashes MORE likely?" Why assume Autonomous Vehicles have to perform better?
Waymo less fatalities == Win
Waymo same fatalities == Draw
Waymo more fatalities == Bad Waymo