Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not at all. Self-driving cars cannot yet safely navigate complex or unusual scenarios. The human backups in test cars still have to take over with good regularity. That's not something you'd see if it were anywhere close to ready. Even with all their data, there aren't enough training examples of every situation. Deep learning models also have a tendency to be pathologically wrong in rare but completely unpredictable…
Point taken. However if you a look at statistics regarding the leading cause of accidents in the US, for example by going to https://www.after-car-accidents.com/car-accident-causes.html It seems that most accidents are caused by human error and humans being distracted or under the influence of a substance. Weather and complex situations would only rank at the bottom of the list and therefore could be considered a YAG…
#1 was speeding. Self driving cars would be trivially programmed not to do that, of course. But this one is tricky to interpret, because Americans habitually speed. That means two things: Speeding is trivially something that can be listed as a factor; it wouldn't be a lot less meaningful to say that bucket seats are a factor. And not speeding might actually be more dangerous. That leaves me thinking this one is equivocal for the purposes of the debate.
#s 2, 3, 4 and 6 are drunk driving, distractions, cell phones, and driver fatigue. Those are easy point for self driving cars, of course.
#5 is weather. This feels like an easy one in favor of humans, considering that all the major self driving car companies deal with weather by avoiding it. That's not much of a vote of confidence.
#6 is red light accidents. I would want to see more about override statistics before interpreting this one. It could be that self-driving cars literally never miss a red light. But, given that some of the intersections in my city have quite confusing traffic light arrangements - reflectors that make the light invisible outside of certain angles, lighted intersections spaced 40 feet apart that are separate lighted intersections nonetheless, printed signs informing drivers of non-standard semantics for that light, wildly varying yellow light durations, etc. - I have my doubts about self-driving cars being able to properly deal with the traffic lights. If there are any tests going on in a similar city, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that operator overrides are routine at lighted intersections.
Zooming out to the big picture, though - the ones that are a clear win for self-driving cars are all instances where the human's decisionmaking capacity has been impaired. Which implies that humans are really quite good at operating vehicles when they aren't being stupid. But it also implies something that I think doesn't get enough credit among many advocates of self-driving cars: the fact that, behind the wheel of every safe self-driving car, there's a highly trained human operator who is not drunk and not tired and not diddling around with their cell phone. And we've got evidence to suggest that, when the human operator is a bit more human, the self driving car's accident rate suddenly spikes considerably.
And that's a big deal. It's common to place those errors on the shoulders of the car's driver, but that's trying to have your cake and eat it too. You can't wave away every fatality involving a car on autopilot by saying, "Oh, that wasn't the car's fault, the driver was being an idiot," and also claim that we've got good evidence to suggest that we know how to make cars operate safely without relying on a human driver to act as a backstop for the fallibility of the human programmers. It may eventually come - I think we all hope it does - but given how, in AI, the last year or two's worth of R&D always ends up taking another decade or two before everyone just gives up on the whole enterprise and moves on to a greener field, a little skepticism is far from unwarranted.