You have to wonder, when you see these stories, whether the engineers in charge of these programs spent much time driving around, trying to see the road like an AI might. In my experience, driving in the city, it's rare that I can go more than a few miles before some exception comes up that requires human judgment. Here's a few of the things I saw just last week: * Car double parked. Do I cross the center line to go…
And the amazing part is there are millions of drivers on the road right now that have absolutely no idea how to handle those cases, and do an exceedingly bad job of it. From the very new drivers, to people who simply don't drive often, to people who got their license in another country where the rules are entirely different (me!), to the very elderly who are losing their sight, reflexes and judgement and people playi…
I think there's an abundance of drivers that are almost always unsuitable for the most challenging situations, or for whom the roadway or conditions encountered are completely unsuitable themselves.
Collisions are everywhere and are dwarfed by near-misses. Fatalities are statistically limited by hazard mitigation, safety measures, and a seemingly larger portion of miraculous good fortune.
Some drivers are completely out of control and some even like it that way. There is a much smaller amount of mechanical or health failures.
These all can be the riskiest due to unpredictability.
We will have to admit that each out-of-control driver can exhibit perhaps completely unexpected and unique behavior from each other, because that's what they've always done.
That's not a very high bar for different out-of-control AI events by comparison.
Tragedies occurring from individual human driving deficiencies have been largely attributed to social effects, because the underlying mechanical engineering performance has been so overwhelmingly predictable by comparison.
With AI different unforseen tragedies are to be expected, and it will not be due to any recognized or imagined individual human driver deficiency. Attribution will be squarely on the engineering team deficiencies when it comes to the programmable electronics that were overlaid onto the fundamentally predictable 20th-century-proven mechanical platform.
There could be deaths that can not be dealt with using natural human social constructs.
Being killed by an out-of-control robot is always going to be something that's supposed to be nearly impossible to occur, compared to being killed by an out-of-control human.
Anyway, with emerging programming technologies sometimes actually achieving highly suitable goals which were only reachable when combined with ideal support, and a sales/advertising mentality that can make up the difference when the incredible engineering effort has done all it can and the goal is not quite met nor suitable, everything's looking better than ever so what could go wrong?