This is why I believe the approach of incremental improvement towards full self driving is fundamentally flawed. These advanced driver assist tools are good enough to lull users into a false sense of security. No amount of "but our terms and conditions say you need to always pay attention!" will overcome human nature building that trust and dependence.
It depends. As long as the resulting package (flawed self driving system + the average driver) isn't significantly more dangerous than the average unassisted human driver, I don't consider it irresponsible to deploy it. "The average driver" includes everyone, ranging from drivers using it as intended with close supervision, drivers who become inattentive because nothing is happening, and drivers who think it's a reas…
Doesn't this hide a paradox? Using a self-driving car as intended implies that the driver relinquishes a part of the human decision making process to the car. While close supervision implies that the driver can always take control back from the car, and therefore carries full personal responsibility of what happens.
The caveat here is that the car might make decisions in a rapidly changing, complex context which the driver might disagree with, but has no time to correct for through manual intervention. e.g. hitting a cyclist because the autonomous system made an erroneous assertion.
Here's another way of looking at this: if you're in a self-driving car, are you a passenger or a driver? Do you intend to drive the car yourself or let the car transport you to your destination?
In the unassisted scenario, it's clear that both intentions are one and the same. If you want to get to your location, you can't but drive the car yourself. Therefore you can't but assume full personal responsibility for your driving. Can the same be said about a vehicle that's specifically designed and marketed as "self-driving" and "autonomous"?
As a driver, you don't just relinquish part of the decision making process to the car, what essentially happens is that you put your trust in how the machine learning processes that steer the car were taught to perceive the world by their manufacturer. So, if both car and occupant disagree and the ensuing result is an accident, who's at fault? The car? The occupant? The manufacturer? Or the person seeking damages because their dog ended up wounded?
The issue here isn't that self-driving cars are inherently more dangerous then their "dumb" counter parts. It's that driving a self-driving car creates it's own separate class of liabilities and questions regarding responsible driving when accidents do happen.