this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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I do think it would be much safer with zero human drivers and only autonomous vehicles on the road, for sure. But I also think it would be impractical to replace everything all at once. Even the best programmed thing would eventually encounter a human driver that defies all previously known data and freaks out the computer.
I don't know anything about how autonomous vehicles work. As far as humans doing unusual things, well assuming the human driver only steers the wheel and controls the gas and breaks, it should be possible with existing technology to avoid crashing into them at least as well as any human can. So that leaves really unusual things, like the human hopping out of their car in the middle of an intersection, as the high-hanging fruit to model. I would imagine for most of these really strange cases, even if the autonomous vehicle can't understand what's happening, they can at least realize that something strange is happening and then pull over.
Obviously there will be truly unusual situations that cause fatal collisions. So long as that is at a lower rate, then what's the safety concern?
Safety is a red herring IMO, as better code can fix it. There are much worse potential problems that autonomous vehicles will cause than rare collisions. NotJustBikes has a lot of points I'd never considered before in the second half of this video. (The first half, though, I found aggravating; it's just about solvable safety risks.)