Self driving cars are like airplanes
Yesterday, for the first time, an autonomous car killed a pedestrian . It isn't clear that the car was at fault but we're almost certainly going to have an accident where the car was at fault at some point. At this point autonomous cars haven't driven enough miles for us to know if they're currently safer or more dangerous than human drivers. But I think they have the potential to be much safer in the long run for a combination of technical and institutional reasons. Technically, cars can learn in the same way that humans can. But while we humans are mostly limited to learning from the situations we encounter a fleet of cars can hope to learn as a unit. Some accident occurs, engineers analyze it, and then no car in that fleet will make that particular mistake again. It's reasonable to think about robo-cars trained on a body of experience far greater than a human could amass in a lifetime. And I think that robotic car manufacturers have the right...
