> just monitoring the system in case something goes wrong increases the likelihood of accident significantly.
That depends on the rate of system failure. I used an early form of autopilot and you quickly started to pay attention to where the system would fail. It was like cruse control where you look for situations where you can turn it on but never stop paying attention.
At the other end with really safe systems they are going to default to safer than a human driver. So, there might be a significantly deadlier middle ground, but no company has deployed anything like that yet.
> I used an early form of autopilot and you quickly started to pay attention to where the system would fail. It was like cruse control where you look for situations where you can turn it on but never stop paying attention.
You may do this, but I bet the majority of people do not. I know that Google has data about it's self-driving cars that they know their "safety drivers" simply don't pay attention. In Uber's case - here in the Phoenix area last year - this inattention helped to cause an arguably avoidable fatal accident. These were people supposedly trained not to do this - yet they did.
As far as cruise control is concerned - there've been more than a few accidents of people thinking it did more than it does, and not pay attention to the road in front of them. Tesla's autopilot system, while better than simple cruise control, has - because of this better system (and poor marketing) - caused people to think it does more than it can, and has led them to sleeping in their vehicles while it "drove", to being completely inattentive, etc.
It is pretty well known at this point that those "middle levels" of self-driving technologies are things that shouldn't be implemented, because people either misunderstand them, or misuse them, leading to often fatal accidents.
When I mean early I am talking a system that stops working every 60 seconds or so. The constant failure instilled a fair amount of paranoia, and did not give enough time to cause boredom.
Google’s cars are in that middle ground, but Google has also not released their system. Presumably they are going to wait until it’s as safe as the average driver before releasing it.
That depends on the rate of system failure. I used an early form of autopilot and you quickly started to pay attention to where the system would fail. It was like cruse control where you look for situations where you can turn it on but never stop paying attention.
At the other end with really safe systems they are going to default to safer than a human driver. So, there might be a significantly deadlier middle ground, but no company has deployed anything like that yet.