Why? We aren't looking at introducing autonomous ambulances any time soon.

They should be compared to taxi/Uber/Lyft drivers that is what is being replaced by this and as such where the net harm increase or reduction will occur.

Why -> because if someone caused an accident I'd want to look them in the eyes and call them names; as opposed to calling a support number. If these vehicles were among the best drivers, at least I could live with it maybe. Emotions are real, you cannot always rationalize them away.

Average drivers sometimes end up in jail for their mistakes. If Waymo made those same mistakes, guess what will happen.

I'm not sure it's possible to solve for that with additional prowess.

If you are wronged by a machine you are always going to be emotional about it, i.e having your email account unceremoniously terminated by Google without recourse by an essentially automated process.

The thing to solve for is the lack of recourse. Very very difficult in American society given how skewed the relationship is between corporations and people (or the government for that matter).

If instead when a Waymo demonstratively caused an accident the payout was 10-100x higher than if a human was involved I suspect many peoples qualms would go away.

While I think just the "knowledge" (assuming Americans would accept facts...) that the driver is X% better than the best drivers on the roads would provide little comfort to most.

I think in societies outside of America these may be more successful actually. i.e most parts of Asia.

You just need to know the injury claims of those drivers vs the average to compare. But I agree, if I were to trust such a system, I'd want it to be a better driver than me, not than average. (And like everyone, I believe I'm significantly above average...)

Both measures are valid.

When the AI is better than the best humans, that's when the best humans finally change career.

There's nothing that requires delaying until that point, the time in which courts order drunk drivers to only be allowed to own self-driving models.

> I'd want to compare to our best drivers (e.g. ambulance drivers), not average drivers.

Why? As long as it is better than the median driver the roads are safer.

> Why? As long as it is better than the median driver the roads are safer.

The intent is to increase miles driven, and the drivers a commercial service can be expected to replace first are professionals, not "median drivers". In practice accident stats are also benchmarked against mean drivers in a world in which serious accidents disproportionately involve inadequate drivers (or conditions Waymo does not deploy in)

Then shouldn’t the comparison be to Uber instead of an ambulance?

Ambulance drivers might be a step too far unless autonomous systems are expected to drive ambulances at high speed and run red lights. But my point is that they really do need to be a lot better than the median driver given their real world operational expectations, and especially significantly better than the mean driver they're being benchmarked against here, who probably loses their license for the bodily injuries they cause...

Well Uber drivers don’t have any special qualifications. That’s kinda the point of Uber. Is there any reason to expect them to be safer than the average driver?

Not being super nervous about being behind the wheel, not showing off their speed to their friends and probably being sober is a starting point

I think we both agree Uber drivers aren't the worst drivers on the road but your assertion is that Uber drivers are professionals and so somehow better drivers than the average. But they aren't. They're actually average drivers. So a self-driving car actually has a very low bar to clear.