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Self-Driving Cars Should Be Legal Because They Pass Safety Tests, Argues Google (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes an article on The Verge: Chris Urmson, director of Google's self-driving car project, has sent a letter to US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx today with a plan for selling autonomous vehicles that have no steering wheels or pedals. The plan appears to be pretty straightforward: Urmson argues that if a self-driving car can pass standardized federal safety tests, they should be road-legal. Urmson adds that regulators could 'set conditions that limit use based on safety concerns.'
There are plenty of computers in use (a lot of the better ones are running Linux or an RTOS and hell, even Windows NT/CE/XP) that people trust their lives to implicitly on a daily basis in a lot more delicate situations than driving a car. Commercial planes do most of the flying fully autonomous, most of both your debt and savings is being invested fully automated, any machine in a hospital parses a lot more data than a few dozen sensor and requires much more precision.
Have you seen a commercial plane without human pilots ? I thought so.
Driverless cars will never ever come on the road. Unless you somehow want a driverless tram-like system.
But I don't see an AI coping with unexpected events in a timely fashion ever. Google and others like them are trying to sell a pie in the sky dream. Beware.