>Cruise and Waymo say city officials have mischaracterized their safety track records. Their driverless taxis, the companies say, have lower collision rates than human drivers and public transit.
This is comparing the mean driverless incident rate to the mean human driver incident rate. This is disingenuous, since a small minority of human drivers cause the vast majority of incidents, thereby severely inflating the mean human incident rate.
Today's self-driving cars may be safer than the mean human driver, but I would wager they are far from the median human driver, and absolutely nowhere close to the top 10% of human drivers. It may be possible (but very difficult) to beat the median human with dramatic improvements to current self-driving algorithms, but beating the top 10% of human drivers will require AGI.
This is comparing the mean driverless incident rate to the mean human driver incident rate. This is disingenuous, since a small minority of human drivers cause the vast majority of incidents, thereby severely inflating the mean human incident rate.
Today's self-driving cars may be safer than the mean human driver, but I would wager they are far from the median human driver, and absolutely nowhere close to the top 10% of human drivers. It may be possible (but very difficult) to beat the median human with dramatic improvements to current self-driving algorithms, but beating the top 10% of human drivers will require AGI.