The evidence from robotaxis in San Francisco seems to show self-driving cars are already safer than human-driven ones. They'll keep getting better at driving, people won't.
Humans are taught to do their best to obey the law, even and especially when there are flashing lights around.
No that doesn't mean humans are perfect, but at least they're educated what to do when around emergency vehicles. But you throw some flashing lights and shiny reflectors around autonomous vehicles and they spaz out and go stupid.
At least you can charge humans for such negligence, but who do you hold accountable when the vehicle itself doesn't obey the rules of the road, especially when first responders are on the scene and even sometimes trying to tell the car what to do.
If there's an officer trying to direct the car around or through a detour, autonomous cars aren't trained for all that, so they don't even listen. Humans have ears and brain goop to follow orders and change their direction as necessary though.
I mean let's get real, do you trust bits of cryptic silicon over your own brain? When did humans start placing more trust in computers than their own noodles? God knows we've all seen our share of error messages and BSOD's...
If there’s an officer trying to direct the car around or through a detour, autonomous cars aren’t trained for all that, so they don’t even listen.
Do you actually know that to be the case? There was a recent video showing the current state of Tesla self-driving and it was handling detours through construction zones just fine.
I mean let’s get real, do you trust bits of cryptic silicon over your own brain?
In a great many circumstances, yes, very much so. I use GPS to navigate, I time out my activities using clocks and alarms, I use a compiler instead of hand-coding assembly langauge, I communicate using telephones and computers rather than writing letters to be hand-delivered. I have fortunately not needed significant medical treatments in my life, but when it comes to that there will be all manner of medical devices that I'll be trusting my life to.
The reason we trust these technologies is, as I have said, because of statistics. We know that on the whole these things work. Every once in a while someone will come up with an anecdote about that one weird time that the GPS led them astray or an alarm failed or whatever, but those are anecdotes. The plural of anecdote is not data.