Item — HN Reader

> deaths […] with humans at the wheel, and a sizable number of them are due to the limits of human visual spectrum input.

There will always be situations where (human or computer) captors aren’t sufficient. You can add more sensors or blame the existing one. Until that, a typical driver adapt its velocity depending on his capabilities and the road/weather. In my country that also partially enforced by the driving code: freeway is limited to 130km/h but reduced to 110km/h if it’s raining or 50km/h if visibility is less than 50m.

Adding more sensors will let you increase your speed but if you want safety, look for your speed.

1 comments

> Until that, a typical driver ?? adapt its velocity depending on his capabilities and the road/weather.

There’s an important missing word here, do you mean “should” or “does” where I’ve added in question marks? Because people hit moose and deer all the time, I think it would be good if everyone would drive safely, but they don’t.

An autonomous car with capabilities similar to a human that is designed by responsible engineers to drive safely would not be very popular I think, it would drive very slowly and annoy the passengers.

And of course an autonomous car that was as dangerous as a human would be the subject of all sorts of news reports and chatter online, and nobody would buy it because it would be seen as too dangerous.

It isn’t fair, but we won’t see widespread adoption until the average person can anthropomorphize a model of a car as, like, a guy they know who drives a lot and has never gotten in an accident. Because the Tesla algorithm is what we hear about, we think of it as being a single entity that drives all Teslas, and it ran into a fire truck or whatever, so it must be kind of an idiot.