Self-Driving vs Human Drivers

The cluster debates whether self-driving cars need to be perfect or just safer than average human drivers, highlighting human flaws like distraction and recklessness while noting AVs' potential advantages in safety and error correction.

📉 Falling 0.3x AI & Machine Learning
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Keywords

AFAIK AI AGI ML GI SDC LIDAR self driving driving human drivers human cars drivers humans driver driving cars self driving cars

Sample Comments

fsflover Dec 29, 2022 View on HN

Sounds similar to the arguments against self-driving: "Self-driving itself isn't the challenge. It is self-driving better than humans". AFAIK this is already possible at least under certain conditions or at certain roads.

dbish Jul 4, 2024 View on HN

it's the self-driving car problem. Humans aren't perfect either but people like to ignore that.

bluGill Jun 6, 2017 View on HN

The self driving car doesn't need to be perfect, it needs to be better than humans. That is a much lower bar. Self driving cars have already demonstrated their ability to handle traffic better than humans, but there are other situations where they are much worse.

ilaksh Sep 3, 2023 View on HN

AI driven cars are not highly flawed and very, very rarely kill people. Humans driving cars are often reckless or intoxicated and kill many, many people every day.

bluGill Dec 12, 2025 View on HN

Have you ever looked at how humans drive? Not the drunks, but the average person - they are terrible. You are not better. Self driving doesn't have to be very good to be better than humans.

t43562 Jun 4, 2023 View on HN

It's fairly obvious that cars cannot think at the level of humans and are at a disadvantage sometimes. We also don't need fully autonomous driving to prevent careless mistakes.

xkcd-sucks Aug 12, 2018 View on HN

That's because you're comparing a abstract, idealized self-driving cars to real-world human drivers

dotancohen Jul 8, 2024 View on HN

This is how I feel about cars that can drive themselves 99.9% of the time. The remaining 0.1%, the most difficult of corner cases, are to be handled by the human who has no experience driving even in good conditions.

lafar6502 Apr 6, 2018 View on HN

ha ha i dont see how this is supposed to improve safety. Maybe it's safer than having no driver at all but if we're talking about being better than typical human then the safest thing to do is to switch this thing off.

mikeash Sep 25, 2013 View on HN

Let's not forget that all of the things you list are things that humans are pretty bad at. A self-driving car doesn't need to perfectly handle strange situations, it just needs to handle them better than most people, which is a much lower bar.Not saying we'll get there anytime soon, I don't know well enough to say. But I find that people in these discussions tend to overestimate the skill of most human drivers on the road.