The US has around one traffic fatality per 100 million miles driven; if a human driver makes 100 decisions per mile
A human driver does not make 100 “life or death decisions” per mile. They make many more decisions, most of which can easily be corrected, if wrong, by another decision.
The statistic is misleading though in that it includes people who text, drunk drivers, tired drivers. The performance of a well rested human driver that’s paying attention to the road is much, much higher than that. And that’s really the bar that matters for self driving car, you don’t want a car that is doing better than the average driver who—hey you never know—could be a drunk.
Yes, the median driver is much better than the mean driver. But what matters is the mean, not the median.
If we can replace all drivers by robots, what matters is whether the robot is better than the mean human. Of course, it’s not all at once. It’s about the marginal change. What matters is the mean taxi driver, who probably isn’t drunk. Another margin is the expansion of taxis: if robotaxis are cheaper than human taxis, the expansion of taxis may well be replacing drunk or tired drivers.
A human driver does not make 100 “life or death decisions” per mile. They make many more decisions, most of which can easily be corrected, if wrong, by another decision.
The statistic is misleading though in that it includes people who text, drunk drivers, tired drivers. The performance of a well rested human driver that’s paying attention to the road is much, much higher than that. And that’s really the bar that matters for self driving car, you don’t want a car that is doing better than the average driver who—hey you never know—could be a drunk.
Yes, the median driver is much better than the mean driver. But what matters is the mean, not the median.
If we can replace all drivers by robots, what matters is whether the robot is better than the mean human. Of course, it’s not all at once. It’s about the marginal change. What matters is the mean taxi driver, who probably isn’t drunk. Another margin is the expansion of taxis: if robotaxis are cheaper than human taxis, the expansion of taxis may well be replacing drunk or tired drivers.