Yes, humans can drive, and that fact is literally remarkable. You have remarked upon it, I am remarking now upon it.
Can we drive well? Compared to what would be the interesting question. By all reports, self-driving cars will be much safer than human driven cars. By contrast, self-walking machines do not generally outperform humans or animals, machines for image recognition or voice recognition do not outperform humans. Perhaps it is going to be harder for us to beat, or even equal, with machines what we have spent millions of years evolving, while it may be much easier for us to beat with machines things we were not evolved to do. Presumably in self-driving cars, many aspects of other-vehicle and road situational awareness are hard to beat a human at, but the overall decision making algorithm of how to drive turns out to be easy to beat humans at, so that even early attempts are much safer than humans manage.
Note parenthetically that safer really does mean better if the cars are going the same speed as humans. Automated car system designers will have a tradeoff to make as time goes on between increasing the speed of automated car traffic at the expense of higher accident rates. There will be some optimum based on some implicit, or perhaps by then we will have matured enough to make it explicit, estimate of the value of a human life.
SO yeah, we can drive, but because we did not evolve to drive we do it poorly enough that even the earliest driving machines will be much better at it than us.
Yes, humans can drive, and that fact is literally remarkable. You have remarked upon it, I am remarking now upon it.
Can we drive well? Compared to what would be the interesting question. By all reports, self-driving cars will be much safer than human driven cars. By contrast, self-walking machines do not generally outperform humans or animals, machines for image recognition or voice recognition do not outperform humans. Perhaps it is going to be harder for us to beat, or even equal, with machines what we have spent millions of years evolving, while it may be much easier for us to beat with machines things we were not evolved to do. Presumably in self-driving cars, many aspects of other-vehicle and road situational awareness are hard to beat a human at, but the overall decision making algorithm of how to drive turns out to be easy to beat humans at, so that even early attempts are much safer than humans manage.
Note parenthetically that safer really does mean better if the cars are going the same speed as humans. Automated car system designers will have a tradeoff to make as time goes on between increasing the speed of automated car traffic at the expense of higher accident rates. There will be some optimum based on some implicit, or perhaps by then we will have matured enough to make it explicit, estimate of the value of a human life.
SO yeah, we can drive, but because we did not evolve to drive we do it poorly enough that even the earliest driving machines will be much better at it than us.