this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
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This is the fundamental problem with automated cars and remote (or embedded) kill switches: they can never account for the edge cases that humans can readily adapt to. People will die as a result of those edge cases. Will it save more than it costs in human life, and are we willing to make that trade as a society? I can't answer that but neither can the people making the decisions to make Waymo profitable over public safety.
Yeah I’m pretty sure it will. Humans are also incompetent, egotistical, self-righteous drivers. Statistics say humans are in reality poor drivers and I’m confident the self-driving car will be safer overall
But there will always be those edge cases where a human could perhaps do better. They have different weaknesses. So it won’t be a clear cut decision when self-driving would be widely allowed
This was also my opinion from doing a trial of full self driving. It did an amazing job, and most of my corrections were wrong. It is already safer than a human in “normal driving” and has been for a while. But every drive had edge cases where it just wasn’t ready.
Yeah the only real solution to this problem is to put a genuinely competent AGI into the car. Which of course of course they've known from the start, but have never been prepared to admit.
It's not really a solution to rely on something that doesn't exist. The closest we can get is to have a person there to oversee and be liable for whatever happens.