These stories make for interesting reading but I'm more interested in the crashes per miles of these cars and how they compare to other vehicles. Are they safer or are they not? Or are they getting safer vs previous crashes?
Given all the cars and all the distracted driver, there will always be crashes. The fact that this car got in a crash is not that out of the ordinary. It's likely to happen again. I just hope they become very rare.
The interesting part is that the car stopped instead of moving out of the way.
A human has an instinct to avoid collisions that evidently is absent in their model.
The question is how long is the long tail, and how hard is it to instill common sense things like crash avoidance in unusual scenarios.
Humans benefit from a few hundred million years of training on “run away when things fast approaching”, even if “thing” is totally outside our training set.
Gradient descent doesn’t really have fear / self-preservation, and adding that in runs into Asimovs laws immediately. Interesting stuff.
Also - there are better and worse ways to get seriously injured. Something about the total lack of autonomy in current self driving cars is both horrifying and infantilizing. Sitting in the middle of an intersection with oncoming traffic and having absolutely no control over you own imminent death or injury would certainly make me re-evaluate categories of risks.
Given all the cars and all the distracted driver, there will always be crashes. The fact that this car got in a crash is not that out of the ordinary. It's likely to happen again. I just hope they become very rare.