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It's actually not a very useful quote because, as you say, taken literally it's an impossibly high bar. What is required to be useful is either

1.) Demonstrably better than human (whatever that means exactly) for a well-defined subset of roads and conditions such as interstate highways under some subset of weather or

2.) Demonstrably better than human for any roads and conditions that a typical adult human would typically be able to navigate door-to-door safely.

1. is a very useful driver assist system, and likely a big win for safety, but you still need a sober adult driver available to take over with reasonable notice. 2. is what you need for robo-taxis to be practical.




There are open questions about whether or not intermediate levels of automation might actually be more dangerous because they lull human drivers into a false sense of security, so I don't even know that 1 is necessarily sufficient.


My assumption with 1 is in the vein of "we're approaching an exit in two miles. Please be ready to take over." i.e. planned disengagement. Yes, any automation system that may fail by going "OMG. Do something now!" is worse than useless. I'm not sure the question is even open.




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