I find the topic of self driving cars fascinating. Not so much for the technology, but what it reveals about people's not-so-rational dreams and expectations. Much the same as the apparent yearning for 'AI servants and industrial production', but with the added dimension of staking your life on the software controlling a high speed vehicle.
A few points:
* Any highly automated system with some kind of always-on net connectivity will be susceptible to remote hijacking. Don't even bother to talk about computer security, in a world where (for eg) hardware level backdoors are built into all contemporary Intel CPUs, all network routers, all cell phones, etc. Ask Michael Hastings about the pros and cons of remote vehicle operation.
* All complex software systems are prone to obscure bugs and design mistakes. Some are more stupid than others (eg Boeing's 'please fly us into the ground right now' brilliant idea.)
* The nature of the problem prevents 'perfection.' Road driving is a highly complex task, with infinite numbers of obscure marginal and tricky cases. Even alert, skilled humans get fooled sometimes and end up in accidents. Some of which are high speed and fatal. No level of AI is going to completely eliminate all situational f*ck-ups. Self-driving cars ultimately involve a statistical risk evaluation: What added probability of death or maiming do you accept for the 'convenience' of not being in control of the vehicle yourself?
* What's the actual benefit of not being in control? What kind of person could actually nap, or concentrate on some productive task, while being carried at speed by an AI system? I definitely never could. Idle conversation, maybe. But that's not something I'd choose to even want, let alone try. I can relax in trains, because that infrastructure is very good at achieving an extremely low risk. Planes, because again quite low risk, and skilled humans are in charge (unless a new Boeing...) Cars on ordinary roads - never!
* At a political level, there are too many ideologues trying to impose restrictions on individual travel, and also track such travel. Taxing travel at a rate per Km, requires logging of travel. Automated cars can be legislated to support that. Tracking for social control, ditto. Schemes like China's 'social credit', also would find automated cars useful. How about governments mandating things like rationed travel, selected days when you are allowed to travel, zones you are not allowed to enter, and so on? Automated cars enable all that kind of bullshit.
* Privacy. Given that Google, Amazon, etc 'home assistants' are being revealed to upload a lot of information about conversations in the home (and commonly making comical interpretation mistakes), do you want that in cars as well?
* Legal liability. I can't wait till this issue becomes prominent through increasing numbers of accidents in which no human adult was responsible. I wonder if legal principles for dealing with AI in general, will be founded in road accident case precedent? That will go well, not.
Then there are the fundamental philosophical issues with increasingly general purpose AI systems (which is where self-driving cars will be forced to go, by virtue of the complexity of the problem.) There are many questions here. For instance, how wide is the window of workability, in which the car is smart enough to get the job done, but not smart enough to get in a snit about something you said to it, and refuse to do the job? (Or decide to suicide, with you as passenger.)
Meanwhile, I'm keeping my old, pre-engine-management-computer car. Self-driving car technology is good for one thing - entertainment, in watching a fairly predictable developing social insanity.