"I'd rather share the road exclusively with other humans that fear death just as much as I do."
Assuming you fear death enough to give your full attention to driving safely, how do you hope to accomplish this wonderful utopia? There will always be drunk, distracted, aggressive, tired, epileptic, vision impaired drivers as long as humans are driving. The true solution is to remove all human drivers and only have computers that don't need to worry about unpredictability of other cars, because the cars communicate directly.
Everyone seems to be downvoting you but I agree. Our tech is not even nearly in the universe of good enough to strap to a 2 ton vehicle traveling at 100kph along random roads.
And by tech I'm including security, because that's the part that I'm worried about too. There's so much incentive for bad actors to mess with these systems, and the consequences are catastrophic.
Just imagine setting up a hidden 1550nm lidar jammer/spammer to confuse cars on a freeway. You could make cars crash and nobody would even know it was there. Even if it made only 0.1% of the cars just slightly more likely to crash, it could still cause deaths.
Also RCE and DOS attacks now the cars have remote start and other stupid "features" that increase the attack surface.
I'm sure there's many more malicious scenarios you can imagine.
Everyone on here seems so keen for these self-driving cars to take over, but there's just so many avenues for abuse and our road laws are not set up to handle all the complications.
I'm probably not the strawman you thought you were talking to, but I'll bite. I'm nervous about the prospect of buggy/vulnerable self-driving programs, but I'd say I'm even less comfortable sharing the road with the dozens of texting drivers I see everyday, and the several drunk drivers I report each year, along with many more that I just don't see, and the multitudes who can't be bothered to use their turning signals or check blinds spots on the highway.
Given that automobile accidents are currently one of the most likely ways that you will meet your demise, would you agree that decreasing the likelihood of accidents is a worthwhile pursuit?
As I understand it, increased safety is one of the primary motivators for self-driving cars. I think it's fairly obvious that this goal has not been realized yet. But it's one motivator for a lot of people, one which you don't seem to acknowledge.
> I don't recall ever being asked whether I consent to sharing the road with non-human drivers. I don't
Society does not require individual people's consent in determining which vehicles drive on the road. If it did, there would be no large pickup trucks, because I would never have allowed them.
