>>The same is true to some extent with buses, taxis and Uber - as long as they have human "pilots".
>>
>>Besides that, if something goes wrong you can throw a human "pilot" in jail. Throwing a computer in jail somehow isn't quite as satisfying ;)
>
>I think the person who programmed the system gets to go to jail.

Which still doesn't make it right. It's the guy who designed the system, and often even his hands are tied, as he wasn't given a budget on which he could investigate the oddball cases which may happen. So the budget isn't created until some shit happens; the initial "solve 90% of typical cases and the humans will take care of the rest now that they have the time" rapidly turns into "we have all these guys sitting around doing nothing, fire them and look nice on the stock market - we reduced costs!". Which then means there's nobody at the helm to handle the oddball cases.

Here's one that happened to me just today. I needed to talk with someone abroad, and noticed that I got less than 2€ on my skype account. OK, that time of the year... log in into skype.com, find the thing to click - ah, it remembers that I'm using paypal. Click. Now it wants me to select payment method and paypal isn't preselected. Which idiots coded this? From one page to the next it forgets. Go through the motions... six times. Each time, somewhere in the background, I get an email from paypal that the payment was refused, no explanation. In the "contact paypal" I get the FAQ page. Which is outrageous, FAQ does not equal "contact", and the link doesn't carry the order number so I have to go back to the email to copy it. The enquiry I made on the page has a huge validation error message about missing transaction number. Yeah, right, the 90% of the complaints are about transactions which did happen, but this is one which didn't, where are your humans to handle that? Or, better, where was the designer of your system to tell the coder include an explanation in that email?

The FQ page says something about "expired credit card". Yeah, right, I never had one, it was always debit. And it expired five years ago, and you didn't care until two months ago, because I always had enough money on paypal account. So... what changed? The money is still there. Ah, I guess the explanation, and the link to it, wouldn't fit into your minimalistic, fit-to-phone-screen pages. Design above function, right. Because 90% of your traffic comes from phones, right.

Now translate these lines into a software driven car. It would probably work just fine in the designer's city. It would probably fail on dozens of cases elsewhere, because it wouldn't know what to do

- in several streets here where the undercarriage of the roads is washed away gradually by underground waters, so the manhole covers are sticking out; pretty much everyone is veering a bit left or right to avoid them
- there are bicycles on the road
- there may be teenage girls on rollers on the road - the sidewalks having rain grooves under every gutter and other causes for uneven surface; ditto for people in wheelchairs
- there are streets where pavement is 1,5 lanes wide - we routinely adjust our speed to pass the car from the other direction at the corner or where the shoulder is less bumpy - would you trust the software to recognize the bumpiness of the shoulder?
- there may be grain on the pavement from the tractor or truck in front; it's more slippery than ice, does the software recognize that?
- I may be carrying vats with liquid in the back and drive accordingly, with no sudden movements. Where in the GUI do I find the setting for that?
- our traffic lights blink green three times before they go red. It's still green and OK to drive through while it blinks, it's if you see it from some distance to tell you you'll be late. I don't know of any other country where this is the default setting. How high on the priority list is this setting?
- we also have a conditional right green light (without its own yellow and red), same question as above
- how much graffiti on the traffic sign can it take until it declares it unreadable?
- how does it know whether it's a traffic sign and not an advertisement?

Until most of these are resolved, I remain not just skeptical, but actively distrusting the software in the cars.