Should human car drivers be banned?

Source background

Google cars have clocked up over
one million miles on public roads.

David Lee writes in "Google self-driving car hits a bus" that the previously perfect record of Google's self-driving cars, or autonomous vehicles (AVs) as Google calls them, might be about to end (2016). Two weeks ago, on February 14, a Google AV had a minor collision with a public bus in California. According to Lee, the Google human who was in the Google car did not disagree with the computer's decision. This is the first time that a Google car with the computer making the driving decisions might be found to have made a mistake that caused an accident. Whether the accident, which harmed no one, was caused by the computer driving the car or the human driving the bus will be decided in a meeting between Google and California's Department of Motor Vehicles. But whatever the outcome of that meeting, Lee tells us that Google's computers have already had their driving improved to make better decisions in similar situations in future.

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My Yes/No question is:
Should human car drivers be banned?

My answer is:
Yes, human drivers should be banned, but not this week. When I first read this BBC News story, the question that came to mind, and which for a short time was my Yes/No question above and for the title of this post, was: Would you use a self-driving car? My answer to this was a much stronger "Yes." Even if they have had a few accidents, always the fault of other drivers, I think the statistical evidence shows that Google's computers make better decisions than most human drivers. Driving is perhaps a little more complex than playing chess, at which computers have been much better than humans for some years now, so why shouldn't they also be better drivers? Having been driven by my mother for many years, and always amazed that she did not have accidents, I have no trouble imaging that I would be safer in a car controlled by a machine. And I remember how bad I was at driving when I used to do it in Australia - I only ever had one accident, and that was not serious, but a machine would not have made the same mistake I did.

So, why do I think that humans should be banned from driving? If you think that avoiding accidents that kill, main or damage property are to be avoided, then it makes sense to insist on the best safety options. At the moment, the law insists that all passengers wear safety belts, at least when seated in the front. Similarly, the law demands that drivers not be under the influence of alcohol, that deadliest of drugs which tears apart families and destroys homes in Thailand's horrifyingly high traffic death statistics. It will probably not be very long before Google cars and other AVs are legal, licensed and on the roads. These cars will be able to communicate with each other far more efficiently than human drivers do, and they will be much better drivers, so it will be sensible to ban the drivers who cause the accidents that destroy, injure and kill - that is, the human drivers. We should allow humans to continue driving for a little longer, perhaps for five years but not more than ten.

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Reference

Lee, D. (2016, February 29). Google self-driving car hits a bus. BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35692845