> This seems absurdly paranoid. Why is it, on the face of things, more likely that the LIDAR-packing robot which is scanning 360 degrees hundreds of times per second got into a fender-bender than that the human engineer who sometimes has to drive that same car did?

For all I know there could be a million other reasons why it crashed, none of them related to the hardware. Maybe it was a combination of a software problem and failure of the human driver to intervene properly. Maybe the sensors picked up something that confused the software thinking the car ahead was still moving. Maybe there was some kind of hardware failure. Maybe the AI simply never had to do the kind of unexpected emergency stop that caused this incident and the minimum stopping distance wasn't programmed properly for the road conditions at the time of the incident. Or, maybe, it actually was fully operated by a human. Neither of us knows for sure.

> What reason do you think Google has to lie about this to the public-- considering that if it were the result of a software bug, and that bug made it to production, and somebody died, that little white lie could easily be worth millions of dollars of liability and you better believe that Google PR knows it?

You don't really have to ask that question do you? Google has already spent millions upon millions on this technology, and probably had to pull out all the stops to lobby for the legislation changes they need for their tests. Incidents like this could instantly kill their ambitions and severely hurt the credibility of this technology. There basically is no risk blaming the driver, who was, in fact, in the car and behind the wheel when it happened. Current legislation actually demands there is a human driver behind the wheel for exactly this purpose: to be able to assign responsibility for what the car does to someone in case of an accident. Legally, the 'driver' likely even was accountable for the incident, even if he wasn't driving the car at all.

Nobody is served by saying it was the computer: not the owners of the other cars, not law enforcement, not the government that allowed these cars to drive around town, and definitely not Google.

> And this is even sillier. You use a track precisely because you are not confident that the car will not go off the road, which is very likely to happen while you are building a robotic car.

I brought the other incident up just to make the point that you don't hear anything when the Google cars fail, just success stories that don't include any details about failures or incidents. You don't assume the Google cars are perfect yet, right? So if Google is so open and honest about everything, like you seem to assume, why don't they tell us how often the cars require human intervention, or what kind of situations are still a problem for the AI?

> Allowing the car into traffic indicates that they are confident.

You realize that none of these cars actually goes on the road without a human driver ready to step in when it fails, right? And that all the routes the cars drive are carefully selected and likely full of pre-programmed and scripted details?

This not to say the technology is worthless just because Google is still learning, but it's statements like yours that nicely show what's so strange about this driverless cars discussion. Just because Google is confident to have AI cars with people behind the wheel driving through town, you are confident that you have any insight at all about how those cars would actually do without a human backup driver behind the wheel. Unless you are a Google employee working on these cars, you know nothing more than what Google wants you to know, and that most likely will not include all the possible points of failure of this technology.