Cruise says it plans to test vehicles without a human safety driver behind the wheel before the end of 2020.

Cruise will be allowed to test "five autonomous vehicles without a driver behind the wheel on specified streets within San Francisco," the agency said. "The vehicles are designed to operate on roads with posted speed limits not exceeding 30 miles per hour, during all times of the day and night, but will not test during heavy fog or heavy rain."

A spokesperson for the DMV did not immediately respond to a question about the streets to which Cruise's vehicles will be confined. [...]

The California permit came through before the federal government's, which is weighing a separate application from Cruise to deploy a fleet of fully driverless vehicles without steering wheels or pedals.

As I keep saying: I would like to know the answer to the question of who gets charged with vehicular homicide when (not if) one of these machines kills someone. Even if they are ultimately ruled to be not at fault, what name goes on the court docket? Is it:

• The Cruise employee "non-employee independent contractor" in the passenger seat?
• Their shift lead?
• The CEO, Dan Ammann?
• The author(s) of the (proprietary, un-auditable) software?
• The "corporate person" known as General Motors?

Self-driving cars will never be safe on city streets. This is a hard AI problem that is far beyond any current technology, and that cannot be solved without human-level general artificial intelligence. Every company claiming that this is possible is lying. Their grift is to extract money from investors while weathering an "acceptable" level of increased human casualties. If there is a more literal definition of blood money, I don't know what it is.

Once again, from Fight Club:

I'm a recall coordinator. My job is to apply the formula. It's a story problem.

A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 miles per hour. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now: do we initiate a recall?

Take the number of vehicles in the field, (A), and multiply it by the probable rate of failure, (B), then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, (C). A times B times C equals X... If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.