My thought: is the hardware failure rate of a single computer higher or lower than the failure rate of a human brain? At what rate do humans fall asleep at the wheel, get dangerously distracted, crash, etc. versus the rate that computers die?
More redundancy is always better. Two redundant computers is better than one, ten computers is better than two, fifty is better than ten, a hundred is better than fifty, a thousand is better than a hundred... But how do we decide how much redundancy is enough? I think human driving has to be the benchmark.
Human driving is not a safe default option: it kills as many people as HIV/AIDS. Autonomous driving only needs to be, say, 20% safer than that to be safe enough to deploy, in my opinion. Tesla is aiming for at least 2x safer (ideally 10x safer) and will be collecting billions of miles of shadow mode data to confirm that statistically before it deploys fully autonomous driving.
Related: Tesla mentioned that in Hardware 2.5 there is some computing redundancy added, but I am not aware of the details beyond what I just said.
My issue is not with the need for this tech. I support it and Elon's desire to attain it. The issue is the method used to achieve it needs to be effective and not risk lives needlessly. Tesla's approach does not meet that bar. Waz said this and so has John Krafcik recently.
I am now part of the SAE V&V Task Force. They would not have extended that invitation for no reason. Also please read the articles on Waymo's recent paradigm shift on this.