The car needs to know what's safe regardless of whether or not the instructions are via voice or another method, so inaccurate voice control does not guarantee accidents.
It's not provably possible yet - the average human is quite capable of not killing themselves or others in any number of hazardous and random driving conditions which autonomous cars can't even manage.
I should probably mention since I typically bleed karma in these threads, that i'm not at all against autonomous vehicles in principle. I can see a lot of ways in which they could make driving safer, and transportation costs cheaper, and do a lot of good.
What I am against is the premise that people are so dangerous and terrible at something they've been, mostly, able to do safely for about a century that their freedoms need to be taken away. Autonomous cars are fine - trying to take for granted that personal freedom is dangerous and stupid and that people need to be controlled like herd animals is not necessarily a good thing. Where is this absolute certainty and conviction that I see in these threads coming from? Certainly not from having observed several million autonomous vehicles on the roads.
>What I am against is the premise that people are so dangerous and terrible at something they've been, mostly, able to do safely for about a century that their freedoms need to be taken away.
People are dangerous and terrible drivers. There are 30k vehicle accident deaths each year in the US (1.3 million world wide), and it used to be much higher (especially per mile driven).
Number of deaths per mile driven has been going down drastically in large part because technology has limited a driver's direct control of the vehicle.
> Autonomous cars are fine - trying to take for granted that personal freedom is dangerous and stupid and that people need to be controlled like herd animals is not necessarily a good thing.
ABS/traction control/drive-by-wire takes direct control away from the driver and gives it to a computer. Self driving cars are just the next layer of abstraction above this. You're still in control of the car, it's just that the interface is a touchscreen with a map instead of a steering wheel.
Because it would have to immediately take the action without any sort of verification check?
I wouldn't want to ride in that car either, but that's not how anyone remotely intelligent would design it. We're not talking about unscoped directions either which is a much less harder problem then general recognition.
I hope you're not suggesting voice recognition because anything less than 100% accuracy will guarantee accidents and possibly deaths.