Let's say that halving the death rate is what we can reasonably expect from the first generation of self driving cars. Every year we delay that is 15,000 people dead. This woman dying is a personal tragedy for her and those that knew her. However, as society we should be willing to accept thousands of deaths like hers if it gets us closer to safer self driving cars.
What's your evidence for why this is a reasonable expectation? The fatalities compared to the amount of miles driven by autonomous vehicles so far shows that this is not possible at the moment. What evidence is there that this will radically improve soon?
No, you couldn't have characterized Uber has having "infinitely better" fatality rate than the baseline, because that would have resulted in a division-by-zero to calculate the standard error. Assuming a frequentist interpretation of probability, of course; the Bayesian form is more complicated but arrives at the same end result.
It's true that the variance is higher when the sample size is lower, but that doesn't change the underlying fact that Uber's fatality rate per mile driven is empirically staggeringly higher than the status quo. Assigning zero weight to our priors, that's the story the data tells.
https://www.androidheadlines.com/2017/12/ubers-autonomous-ve...
Presumably a bit more since December.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
Fluctuates just over 1 per 100 million.
(1/2+ million) / (1+/100 million) ~ 50-
That's not a particularly convincing argument, given that (so far), Uber's self-driving cars have a fatality rate of 50 times the baseline, per mile driven[0].
Having to wait an extra ten years to make sure that everything is done properly doesn't sound like the worst price to pay.
[0] Nationwide, we have 1.25 deaths per 100 million miles driven. Uber's only driven about 2 million miles so far: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2017/12/22/ubers-self...