The trend of things machines can do better than people really only goes in one direction. Further people are vastly worse at driving than they think, over 1.25 million people die per year due to car accidents. That's insane.
On top of that, when you factor in the utility of driving a car, the risk/reward ratio looks stellar. Humans are better drivers than given credit for, and it will be some time (much longer than a lot of enthusiasts will admit) before computers manage to match that.
That's one of the top killers anyway you slice it and every single one of those deaths is preventable.
PS: Truckers drive up to 3,000 miles per week * 48 weeks per year * 47 years (65-18) that's ~6.7 million miles. US death rate is ~1:88 million miles on average. So if they where as dangerous as average that's ~1 death per 13 truckers. However, they are safer than this and average less miles. Still, it's one of the most dangerous US jobs.
I don’t see how that’s an argument in favor of letting today’s self driving cars loose on the road.
We don’t let people without any driving experience drive cars either because, if we let them, they “will improve soon”.
Or are you suggesting letting self-driving cars loose now is a necessary sacrifice we have to make to make progress?
Yes we do, that's exactly what a learner's permit is for.
And every single one of them is a preventable tragedy.
If you're measuring whether the actual experience of using autopilot meets the prevailing standards by which we judge "safe enough" as a country, you don't want to correct for those first three.
Especially the "the cars are new and safe overall" factor. Correcting for that is like "correcting for" the fact that all the dangerous lithium ion cells are carefully packed and armored, and coming to the conclusion that sitting in a Tesla is less safe than sitting in a bonfire.
It makes the arguments a lot worse when people don't distinguish those two questions.
If (and that’s likely) other features than Autopilot contribute to Teslas killing and injuring fewer people, we must compensate for them to judge whether Autopilot is a net benefit.
All my line of argument is trying to adress is how long until self driving cars are 'ready' which directly relates to how capable they are today. The data I looked at suggested somewhere above 'drunk driver' but below 'school buss driver'. That seems like an extreme range, but they are each human levels of competence. Which is different than they are being portrayed and IMO a sign they are very close to ready.
While the points you bring up are meaningful, we let people drive without those safty features. So, in terms of policy it seems like an ever higher bar, as for example automated breaking systems and lane following raise the bar above human competence, but again are not being installed on older cars.
Which... doesn't really make sense. The safety features are part of the package. You can't get the dangerous part without them.
No cars are sold with a big blob of naked unprotected lithium ion cells. And no cars are sold with autopilot but not high-end crash protection.
A feature being dangerous in isolation is not enough to show that it lacks net benefit.
- Tesla’s cars are newer and more expensive than the average car on US roads (making them safer)
- Tesla’s Autopilot mostly, if not only, gets used on roads that are safer than average.
- Tesla drivers may have had to intervene a lot to prevent more deaths.
- not all those Tesla’s ended up on US roads (probably not something with large impact)