> Cruise and Waymo have both done tons of closed course testing, that's where they validate their respective systems against mission critical stuff. But eventually they've got to go out into the real world and learn to deal with real traffic on real roads.

Waymo has been doing that longer than anyone, though.

Technically Waymo has been acting like cowboys longer than anyone. They smartened up and got serious about safety around 2015, but before that they were winging it. It was just a goofy science experiment back then.

The Google self-drivng car project was under the leadership of Sebastien Thrun and Anthony Levandowski, and as hardcore engineering types their thinking was 'We'll save more people than we kill', and it was as simple as that.

And though there is no fatality for waymo, while we already one for Uber just at the beginning of their program.

Well, to my ear that sounds like "People will still die in car wrecks and I don't even have data substantiating my assumption that fewer people will die than is true currently, but I somehow feel that if robotic vehicles are killing people, that's automatically better than if a human is behind the wheel."

We wouldn't be doing our due diligence if we didn't try. Otherwise it's pretty much a guarantee that 30-40,000 people will die on America's roads next year and every year after that.

That still in no way answers the question I have posed concerning why developing driverless vehicles must involve training deaths.

I have already said I am not against their development per se.

It's an almost nonsensical question, that's why you're having trouble getting people to answer it.

People are saying "a small number of people might die and no one wants that, but it's impractical-to-impossible to guarantee that zero people will die." And you are asking, "but why? But why?"

Now and then there at washing machine deaths. Society accepts these because they're so rare and because it would be impractical to completely prevent them.

Compared to the number of road deaths most experts believe will be prevented over time, the few deaths we may encounter from training deaths seems completely inconsequential.

Acting like my question is dumb because the first however many replies to my comment made no real effort to actually answer it isn't a good faith argument and veers rather close to a personal attack.

> Now and then there at washing machine deaths. Society accepts these because they're so rare and because it would be impractical to completely prevent them.

Are you sure about that? Society just accepts them and moves on?

There aren't lawsuits? There aren't recalls? There aren't redesigns? There aren't safety measures taken so deaths don't happen again? There aren't investigations? Fines aren't levied if they violated regulations? Regulations aren't passed in response? Everyone just rolls over and says, "This is just the price of washing clothes" like we are with autonomous cars?

That person you're talking about, that says autonomous cars are just going to cause deaths and it's okay and we shouldn't try to investigate or improve safety measures or check if regulations were violated? That person doesn't exist.

Accepting that accidents will always happen does not imply you learn nothing and improve nothing.

> That person doesn't exist.

I agree, beyond a select few individuals who have not posted on HN at all, I do not see or believe that anyone is calling for unnecessary deaths if they can be avoided.

I do believe that we're letting optimism and good intentions get the better of us, by allowing our interests in the betterment of the humanity to align with the interests of business, which would like to see autonomous cars on the road unencumbered, unregulated and unquestioned as soon as humanly possible.

Hence why I am advocating for a level of healthy skepticism. I am imploring posters who are taking it on faith that autonomous vehicles will solve the problem of automotive deaths if we suspend our disbelief, to apply the same level of skepticism to this field as they would, say, biotech.

There's no way to possibly guarantee 100% safety so proposing it as the standard is as good as killing off the program.

What's that classic example, robocar has to make a choice between (potentially) killing a bus full of school kids or a bunch of adults standing around on the sidewalk.