> The problem is where people set up the goal posts and have a double standard for human vs. ai driven cars. AI cars, for some reason, are expected to produce an error rate of 0 right off the bat and ever single incident gets used to feed an existing (and often legitimate) narrative about tech bro laziness and irresponsibility. Meanwhile 1.25 million people die in human caused car accidents every year and somewhere around an additional 30 million are injured. But that’s “just the world we live in.” Or that’s “your choice to take a risk when you choose to drive a car.” Or whatever.

If we set up the goalposts fairly, Waymo wouldn't be anywhere near receiving permissions for full autonomy until we had statistically significant evidence the latest build could reduce fatalities to human levels which are in the region of 1 per 100 million miles (a rate which includes all the people who aren't allowed on the road...). When they've only driven a few million miles, the fatal error rate - including potentially fatal collisions avoided by safety drivers - really should be zero.

We haven't got any evidence that fatal errors in AV technology approaches that level of rarity, will never have it for individual builds, and the best [limited] evidence we've got refuses to reject the null that despite being shielded from hard AI problems like left turns and supported by safety drivers and driven at low speeds, AVs are an order of magnitude more deathly than human-driven cars...