If we look at the history of airline safety, going back further, we can see that it took many years and numerous crashes to get to the point where it became well regulated and crashes were independently investigated. Before government stepped in, private companies weren't doing a great job and their biases (inc. bad headlines/liability/cost) got in the way of improving passenger safety.
So let's absolutely keep with the airline analogy and regulate Tesla's AutoPilot like the airline industry.
We need to have the appropriate balance.
No, the reduction in deaths was through not crashing.
The airline industry would not have got safer faster by deliberately doing more crashing. "Okay, we need to increase safety, so let's crash as much as we can!" is something they didn't say, because that wouldn't have made any sense.
What you've done here, and the reason you've been upvoted to the top spot, is you've applied the Silicon Valley mantra of "failure is good" to airlines, and by extension, to autonomous cars. That mantra isn't really even true for software - it's not that failures are good, it's that learning is good - but it just about works in a world where people turn can turn free VC dollars into Medium posts and acqui-hires by failing, and hence where you might as well learn that way, rather than proceeding slowly with painstaking care; this approach doesn't really work in worlds where failures are underlined in blood.
Airplanes never had airbags, crumple zones, etc. The odds of surviving a car crash are much higher than odds of surviving a plane crash. It seems therefore that testing in cars can be done with lower risk of loss of life. Yes, there will be fender benders and some deaths.
NASA is horrible at keeping astronauts alive. Worse than the Soviets/Russians, as far as I know.
Apollo 1 and the two Shuttle disasters do not paint a good picture for NASA's safety in practice.
Here's an example of one of their famous investigative reports on a Tesla Model S crash while operating under AutoPilot back in 2016:
https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2016/INCLA-PE16007-7876.PDF
Scenarios where a plane would refuse to takeoff or divest to another airport... are conditions where employers would still expect their employees to get to work, or their deliveries.
That said, I'm totally fine with a self-driving car that gives up when it can't handle something. As long as it can safely remove itself from traffic and come to a stop (e.g. pull over to the side of the road), then alert me that I need to take over, that's fine.
If NHTSA mandates driver attention management systems in all cars then this calculus changes. If the driver attention management system is only required while AutoPilot is on, then the requirement is actually counter-productive to overall safety, e.g. results in increased deaths.
Extreme but (hopefully) relevant counter-example: was the killing of tens of thousands of people (soldiers and civilians) by American citizens in Europe during World War II justified? This is a very complex question, and any reasonable answer will be even more complex and nuanced, so I'm not really asking anyone to directly answer it in this venue.
To be clear, I'm not talking about Tesla here, only the first sentence in your response, in isolation.
I think there are some circumstances where some deaths as payment for far fewer deaths that are morally and ethically sound and defensible.
If we can agree to that, then we can move on and analyze what Tesla is trying to do.
But this is not a war in any way - there's already options in place to save lives - better policing, stricter speed limits, safer vehicles/roads/crossings. Allowing new technology on the road without the proper safeguards, (and the in my opinion abhorent justification that a few unlucky people might just get run over for the greater good) is not one of these options.
The "dangerous self driving cars on the road" option is only helping the pockets of Tesla's investors, not the public.
I'm not trying to invoke Godwin here: just that war happens be somewhat hard to compare - "people die, ergo same thing" seems a rather forced comparison.
Perhaps the only fitting parallel seems "history will be written by the victors."
I think everyone wants better transportation and fewer deaths. But 0 deaths with an emerging driving technology sounds really hard. There are just so many edge cases and physics is pretty unforgiving on our bodies past 40mph.
In 2017 there were zero reported accidentally deaths [1]. Compared to 1972, one of the most dangerous years to fly, where more than 2,300 accidental deaths occurred on commercial flights.
How did we go from thousands of deaths to zero? Primarily through crashing. Then working to evaluate what went wrong and improve the design, processes, and programs around commercial aviation.
As one pilot explains [2]:
"One of the ways we’ve become so safe was to realize that our efforts were never going to be good enough."
So yes, I think technologies like autopilot will save lives. But it won't be able to do it magically, unfortunately some harm will occur because we—in all our human wisdom—just can never accurately predict all possibilities. It's the same problem most self-driving companies are facing today, and the reason promises of self-driving being here today have fallen short. The world is far, far more complex than we realize... especially when we put a computer out into it and tell it to "go forth."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-aviation-safety/2017-safe...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/columnist/cox/2018/01/...