If a self-driving vehicle is only 1.5x (instead of 5x) as safe as the average human driver then you're not trading between death by humans vs. death by machine, you're primarily trading between death by human and spared by machine and only secondly between the former.
You’re talking about it at a societal level, as if everyone switched over to robot cars at the same time.
You’re talking about it as a macro optimization problem while the OP was explaining a rational decision at the level of the individual.
Edited for clarity
It matters to the safe drivers. Bad drivers are mostly a danger to themselves. At only "1.5x as safe as average", it's a good deal for the bad drivers, but there are probably a lot of "2x as safe as average" drivers that are getting a bad deal. They are in more danger than before.
Edited for clarity.
In the past couple of weeks, I've narrowly avoided hitting pedestrians three different times. Each time, the pedestrian was somewhere other than a valid crosswalk (once was on a highway exit). In each case, I think an autonomous vehicle could have handled it better than me.
A perfect autonomous car sure sounds nice - but will it ever arrive? Would it have just hit 1 of those pedestrians instead? Would it just go, ding, and suddenly you're in control? Would it kill 1 and then the company would have the data to know to not kill pedestrians in that one specific example? How many people would have to die as test subjects before the system would be better than people? And what if it never got there but you still killed all those folks anyway?
And tesla's system is unable to see stationary objects. It would never qualify as an autonomous driver.
We don't need a perfect system to avoid hitting pedestrians. Current tech can actually do a good job. It just has to be a design goal of the system.
Source? It seems only logical that the number of accidental deaths goes up with the number of bad drivers on the road - not just because they kill themselves.
My point is that, even if we lower the total death count, the safest drivers could still end up at greater risk, because a disproportionate amount of the reduction in deaths will go to bad drivers.
When it’s a robot chauffeur, you have to evaluate it like you would a human one.
In the third person version, I suppose there’s an implicit unstated option that while your particular chauffeur has evidence they are better than average, you have an option to hire someone more responsible. That aspect of agency is central here.
> if the statistics he cites are correct and also apply to chauffeurs
I meant compared to the general population. As in self driving versus general population stats.
In aggregate we can probably buy more safety by having policies that encourage replacement of bad drivers with merely average autonomous vehicles rather than attempting to rely on individual behavior to improve safety.
If you want to still exercise personal options you could choose an autonomous car plus safety driver.
I'll even go so far to say that many unsafe drivers can't afford a self-driving car. They're often unsafe because their car is on balding tires, the brakes don't work, and the tail lights are busted.
The rest, well, they simply enjoy driving unsafely and thus have no reason to get into a self-driving car.
But you already do. Every day you're near a road, there is chance the next vehicle around the bend is drunk or reckless or using their phone.
It doesn't even matter if you are in a vehicle or not - even as a pedestrian you already deal with them every day.
It sucks, but it's reality.
Assuming someone has a certain (constant) probability of excluding himself from the driving pool every year, over time the average percentage will drop as folks most susceptible from excluding themselves will have already done so.