What I was discussing was the supposed ethics of fully automated driving vs human driving when crashes happen.
I'm tired of seeing these contrived, hypothetical examples about what an automated car may or may not do in a very specific scenario, that completely ignore the fact that crashes & deaths will go down by orders of magnitude.
Maybe crashes and deaths will go down by an order of magnitude one day. But my point is that that’s hardly an argument in favor of not worrying about the ethical implications of self driving cars today.
My view is that even if self-driving car corporations kill people with zero consequences (due to poor laws and poor oversight), as long as they're doing so at lower rates than human drivers are, that's still a net win. It's still not an ideal scenario, because those deaths could be further reduced under the threat of real consequences. But by and large, it'd still be better than what we have today.
If they're killing people during testing of experimental tech that hasn't been approved for general use (like the Uber case you mentioned), they need to be smacked down hard. If they're killing people at a higher rate than human drivers, they should not be approved for general use in the first place. If they're approved, but release an update that ends up killing more people, they again need to be smacked down hard, with the update immediately reverted.
As someone who spends more time cycling than driving, watching videos like this[1] give me more confidence in today’s self-driving technology (assuming good conditions) than in most drivers on the road, even knowing that any internal video is bound to have a dose of propaganda. It’s not entirely even that drivers are to blame; our infrastructure puts cyclists at risk as does the human limitation of only having two eyes.
Why do people (in particular people without robotics experience) keep assuming this will happen any time soon without any evidence whatsoever? "We must move over to self driving cars as soon as they are safer" is fair but it's almost tautological.
The only numbers we have so far show that despite only testing in near ideal conditions (e.g. Waymo choosing to test in suburban Arizona rather than Manhattan or rural snowy Midwestern areas), the accident rate for autonomous vehicles is actually significantly higher, not even counting "interventions" which every company measures in its own inscrutable way.