The same is true of manufacturers and others in the chain of commerce of goods (see, e.g., the general rules on defective product liability), even where they aren’t individual humans. There’s nothing about AI which makes it particularly special in this regard.
Solve the liability problem and I would 100% take a machine that performs 30% better than a human or helps a human perform 30% better every time because it means fewer humans die on the road.
How is it valid? It's currently a solved problem. The driver of the car is still held liable because they are still, ultimately, driving the car. Tesla's with autopilot seem to make drivers safer, and acting like we don't know who is liable in the event of a crash is just a red herring.
It's surprisingly hard to establish those parameters though, since (i) the more meaningful indicators of good performance (driver error fatalities) happen only every million or so miles, even less frequently once you've narrowed your pool down to errors made by sober drivers that weren't racing or attempting to driver in conditions unsuited to electronic assistance, so that's a lot of real world road use required to establish statistically significant evidence a machine is a 30% or so safe than a human driver (ii) complex software doesn't improve monotonically, so really you need that amount of testing per update to be confident that the next minor version of something "30% safer" hasn't introduced regression bugs which mean that it is now a bit worse than the average driver and (iii) performance in different road conditions is likely highly variable such that it might be both 30% better overall and 30x as likely to cause an accident if not disengaged in that particular circumstance.
To make a valid assessment of the overall safety impact, you'd also have to factor in that (iv) the worst drivers who skew the stats are the generally the ones least likely to buy it and (v) if it's fully autonomous driving, road use would increase substantially and whilst that may have other benefits the likely outcome from substantial increase in miles driven using tech that's only marginally better than a human is more humans dying on the road
The fact that overall road use is so high that a sufficiently bad regression bug in sufficiently widely-deployed software could rack up a massive body count within hours obviously doesn't make the case for introducing something believed to only be a marginal improvement any stronger.
This simply isn't true. By the mile they have a worse safety record than other cars in their class (mitigating factors: where they're driven and who drives them). You might be referring to Tesla's marketing statistic that there are fewer accidents per mile involving autopilot - typically engaged in ideal driving circumstances - than when it's switched off, or across all other drivers. But that's not very meaningful data. Some would argue that citing marketing figures from a company with a track record for obfuscation and dishonesty as "the data" (and really, there isn't much better data available to the average person) is an indication we're not being careful.
https://medium.com/@MidwesternHedgi/teslas-driver-fatality-r...