You state this as a fact with absolute confidence. That's interesting. Not only do I respectfully disagree, but I'm actually surprised you are so sure of yourself. It seems (to me) rather obvious that self driving cars are not a mature technology yet. In fact, they aren't even deployed widely. In that regard, of course it isn't a mature technology!

So I'd really appreciate it if you could help me understand how you arrived at that conclusion. Being so incredibly confident you must have a rock solid set of arguments about this topic and I'd love to hear them.

What if they do build this and it fails 10% of the time? What do you think the ramifications of that will be?

I'm basing this on history, capitalism, and current available data.

Will this eventually be as everyone believes? Yes. In our lifetime? Almost certainly not.

So, should we wait? Or find more realistic way to save lives today?

If it fails 10% or the time that sounds like a great start and I hope they can improve it! 10% failure rate seems like a great process that could be improved.

Again, I'm interested in why capitalism makes you pessimistic about technological advancement. Capitalism seems pretty good at advancing technology. Let me ask you a question, why do you think "capitalism" can get such a system to 10% failure and then stop improving forever? That seems pretty random to me. I'm interested in why you think that!

Also, why do you think it's a zero sum game? E.g. we can cure cancer and make self driving cars better at the same time! It's pretty sweet actually.

It is imminently within the realm of possibility that a smart watch can, with minimal human intervention, redirect the current driverless vehicle to an emergency room. I would not be surprised if the iWatch->phone->CarPlay integration were to expose this path in the next or second-to-next major iOS revision.

Capitalism is good at providing 'efficiency', nothing more nothing less. It's a dumb (as in not smart not necessarily stupid) filter on economic activity.

I think what they are referring to is that such a system does not prioritize reducing failure rates to zero, it prioritizes reducing costs to zero - 10% is probably an arbitrary lower limit, but the cost of the court fees, medical bills, and manufacturing loss should be greater than the cost of developing and deploying the technology that can reliably reduce rates below X amount.

It's a fairly ruthless algorithm that will justify millions of deaths based upon economics.

Compounding the simple issue above, is when the system attempts to increase efficiency by lowering the cost of legal/medical repercussions e.g. by with-holding blame, fines, and economic relevancy rather than by improving the technology.

E.g. if only 100 people can afford to use a technology then a 1% failure rate is statistically easy to achieve, and efficiently requires very little testing. Applied to a population of millions however that is potentially a mass genocide.

Capitalism has a very dark side, for those willing to look the truth in the face, like with any tool, it can and will be wielded in terrible ways.

You don't think it's pretty easy for a Waymo car to monitor its passengers for unresponsiveness? For speech asking for help? For mention of "take me to the hospital"?

Seems pretty easy to me. Would surprise me if some of this was not already in the programming.

It seems pretty clear to me that the current cars will feature that soon. If they don't already do. Through monitoring the passengers and responding for against-the-rules behavior and un-responsiveness, and distress speech. Because that seems pretty easy to do and pretty liable otherwise.