Your belief in the superiority of your own mattress-avoiding abilities seems odd. One likely outcome of a meat module detecting a mattress ahead at 70MPH would probably be to slam on the brakes, lose control, flip over the barrier, slam head-first into a van full of little kids on a field trip where a dozen people die in the fire and it's all over the local news. Whereas a computer-driven car is likely to 1) detect such a large obstacle well in advance, 2) apply the brakes as safe levels while it thinks about something else to do, and 3) safely maneuver around the object within the performance envelope of the vehicle.

Frankly, although I'm not pinning this on you, the widespread belief in one's own superiority is part of the problem with the legacy human driver.

> Your basic argument is that, although robots will make mistakes, we'll let them kill just a few of us to save many more. That seems like it's not going to go over well with most people.

Even if this was thrownaway2424's argument - which it isn't - it would still be valid. It actually illustrates one of the biggest problem with people - the public's inability to "shut up and multiply". If we would replace (ceteris paribus) human drivers, that kill hundreds of people a year, with self-driving cars, which kill a few people a year, then it'd be a clear-cut Good Thing, a win, the right thing to do.

I think you misread. He's saying that it's better for everyone if a robot hits debris every now and then vs a human driver that causes 100ish deaths a day.

According to http://www.nhtsa.gov/NCSA a pedestrians is killed every two hours and injured every 7 minutes. A robot car would reduce these rates to near zero.

I'm still not sold that "A robot car would reduce these rates to near zero" as you claim. Your statistics give: time of day; weather conditions; area (pedestrian or motor vehicle designated); alcohol consumption; and state/city data;

BUT I don't see conditions predicating the crash.

I would be very interested, and would be sold more on the idea of self-driving cars if the advocates who make your claim could point to examples that would reduce these rates. How many accidents are caused by drivers swerving to miss something? How many are caused by driver inattentiveness? How many are caused by mechanical error? Without these numbers, saying that a robot car would reduce these rates to near zero is on the same footing as anyone who wants to claim that self-driving cars would kill more people, because we can plan ahead. I hope that makes sense, I'm having a hard time with the language today.

By the way, I love the concept of self-driving cars, I just don't think they're the cure-all most advocates, such as yourself, claim them to be.

You're acting like one of those people who say that we don't have all the evidence on global climate change yet. There's no mystery about what causes motor vehicle collisions. Here is a huge report from the administration to Congress on the causes of motor vehicle collisions.

http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811059.PDF

The majority of crashes occur in daytime, in clear weather, while the car is moving in a straight line. You'll note that substantially all of these causes would be solved by a computer-driven car.

""" About 41 percent of the driver-related critical reasons were recognition errors that include inattention, internal and external distractions, inadequate surveillance, etc. Of these, the most frequently occurring critical reason was inadequate surveillance that refers to a situation in which a driver failed to look, or looked but did not see, when it was essential to safely complete a vehicle maneuver. This critical reason was assigned to drivers in about 20 percent of crashes. Internal distraction as a critical reason was assigned to drivers in about 11 percent of the crashes. About 34 percent of the driver-related critical reasons were decision errors that included too fast for conditions (8.4%), too fast for curve (4.9%), false assumption of others’ actions (4.5%), illegal maneuver (3.8%), and misjudgment of gap or others’ speed (3.2%). In about 10 percent of the crashes, the critical reason was a performance error, such as overcompensation (4.9%), poor directional control (4.7%), etc. Among the nonperformance errors assigned as critical reasons to drivers in about 7 percent of the crashes, sleep was the most common critical reason (3.2%). The effectiveness of vehicle-based countermeasures used in mitigating the effects of various driver performance, recognition, and decision errors could be evaluated using this information. """

You'll note that "vehicle problem" is the critical pre-crash event for only 1.2% of crashes. Therefore if the computer _only_ solves the sleeping driver problem, and even if it is twice as bad as humans at handling vehicle mechanical failure, society is still reaping a net benefit. But, of course, computer-driven cars can solve nearly all of these causes of crashes: inattention, misperception, distraction, sleeping, driving too fast for conditions, and on and on.

> Your basic argument is that, although robots will make mistakes, we'll let them kill just a few of us to save many more.

What's the alternative? The argument that, although humans will make mistakes, we'll let them kill lots of us to avoid saving some by having robots instead?

We let people kill more than a few of us. We let people wreck our cars and endanger our lives in situations that would have been easily avoidable.

And we don't have a choice but to live with people.

Selling a random person an item and asking them to give over control to said item, when the item carries the very real possibility of causing harm, is a harder sales pitch. You have to remember that not everyone is sold on technology, just for the sake of technology.

So you need to pitch the safety. Because you're selling an item that carries much, much less possibility of causing harm than the human-driven car does, and also that allows you to reclaim your time spent commuting (in a self-driving car you could easily e.g. read a book, code or talk to people).