OK, this is a very good answer- thanks for taking the time.

I'm too exhausted (health issues) to reply in as much detail as your comment deserves, but here's the best I can do.

>> 4.) So basically, driverless cars will only find a routine place on the road if and when they have sufficiently fewer fatalities than human driving. My assertion was a bit tautological in this respect, but basically, if they're anywhere near as dangerous as human drivers, then they won't be a thing at all.

Or at least it won't be morally justifiable for them to be a thing at all, unless they're sufficiently safer than humans- whatever "sufficently" is going to mean (which we can't really know; as you say that has to do with public perception and the whims of a fickle press).

I initially took your assertion to mean that self-driving AI will inevitably get to a point where it can be "sufficiently" safer than humans. Your point (2.) above confirms this. I don't think you're wrong, there's no reason to doubt that computers will, one day, be as good as humans at the things that humans are good at.

On the other hand I really don't see this happening any time soon- not in my lifetime and most likely not in the next two or three human generations. It's certainly hard to see how we can go from the AI we have now to AI with human-level intelligence. Despite the successes of statistical machine learning and deep neural nets, their models are extremely specific and the tasks they can perform too restricted to resemble anything like general intelligence. Perhaps we could somehow combine multiple models into some kind of coherent agent with a broader range of aptitudes, but there is very little research in that direction. The hype is great, but the technology is still primitive.

But of course, that's still speculative- maybe something big will happen tomorrow and we'll all watch in awe as we enter a new era of AI research. Probably not, but who knows.

So the question is- where does this leave the efforts of the industry to, well, sell self-driving tech, in the right here and the right now? When you said self-driving cars will almost certainly be safer than humans- you didn't put a date on that. Others in the industry are trying to sell their self-driving tech as safer than humans right now, or in "a few years", "by 2021" and so on. See Elon Musk's claims that Autopilot is safer than human drivers already.

So my concern is that assertions about the safety of self-driving cars by industry players are basically trying to create a climate of acceptance of the technology in the present or near future, before it is even as safe as humans, let alone safer (or "sufficiently" so). If the press and public opinion are irrational, their irrationality can just as well mean that self-driving technology is accepted when it's still far too dangerous. Rather than setting the bar too high and demanding an extreme standard of safety, things can go the other way and we can end up with a diminished standard instead.

Note I'm not saying that is what you were trying to do with your statement about almost certainty etc. Kind of just explaining where I come from, here.