I am saying we all go out into a chaotic world every day and face technology which companies have put into the world for their own profit-seeking motive which is just as likely (if not significantly more-so) to kill us as a self driving car.

This has nothing to do with sacrafice. The government necessarily makes life and death trade-offs in setting regulatory hurdles. It’s entirely unconvincing to argue that the beta driver assistance and beta self-driving technology should be banned from roads because it can’t guarantee someone won’t die.

Because in fact automobiles are killing over a million people per year. Self driving automobiles are responsible for exactly 1 of those 1.25 million deaths, and driver assistance technology have contributed to about a dozen more.

What is indisputably moving fast and killing people are... people driving cars. The singular solution to this ongoing bloodbath may be only a few years away. But you seem to want millions of people to continue dying because of a misappropriated Facebook slogan?

I’m not a big fan of populist outrage in the best of times, but when it seeks to perpetuate the status quo of 1.25 million annual auto fatalities I think we owe it to ourselves to elevate the discussion to the point where you are actually considering the implication of your proposed solution.

Every year you shift the self-driving adoption curve you are killing hundreds of thousands of people. But in the real world today this technology could arguably share the blame for about dozen deaths. Should the government ban the technology from public roads and force companies like Tesla to recall their existing functionality? There’s a hysterical appeal to emotion be made, but nothing close to a cogent logical argument.

If anything, government should be pushing self-driving requirements harder than carbon limits. Instead of municipalities claiming they are going to be banning gas engines by 2030 they should be claiming they will ban steering wheels. The steering wheel is far, far deadlier.