You say "utilitarian responses to ethical dilemmas", I say "using reason to respond to magical thinking".
2) right now self driving cars are more deadly than human drivers by several orders of magnitude. Thats the reality.
2. You're misusing statistics. There isn't enough data on autonomous driving performance to make your claim, not enough road miles.
We can't demonstrate empirically, because there is far too little data at this point (and refusing to do the thing to collect the data because we don't have enough data is not a sound moral argument).
But we can infer a great deal. And I've already established grounds for inference...
- Better sensors. Sensors that can detect 360 degrees at all times, and see into infrared, not to mention LIDAR. The sensors can easily outperform human eyes attached to human heads. - Better mechanics. Automation can be directly connected to steering and brakes, as opposed to modulating through human hands and feet and into other mechanical linkages. - Better reflexes. Less lag from observation to action, compared to the eyes/brain/hands system. - No distraction. Human minds wander. - No intoxication. - No sleeping! Falling asleep at the wheel causes many fatal accidents. - No emotions, no anger, no aggression.
So emotionally and mechanically, autonomous systems are clearly superior to humans. The only real argument left is interpretation of the environment. Can they detect hazards more effectively than humans can? Let's look at some hazard categories...
Lane drift - easily solved. Running red lights and stop signs - easily solved. Speeding - easily solved. Maintaining braking distance in traffic - easily solved.
I could go through more, but you get the idea. We're focusing on "What if a pedestrian steps out in front of it and it doesn't recognize them as a hazard?", and ignoring much more common categories of accident-causing situations, categories where machines easily outperform humans.
So "empirical base"? Sure, no basis. But inferentially, the argument for the superiority of autonomous driving systems is very strong.
I believe the evidence strongly suggests that autonomous driving will not only catch up, but greatly exceed human drivers in the foreseeable future. Mechanically, automation is superior to humans for simply operating the car. And the large categories of causes for fatal accidents are low-hanging fruit for automation - lane drift, running red lights, driving too fast for conditions, etc. And sensors can observe the environment as well as or better than eyeballs.
The only real point of contention is in interpreting unexpected hazards, like the infamous bicyclist. But interpreting sensor input is subject to continuous improvement, due to programmer experience, log data, and Moore's Law. So even if that point is weak now, there's no reason to believe it will not improve substantially - in fact, it is unreasonable to believe that it will not improve.
Large categories of potential causes for fatal accidents are things which humans very seldom have issues with but computer programs often struggle with like inferring intent and identifying whether something is animate, which can easily cancel out reductions in other types of accident due to (e.g.) better average lane discipline. Especially when you consider the benchmark for fatalities per billion km driven is around 3.5[1] including fatalities caused by humans considered unfit to drive, and humans who are considerably less experienced and safety-conscious than the likely early adopters of SDVs. SDVs have already had one fatality and several incidents where human intervention prevented accidents in a few million miles of low speed, good condition driving. I think we're a very long way from seeing any indication computers alone will ever beat that benchmark, still less a plausible case that the additional deaths resulting from riskier testing programmes will be cancelled out by lives saved if the first few SDV models go on sale a few months earlier.
[1]a few European countries; it's double that in the US, which also suggests that if you want to reduce road deaths there's a lot of other steps that can be taken which don't involve risky technology experiments.
The alternative is to simply never allow it at all, to assume that humans will always be better drivers than computers. Which opens up an ethical dilemma. If auto-autos could save tens of thousands of lives a year - and it seems at least plausible that it could happen - then to reject it out of hand is to cause tens of thousands of innocent deaths a year.
Your argument is "Sensors are better than humans!", and that's a non-argument, inferential or otherwise.
There's a lot of problems we don't know the solutions to, but that certainly does not mean that these teams don't know the solutions either.
You are commenting in a thread about how a team of those "much qualified software engineers and other specialists" failed to do simulation testing. So yes, there is reason to believe that these companies are failing to address many of these potential problems.
Detecting sensor failure is child's play. We have over a half-century of experience at detecting and handling sensor failures in computer systems. Hell, I left the gas cap off my car once, and every idiot light in the car flipped out on me. Cruise control stopped working. Etc.
Detecting glare, flashing lights, and other visual interference is likewise well-established technology. And how does the autonomous car respond? By slowing down, staying within safe parameters. Meanwhile, one of the most common causes of fatal accidents is humans driving too fast for conditions, often due to poor visibility. I trust the self-driving car more than the human driver for that.
And, as you mentioned, we need to accumulate billions of test miles before we'll have statistically comprehensive data.
There are currently at least 4 confirmed deaths from autonomous vehicles[2]. While beat is correct in stating that those are not enough deaths to draw reliable conclusions from (and Model S owners are not like the average driver), there would have to be more than 600 million km driven autonomously to be comparable to the death rate of normal cars. Probably significantly more, as the cohort of human drivers that is equivalent to Model S owners is way less often involved in accidents in the first place.
[1] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
[2] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autonomous_car_fatalit...