That was 7 years ago. 7 years before that video ipods just came out, blogging became a thing, and the best phone out was a razor. That was a whole technological epoc ago.
Self-driving cars are one of those instances where painstaking adherence to the precautionary principle is going to get a lot of people killed due to poor risk modeling. This article is a great example, where the reporter has engaged in elaborate rhetorical gymnastics to paint an incident arising from a human driver's poor judgement as the fault of a "rogue engineer."
I don't think that's true. A lot of people campaign for better road safety.
However, the whole idea behind the report is that the reason we don't have the necessary evidence to draw a conclusion is that the cars simply haven't been on the road long enough yet. It accomplishes nothing to pound your desk and proclaim loftily that "There's no evidence whatsoever."
I don't see why AVs can't outperform human drivers, and further, I don't see why they need to be built with NASA-level software and hardware quality to meet that goal, as many suggest. That will only increase costs and delay benefits. "Move fast and break things" is a perfectly valid strategy if it results in fatality numbers that spike temporarily and then plunge rapidly, which is what I personally suspect is going to happen.
According to [0] 1.24 million people die in automobile related accidents annually. This works out to 0.04 per second. Unless parent is a very slow typist your number overstates the real toll several times.
[0] http://www.progressive-economy.org/trade_facts/traffic-accid...
Seems to be a mix of 2010 and 2014 data, but broadly speaking close enough.
We need to learn to place reasonable restrictions on the use of potentially dangerous technology while it’s under nascent development.
I have no idea what that would look like, or if it’s possible. I do believe it’s an on going concern.
Edit: changed active to nacent to improve clarity.
He was guiding strategy and everything. When a senior employee misbehave it's hard to fire them. When they have a strategic value, it's almost impossible unless they are already lost i.e actively work against the companies interests to further their or a competitor's interests.