> I find it curious that we are going to hold autonomous vehicles to a perhaps impossibly high standard while we also hold people to barely any standards at all.

This is all US-centric obviously, but my 2c: We can blame individuals for bad behavior, it's harder for us to reason about complex systems breaking and that scares us.

When an accident happens currently, we immediately rush to judgement: You're a bad driver, you were going too fast, there's order in the universe and you made a conscious choice to disrupt that. We'll really reach sometimes too (I've heard this in real life): You had a stroke and lost control of your car? The crash is still your fault, you should've lived a healthier lifestyle. Or it's your spouse's fault, they should've noticed you were acting funny and not let you drive the car.

When people screw up, it's almost always someone's fault even if we have to really reach for it. We rarely consider the system that led to the failure and absolve the individual. When computers screw up, it's unclear who to blame and it's much scarier as a result, so we hold computers to a much higher standard.