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I wouldn't trust my life to proprietary software, because its makers' motives obviously don't align with my own. If my safety was really paramount, they'd open their software to scrutiny.

It's unethical to leave life-and-death decisions to a black-box algorithm, when I know it was written for the primary purpose of gathering more money. Safety is a constraint, not their goal.

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You already do that right now and basically have done it every day of your life.

The power grid, railway, traffic lights, elevators, etc. all these systems are critical and closed source, and you don't see them killing people on a wide scale nor even on a small scale but regular basis.

Yep. Add the code which controls ABS and ESP in modern cars.

Elevators I'll grant you, but the power grid, railway and traffic lights are all controlled by governments, councils and NGO-type organisations — they all have reliability as their primary concern, not churning out units for profit.

And it may be irrational, but wrongly-activating brakes feel like less of a risk than wrongly-activating steering or accelerators.

And anyway, “lots of things are untrustworthy” is not a good argument for trusting something else.

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