There's nothing wrong with rooting for other entrants in the self-driving technology space, like Waymo, which aren't willing to grease their path to market dominance with the blood of innocents.
I guess this is one of those derail the train or kill the man questions, is society willing to kill a man to save thousands of lives in the future?
Of course it’s not quite as clearcut since we’re not certain self driving cars will ever be safer than human drivers (although my intuition is that they will be since they won’t get drunk, fall asleep, or text at the wheel).
And of course comparisons are a bit difficult since humans are of course at level 5 autonomy and statistics are generated from those conditions, and of course Tesla is not and stats won’t be.
Interesting stuff.
If autopilot (or similar system) are safer than humans, then this should get reflected in the statistics. Just because people die in a crash with a self-driving car (even if that software was at fault), is NOT sufficient evidence. What matters is the net effect!
No one deserves to die, but he is responsible for his own death.
As a side note, there's an article every time someone is killed in a Tesla, but there are never (rarely?) articles when someone is saved by one.
You can't show (least of all on some fanboy Youtube video) that AutoPilot had prevented a crash, compared to a normal person just driving a car. A Tesla crashing into a firetruck -- that you can show.
What you could show would be crash statistics over a significant population of similar cars, in similar conditions, driving on similar roads. These statistics don't seem to show any safety benefit to Tesla, but believers will believe.