"think of the children!"
Lives at stake don't change anything here. The question is whether self-driving cars, even with the errors, are safer for people than regular drivers on average. If so, then absolutely yes everyone should bet their lives and their families'.
Thousands of people are dying every day in cars. This is not something we need to wait for it to be perfect. It only needs to be better.
If I die in a plane, I have no control over the matter. If I die in a car, then at least I may have had control, and it could be chalked up to my inattentiveness, bad driving behavior, etc. The latter then implies the individual has direct control over whether they live or die, and can thus ensure life by being a responsible driver. I bet the same reasoning will be applied to self driving cars, even if they are orders of magnitude safer, just as the case with airplanes.
This is the same reality for self-driving cars. The edge cases will happen but they won't keep happening with rigorous improvements in the models and trained behaviour.
Flight safety has improved dramatically over the past century and the ability for self driving cars to adapt will be even faster, as it's mostly just software.
Of course this implies that an accident had to happen for such an improvement to take place. But we have both simulation improving drastically to help alleviate that plus the alternative is the current situation where the same types of accidents keep happening again and again with only the occasional improvement to car technology and safety features.
Maybe logically that makes sense but from an ethical perspective I argue it's much more complicated than that (e.g. the trolley problem)
In the current system if a human is at fault, they take the blame for the accident. If we decide to move to self driving cars that we know are far from perfect but statistically better than humans, who do we blame when an accident inevitably happens? Do we blame the manufacturer even though their system is operating within the limits they've advertised?
Or do we just say well, it's better than it used to be and it's no one's fault? When the systems become significantly better than humans, I can see this perhaps being a reasonable argument, but if it's just slightly better, I'm not sure people will be convinced.
Move fast, break different things, is not the answer.
And in context, we still punish surgeons for causing fatalities through gross negligence even though overall they are many orders of magnitude better at performing surgery than the average human.
Sure it takes miles to determine what's better. Once automated driving is happening in millions (instead of hundreds) of cars on the road, it will take only days to measure.
Some of us believe (perhaps wrong but there it is) that the human error rate will be trivially easy to improve upon. That's not sociopathic. It would be unhelpful to dismiss this innovation (self-driving cars) because of FUD.
People who actually want initiatives to succeed are going to have to do better than sneering dismissal in response to anybody people pointing out obvious facts that complex software seldom runs for a billion hours without bugs and successfully overfitting to simulation data in a testing process doesn't mean a new iteration of software will handle novelty it hasn't been designed to solve less fatally than humans over the billions of real world miles we need to be sure.
So you can name-call all you like and disparage dialog because you disagree or whatever. But I don't think a billion miles between accidents is anywhere close to what I see every day.
FUD isn't a position, its got no place in this public-safety discussion.
So far, I have been killed exactly zero times in car crashes. All the empirical evidence tells me that there's no need to surrender control to a computer.
If I die in a crash, perhaps I'll change my mind...
Are deaths where blame can be placed preferable to deaths where it cannot? By what factor? Should we try to exchange one of the latter for two of the former?
You could say "the question is whether aircraft, even with the errors, are safe for people than regular drivers on average. If so..." - then how should we change policy towards Boeing in light of the 737 MAX fiasco? Should we then avoid any adverse action towards them and focus on encouraging more people to fly?
If we declare that something is safer, particularly before it even exists, isn't there a danger of a feedback loop that prevents it from being safer?
Regular drivers kill people, but they are also generally vulnerable to the crashes that they cause. Boeing engineers, or the programmers of self-driving AIs, don't have their interests aligned with you, the occupant of the vehicle, nearly as much.
It only needs to be better.
A Pedestrian likely has a different definition of "better" than the car driver.
I would only buy a car that's as good as a fully attentive, sober, skilled and well rested driver.
Besides, there will be unforceen issues that increase your likelihood of death: hacking, sensor failures, etc.