In my opinion the application of technology, and (more importantly) the delegation of human responsibility to a computer, should be something that's part of the national conversation.

I disagree that they're sensationalized. Self-driving systems are designed to improve user safety, but when they end up making mistakes that human drivers _wouldn't_ make then it's appropriate to thoroughly investigate these systems.

> is because they were self-driving.

Well, precisely. We tolerate driving accidents because we know that the mobility that cars provide end up offering far more value to the world than the occasional accidents that we end up tolerating.

What's the trade with self-driving cars? What is the technology enabling that is worth the possible additional risks?

> car getting in a minor fenderbender and equating it with the safety of the entire car industry?

I don't think that comparison offers anything interesting, and it ignores the long and storied history of improving automobile safety. Look into Ralph Naders "Unsafe At Any Speed" if you really want to see people looking at "regular" accidents and deciding there was something to be fixed.

Put another way, consider all the IT professionals who advise their relatives to wait a month or two before performing a major OS update. When self-driving cars are the majority of vehicles on the road, and we get our first buggy software update that results in a string of crashes, how likely will people be to update if they're even given a choice at all?

Comparing human to self-driving per-mile fatality statistics like that's the primary measure for people, while ignoring the fact that we're looking at the first mainstream manifestations of a coming type of threat modeling that the species has never before had to even consider, seems a little narrow a way to view the issue.

For insurance companies and actuaries looking to define collectivized risk, spreadsheets are the right way to consider this kind of thing. For individuals who've driven their whole lives without an accident, deciding to let emerging tech take over for you when taking the kids to visit grandma is going to be a significant transition in human history.

Consider that there are very elderly people alive today who will still never fly on an airplane because of their early safety records.

Sure, self-driving cars that were better than humans would be good, but what we have right now is self-driving cars that are maybe better than humans in normal conditions (controlling for type of car, conditions etc), and completely break down in bad conditions and often fail unsafe in between.

>Do you think you'd see a bunch of FUD about a 2021 manually-driven Chevy mystery car getting in a minor fenderbender and equating it with the safety of the entire car industry? No.

Well of course not, because we all moved to self-driving cars in 2017 as Elon Musk told us we would.

There's a very simple reason we aren't worried if Bob down the road crashes his car, it's because we're not binary identical bob, and people haven't been systematically lying about bob's capabilities for the last decade.

I'd even support the idea of building them statues, should they meet an unfortunate hero's end.

Anyone who uses these numbers to even imply this is safer than Tesla knows nothing about statistics. It is way too early to draw any conclusions about Comma's safety. It is also probably too early to even draw statistical conclusions about Tesla's safety.

Not excusing Tesla’s faults but the volume of Tesla’s cars on the road compared to Comma’s would probably explain the difference in statistics.