This "faith in technology" is borderline religion without proof, it's ignorance that it is as good as the code bugs and sensor fail (and people overriding safeguards out of laziness).
Pedestrians and cyclists are the "beta testers", I am sure the people in the hardened car frame will be mostly fine.
Yeah yeah, automation "will kill less than humans". Who goes to prison when software kills someone?
It was a light rain that has been falling for hours. The roads are sleek but very few deep puddles. No problem with traction, but the sheen of the water combined with poor lane markings means it’s often hard to see the lanes.
My experience has always been the vision AI can discern lines and road markings significantly better than I can. So I often choose to drive with autopilot on and keep close attention at night in the rain.
The car will be almost always perfectly in lane while I am freed up to pay more attention to the greater surroundings, traffic signs and lights, route planning, and watching for hazards and other traffic.
I find at night in the dark driving without autopilot, lane keeping requires significant focus, which can mean other driving tasks like route planning and identifying hazards can suffer.
As of right now, exceedingly few cars are being driven entirely automated. Humans using autopilot will have more time and focus to identify and avoid cyclists/pedestrians that are on or entering the road. Autopilot is a massively useful safety tool.
Unfortunately some humans abuse their driving privilege. Drunk driving and distracted driving are huge and growing killers. Human drivers that are supposed to be paying attention that instead hit a cyclist / pedestrian are at fault. If it’s done while driving distracted on autopilot that’s even more so the human’s fault.
The issue I have with AutoPilot is it doesn’t always shy away from poorly driven cars and large trucks in the next lane over. So while a human would be all the way over to the far side of the lane, AutoPilot stays perfectly centered or only slightly shys away from semi-trucks.
It's extremely rare even for fatal hit and runs to result in prison/jail time: https://abcnews.go.com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail-t...
A self-driving car surfaces the problem in a visceral manner, but this applies to many many sectors and to any software that runs critical services/tools/infrastructure - Hospitals, Medical devices, thermostats, etc.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-g...
https://medium.com/predict/a-simple-computer-bug-that-killed...
etc
Also, this covers physical harm, but what about economic harm? If an OS security bug was exploited by a hacker and caused you to loose all your life savings and end up homeless, can you put a linux/windows/ s/w dev in jail?