I don't agree with this. Driving is, taken at its fundamentals, a dangerous activity; we are taking heavy machinery, accelerating it until it has considerable kinetic energy, and maneuvering it through a complex and constantly changing environment, often in situations where a single mistake will kill or seriously harm ourselves or other humans.

The fact that a very large number of humans do this every day without causing any injury demonstrates that humans are very good at this task. The fact that deaths still occur simply shows that they could still be better.

Not sure I agree.

It's not hard to come up with tasks that inherently cause widespread death regardless of the skill of those who carry them out. Starting fairly large and heavy objects moving at considerable speed in the vicinity of other such objects and pedestrians, cyclists and stationary humans may just be one such task. That is, the inherent risks (i.e. you cannot stop these things instantly, or make them change direction instantly) combines with the cognitive/computational complexity of evaluating the context to create a task that can never be done without significant fatalities, regardless of who/what tries to perform it.

You're looking at the wrong metric.

1.33 deaths per 100,000,000 vehicle miles travelled.

That's amazingly good considering most people, if they drive at all, travel about 0.5% of that distance in their lifetime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Now compare that >1 million deaths per year to the total number of people driving per year around the world... it looks like we're doing a pretty solid job.