There is only one set of stats that matters here: crashes, fatalities, incidents etc per km compared to similar journeys. Everything else is bullshit and emotion and politics.
SF and likely most cities will have others such as how disruptive you are.
People rarely stop in the middle of a road, even with emergency services need to pass and refuse to move.
How rarely? How does it compare to self driving cars per km driven?
The economy might be improved somewhat by personal vehicular mobility, but we’re talking about human lives.
For example, consider if drunk driving is common, and lots of people get into accidents because of that. Then a self-driving car might do better than a drunk driver statistically. But then, what if you are not a drunk driver? Then you might personally drive safer than any self-driving car.
A more realistic example could be that 65% of routes are safer in a self-driving car, but then your personal commuting route might be in the remaining 35%.
Or for example one might look at accidents caused chiefly by inattention and assume that a self-driving car would perform better in those situations. But then, you have the unknown quantity of complex situations where a self-driving car will cause an accident due to not being able to understand its environment.
There isn't really a way to condense the discussion to a single statistic without being disingenuous.
This is a good example, I think it will be the reality of any change like this. But that is sort of my point: Someone will always lose out. That's the price of things getting better for everyone else. And that's that standard we should judge all changes on: do we do more good for more people than we do bad by making this change? Then perhaps you can re-distribute.
That's what I am asking for here. If self-driving cars prevent 10 people dying down town but cause 5 to die up town, that's a good deal because 10>5. The fact it's a bad deal for those 5 people does not mean it is not a good deal for society as a whole...
It’s a balancing act: you do want to maximize the economic benefits of the technology, and on the other hand you do want to minimize the costs to society.
> which have blocked traffic and hampered emergency services
Like, if the only stats that matter are road accidents, the obvious thing would be to just ban all motorised vehicles. A slightly more nuanced view is perhaps required.
Driving creates a danger and a number of costly externalities. Those are the costs side of the cost-benefit equation. It may be the case that AI drivers have generally lower costs because of your assertion that they make fewer mistakes or less grave mistakes than humans. This does not lead to the obvious inference that allowing an AI driver today in a particular place under a particular regime of rules confers a benefit equal to allowing a human to drive.
In the same way, for instance, we do not generally pass laws or policies against people having children, even if we recognize that some people are suboptimal or unfit parents. Instead we presume fitness and build in some checks to capture excessively unfit parenting later. Whatever the cost of suboptimal parenting, we recognize the choice or ability to have a child to be a part of basic human dignity, and so the benefits outweigh the costs. Many jurisdictions place more onerous requirements on pet ownership than human ownership even if the downside cost of being a negligent pet owner is less bad than being a negligent parent.
Perhaps the calculus will be different when AI driving is costless and ubiquitous; we might decide collectively that humans have no inherent right to manually operate vehicles and full participation in society does not require them to. But in the mean time, holding AI driver street tests to a higher standard than human drivers can be justified strictly on a cost-benefit (and thus pragmatic) basis.
You might counter that, well, AI driving tests don't provide a benefit now, but given a particular utility function, the testing offers <x> marginal training value towards a future reduction in costs (in terms of injury/delay/death). But then it depends on your discount factor of the present versus the future, which is a socially determined function.
There's also an underlying presumption that there's some elasticity of resource allocation. Perhaps allocating $x million towards AI driving reduces deaths or injuries or delays; but people can readily contest that $x million spent on other options could do so more efficiently (perhaps infrastructural investment in public transit, perhaps additional free driver's training, perhaps more robust emergency services, perhaps safety features). Because much of this investment is occurring in the private sector, people rely on the state's regulation of these efforts to incentivize allocating resources towards preferred investments. This is also pragmatic, rather than puritanical.
It's fine to disagree or have a more bullish view of AI driving, or to feel these concerns are overrated, but it makes very little sense to characterize them as puritanical (in contrast to pragmatic). Some people may have puritanical views, just as some proponents of the technology may have messianic views. But both positions can be justified entirely from rational argument depending on one's utility function. Why strawman?
You are a really uncharitable poster here. Your first intervention is to dismiss anyone who disagree with you about which metrics are most useful as "bullshit" and "emotional" and here you call them puritans. I think you should engage in some self-reflection and try to approach conversation online in a less antisocial way.
That is is the self-driven same set as human driven? Without any exclusions. And if not are the ones exluded and including accidents included in self-driving?