> The details of their deaths are no important. Saving 25 lives per day is clearly the right thing to do.
I think it's clear that if we were talking about saving 125 people 90 years old or older or 100 children, the clear choice is to save the children, from almost any rational point of view. Even just from a societal health or utility standpoint, children are worth more than people that are statistically close to death anyway at a societal level.
If that premise is acceptable, and if we accept that switching to self driving might change the demographics of who dies in accidents, then it's important to quantify not just whether it saves more people or not, but what people, in case that shifts matters.
> Hint: Imagine all of these people are your family and friends. Do you want to keep having 125 of them die every day, or only 100?
I would rather lose both my parents than one of my children. I don't know a single parent that would feel otherwise.
Additionally, there's also the possibility that like adding extra lanes of traffic to a freeway can make traffic jams worse, self driving cars could increase deaths per capita while reducing deaths per trip, by promoting a lot more car travel (by either allowing current non drivers to drive or increasing time current drivers spend in the car).