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Dying in a car accident is normal, but having your (robot) maid kill your children or burn your house down is not.

I think that will weigh on people's opinions of domestic general purpose robots when compared to robotic cars.

Dying in a domestic accident like a house fire is as "normal" as dying in a car accident. Robots are a novel element in both, so I don't see why one would be more readily accepted than the other.

The domestic accident is in the home, a far less acceptable place to have a threat. Furthermore, the threat/cause of the accident is presumably being visualized as a human shaped live-in android a la Bicentennial Man. A human shaped threat can feel a lot more viscerally unacceptable, at least in my experience.

House fire deaths are at least an order of magnitude less common than traffic deaths and houses are the most valuable asset that many people will ever own. They’re certainly similar but I think different enough that people would have very different reactions to robot-caused destruction.

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