Tesla Autopilot Crash: Why We Should Worry About a Single Death

Do you similarly advocate that we should, right now, today, in real life policy, set up a program where we check people for matches to multiple people needing organs, and if one healthy person's organs can save the lives of 2+ people, murder that healthy person and take his/her organs?

The argument is reversed entirely if you take human desires as given, i.e. if you acknowledge that people do text on the road.

The metric to compare both alternatives then becomes, how many miles of texting while driving vs. being driven by an autopilot while texting does it take to kill one person. I don't have the numbers, but I'm pretty sure the latter is lower. Maybe autopilots encourage "bad" behavior, but convenience also spurred construction of coal power plants at the cost of shortened lives. Much like fines for neglected pollution abatement, I would favor mandatory life insurance for each mile on autopilot to internalize risks.

One day my son will drive.

Do I want for him to face a 1/10000 chance of being killed each year by a human driver?

Or do I want for him to face a 1/20000 chance of being killed each year by an autonomous vehicle?

I'll take option two, for him and for me. I don't give a damn about philosophical questions. And I don't give a damn if it's a different dice I'm rolling.

The only reason I care much about this one death is because it risks slowing down progress. Lives are at stake here. Yours. Mine. Your family's. My family's.

The statistical/utilitarian argument for self-driving vehicles is less compelling than the personal story argument against them. So I want to make the for argument as personal and compelling as we can.

Hmm, you seem to believe that people who don't fly because they are afraid of plans are afraid of planes because they have a mistaken belief about the statistical safety of planes.

My experience with people who are afraid of planes is that they know planes are safer than cars, but none the less feel a visceral, non-rational fear of the airplane that makes flying deeply uncomfortable for them. Kind of like how you might feel if you were covered in insects, even if you knew that the insects were non-venomous, non-disease carrying, and clean.

Is it really accurate to take the very limited and incomplete data of this self-driving feature and compare that to all of the world's accident rates? Think about the long tail here...

Have they even released this data for examination? I am thinking that many people have approached this feature with caution, in that its a novelty but they aren't "trusting" it or relying on it like you would a human driver to safely get you somewhere. It would be also interesting to see the types of roads and conditions where the feature is enabled. In the rain? Snow? At night? Poor visibility? Traffic conditions.

Just a single number paints an incomplete picture of the data. Why has no one mentioned this? People are sheep that are quick to declare victory after seeing a single number without questioning where or how that number came to be.

My thoughts are this: give this feature to your average Joe driving a Honda without much guidance and we'd have a lot more mechanized death.

Youtube is full of Tesla autopilot fail videos where the driver had to take quick action to avert disaster. What if we let this into the hands of a lot more irresponsible people who think they can tool down the highway watching a Harry Potter movie, blind faith and trust in a "feature". How many Tesla owners here would honestly trust the feature that much with their life at this point?