It's a difficult question. Because we cannot just dive into it assuming that the toll (in life/safety) of beta testing AVs on public roads will result in a net benefit within a reasonable timespan. The human driving fatality rate is ~1 death per 100 million miles. Uber has 2 million miles driven and 1 fatality. It's obviously unfair to extrapolate and say that Uber has 50x the fatality rate of normal driving. But that means we have to keep testing Uber AVs on public roads.
What if an Uber AV accidentally kills someone at the 2.5M mark? That's still not enough data to statistically compare apples to apples. Maybe the next 100M miles of Uber testing is fatality free...that still wouldn't be completely enough (right? I'm not great at stats but I would think we need at least a billion?). Of course, it could go the other way, with Uber AVs killing someone every 1M miles.
As a general tech optimist, I'm inclined to think tech will get better, overall. But let's face it, that's not a given. And in the meantime, it's likely the tech upper-class won't be the ones who suffer the most while tech improves. The case at hand being the prime example: a homeless recently-imprisoned woman was killed.
Earlier today someone submitted an interesting RAND study that argued that the testing time for autonomous vehicles to meet statistical reliability for safety testing would be on the order of decades, or even centuries, and there would still be no guarantee that AVs would be safer. I'm hoping RAND is just being really pessimistic here...
What if an Uber AV accidentally kills someone at the 2.5M mark? That's still not enough data to statistically compare apples to apples. Maybe the next 100M miles of Uber testing is fatality free...that still wouldn't be completely enough (right? I'm not great at stats but I would think we need at least a billion?). Of course, it could go the other way, with Uber AVs killing someone every 1M miles.
As a general tech optimist, I'm inclined to think tech will get better, overall. But let's face it, that's not a given. And in the meantime, it's likely the tech upper-class won't be the ones who suffer the most while tech improves. The case at hand being the prime example: a homeless recently-imprisoned woman was killed.
Earlier today someone submitted an interesting RAND study that argued that the testing time for autonomous vehicles to meet statistical reliability for safety testing would be on the order of decades, or even centuries, and there would still be no guarantee that AVs would be safer. I'm hoping RAND is just being really pessimistic here...
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1478.html