[rm999]

>Doing many thousands times better will not be done by incremental improvement

This assertion isn't obvious to me. In my experience incremental updates are often exponential in their impact (especially if enough resources are put into a problem). Moore's Law is an excellent example of this: at any given time, researchers are working on a fixed number of solutions that will generally make a fixed % impact. This is why we can see a doubling in transistor density without a huge increase in the size of the industry.

In the case of reducing accidents, I could see a similar exponential pattern. The first incremental step maybe took the accident rate from 10% to 1% by eliminating 90% of the possible sources of accidents. In the second step, researchers will again shoot to eliminate 90% of the current causes of accidents, bringing the rate to 0.1%. This could repeat every couple years until the accident rate is sufficiently close to 0.