[spacehome]

I'm already a pedestrian surrounded by unsafe human drivers, and every day I hate what I see. What I'm talking about is making a tradeoff between risk now and risk later such that my total risk is lower. I'd take that tradeoff, and I think it's the ethical thing for society to do. What you're talking about is NIMBY, which certainly makes sense locally -- better for some other locale to perfect the technology -- but on the societal level I think it's wrongheaded. But don't worry; there's no danger anybody will take my stance on it seriously. Autonomous vehicles will not be widely deployed until they're provably drastically better than humans.