[hnthrowaway8493]

>if autonomous driving can save 1+ life, it's better than what we have now so we should keep it and accept that crashes will occur

This argument ignores the reality of driving: by being a competent, attentive, careful driver you can avoid many classes of accident. Crashes are all about fault, and as a safe driver you can avoid most at-fault accidents. You get to avoid all the self-inflicted damage of drunk/incapacitated driving, unsafe driving for weather conditions, extreme speeding / reckless driving, etc. You still have to deal with the externalities of those, but some fraction of the time you can notice and anticipate these people on the road and stay away. Not always of course, so that still leaves some number of deaths per mile, but I'd bet that threshold is way lower than the "save one life" bar. So if you're a good driver, autonomous cars at the "current death rate" safety bar would make you less safe.

What you get by ignoring this and using the current death rate as a bar is a "transfer of deaths": you take all the deaths that were the fault of the driver (driver dies due to being drunk/high, very reckless driving, etc) and transfer them to random innocent people who were not at fault.

[vmladenov]

> This argument ignores the reality of driving: by being a competent, attentive, careful driver you can avoid many classes of accident.

It’s funny you use the word reality since this is completely at odds with driving in America. You’re comparing an idealized world of competent drivers to the real world where there are basically no barriers to getting a license and everyone is on their phone behind the wheel. Unless you advocate for stricter licensing and more police enforcement against inattentive driving with equal vigor, this line of reasoning doesn’t hold.