My fact is based on the related fact that all engineered systems fail from time to time. There is no such thing as perfectly engineered systems any more than there are perpetual motion machines.
The interesting questions are:
- what is the likelihood of failure?
- what are the likely failure modes?
- are they designed to fail safe?
- are there backups to the fail safes?
- are there backups to the backups?
And of course complex systems will always have unpredictable failure modes. Failures due to interplay with complex external systems that couldn't possibly be predicted.
I think what most people are afraid of is the fact that you can predict unexpected human behavior fairly well, you can't with a machine.
If you see a car moving weird, you can make stuff to reduce the risk of an accident happening, when a self driving car suddenly turn and kill you, you weren't able to do anything.
Now I love the intellectual challenge to it, however I don't think we'll ever see the today's situation only with self driving cars, way too many cars. My guess is self driving stuff will improve a lot public transportation and people will only travel that way.
The interesting questions are: - what is the likelihood of failure? - what are the likely failure modes? - are they designed to fail safe? - are there backups to the fail safes? - are there backups to the backups?
And of course complex systems will always have unpredictable failure modes. Failures due to interplay with complex external systems that couldn't possibly be predicted.
And so on and so on.