This is by far the most insightful comment in the entire thread.
The real news isn't "Self-Driving Car Kills Pedestrian", the real news is "Self-Driving Car Fatalities are Rare Enough to be World News". I'm one-third a class M planet away from the incident and reading about it.
> The real news isn't "Self-Driving Car Kills Pedestrian", the real news is "Self-Driving Car Fatalities are Rare Enough to be World News".
They are rare only because self-driving cars are; I don't think the total driven miles of all self-driving cars are enough that even 1 fatality would be expected if they were human driven; certainly Uber is orders of magnitude below that point taken alone.
There are lots of fatalities from human-driven cars, sure, but that's over a truly stupendous number of miles driven.
> neither of us has the data, but id bet that whatever miles / fatalities metric is, the self driving cars are still in the lead right now
There's different estimates from different sources using slightly different methodology, but they are all in the neighborhood of road fatalities of 1 per 100 million miles traveled. [0]
Waymo claims to have reached 5 million miles in February [1], Uber (from other posts in this thread) is around 1 million miles; the whole self-driving industry is nowhere near 100 million, and has one fatality. So it's way worse, as of today, than human driving for fatalities.
Of course, it's also way too little data (on the self-driving side) to treat as meaningful in terms of prediciting the current hazard rather than simply measuring the outcomes to date.
