Self driving cars would have to kill over 1.35 million people each year to be as bad as human drivers[1].
But there is no reason we should be happy if a self driving technology "only" kills 1.2 million people in a year. That number is absurd and should not be considered acceptable. I think in the semi-distant future we are going to look at manual operation of a motor vehicle as a dangerous party trick, something only to be attempted by professionals or in limited circumstances like pulling into a field to park or some other low speed maneuvering.
We should be delighted if we have a self driving technology that only kills 1.2 million people a year.
1. That's an incredible amount of saved time, people now get that time back that they use to have to spend driving. We would have eliminated the largest suck of human time on the planet (truck driving). Etc. The main benefit of self driving is not safety.
2. We have a working baseline that we can improve upon to drive that number down, and since computer programs don't have the "new drivers need to learn from scratch" problem, those improvements will stick around approximately forever.
But there is no reason we should be happy if a self driving technology "only" kills 1.2 million people in a year. That number is absurd and should not be considered acceptable. I think in the semi-distant future we are going to look at manual operation of a motor vehicle as a dangerous party trick, something only to be attempted by professionals or in limited circumstances like pulling into a field to park or some other low speed maneuvering.
[1] https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/