Do they? There are other technologies that started out less safe but were accepted and became safer after acceptance, further boosting their popularity. Planes and cars would be examples and mills in the industrial revolution, but there are undoubtably others.
I'd say an automonous car which can completely fail to react to a person in its path is firmly in the "therac-level of failure" category - even if on average they crash much less than humans do. They should all be taken off road and only allowed once we determine through rigorous industrial-level proof testing that it can't happen again.
I agree that they shouldn’t, but they certain do. Strangely we seem fairly ok with devices that kill us when we use them wrong (eg cars, power tools, weapons) but we are outraged when devices that make decisions for themselves kills us. For the victim it’s little different, but somehow it is.
When more cars are autonomous, we may also see news about fatal incidents fade into the background noise.
You also believe that it's possible to do lab tests so good that real-world testing will not be necessary.
Finally, you believe that the radiotherapy machines are 100% safe right now, and will never have a life-threatening problem again. Right?
2) You can do real-world testing without testing on public roads and endangering everyone around you - which is what Tesla was/is doing - all their cars were gathering data which wasn't actually used for autonomous driving yet, but they were able to see what the car would have done had it been running in autonomous mode.
3) No, I do not believe that. I do believe that a certain category of problems has been completely eliminated by rigorous testing, certification processes and engineering practices that prevent those problems in the first place. That's not the same as saying that there will never ever be an issue with a radiotherapy machine. To bring the topic back to self driving cars - the processes should be developed that will ensure that the car cannot not react(like it did in this case) when there is person in its path - it should be physically impossible from the software point of view. If the hardware cannot provide clear enough data to guarantee that, then it simply shouldn't be allowed on the road.
The driver assists you talk about will increase the safety of human driven cars to the point the self driving safety argument becomes less and less relevant.
The idea of a fully autonomous self driving car that can pick you up from your cabin by the lake and drive you into the city is in "flying car" territory for me. The AI required to execute that journey is so far off that the society could have changed enough to make the idea obsolete.
Self driving approved routes are the only way I see this working. Eg. goods haulage or reducing congestion in city centers.
Yes, they can, and, in fact, many operational machines do. You probably mean should not, but even that is clearly not the standard our society applies. Except for machines designed to kill people, we generally try to mitigate this to the extent reasonable, but lots of machines that have killed people are retained in operation in the same configuration.