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Comment by killerswan | Hacker News Reader

Human drivers kill ~260,000 children a year. The bar for robots is low.

Yes, but robots only need to kill one to be demonised. I think this is because the human theoretically can regret it and be punished, whereas there can never be a feeling of justice with the robot. The manufacturers take on a lot of liability (GOOGLE'S CHILD-KILLING DEATH MACHINES!)

And yet individual regret / manslaughter charges don't seem to actually change road death statistics. I'd so love for this to happen; I kinda also doubt it will though anytime soon.

Another thing is that any accident that an autonomously driven car gets into will be blamed on the car automatically, before any information is available.

In other words, it probably only takes an accident, not even culpability, to get demonized.

I think that autonomously driven cars will have a lot of cameras and a black box like airplanes do, so that all the data before the accident will be available and if somebody else is guilty of accident - videos will be published by car manufacturer.

The videos are hopefully going to carry some weight, but I find your consolation in the available data somewhat optimistic; at best, I think they'll just cushion the backlash.

That sounds like an awfully high number. Is there a source for it?

It is not very high if you consider that people drive cars everywhere, not only in the US.

The fatality rate in the US is around 30k-40k every year[1].

[1] - http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/People/PeopleAllVictims.aspx

I wonder if making robots drive would bring the traffic death rate down to the one of other industrialized countries.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=deaths+in+traffic+per+c...

Why is the rate so much higher in the US?

First thought would be to graph it against miles driven per person per year.

Yes: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7776127.stm

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