> Calling for rules to be written before we fully understand the problem is a recipe for overregulation.

I think s/he outlined, at least in essence, one of the (many) problems. This is an area where rigorous QA, test, re-testing, and re-re-testing should be paramount above all else -- including profits, at least at first until we get the software down pat. Do you want to trust your children's lives to some half-baked "ship it!" product? I don't.

> Humans are terrible drivers.

Compared to what? We have some evidence that computers can do better in tightly controlled scenarios (limited access freeways) but that's always been low hanging fruit.

I think humans are pretty good drivers, actually. How many 2 lane undivided roads do people go zipping down all day, every day, with very few accidents? A ton. We're also very adaptable and good at handling outlier situations.

OK. So what? The key word here is "might" be safer than the status quo. We should ensure that we are measuring carefully and confident in our results (which also requires being confident that the systems are well behaved and well understood and thus the testing is valid) so that if they do show they are safer than humans on average it will be beneficial to move to autonomous driving as much as is practicable. And if, on a case by case basis, that is not true then we can avoid killing more people unnecessarily because we want to save some money on development costs.