Gil Pratt, who heads up Toyota's autonomous development initiative mentioned that we would need to drive 8.5 billion autonomous miles to be able to declare with 99% statistical certainty that autonomous vehicles are safer that human driven ones. Of course, as we are witnessing, great pains will be taken with every preventable injurious or fatal collision to ensure that sort of failure never happens again, so by the time we get to the 8 billionth mile the software and hardware will have improved considerably, rendering the early data moot.
One thing we can say about the woman killed the other day by an autonomous Uber, is that unlike the other ~40,000 killed on America's roads over the past year, her's was not in vain.
Every day that we delay the widespread deployment of this technology, it's another 100 or so people dead. Of course, the public is unlikely to see it that way. They see one death as a tragedy, but 40,000 is just a statistic, business as usual, nothing to get excited about.
