About 40,000 people die per year in the US from traffic fatalities. There are about 200,000,000 people licensed to drive in the US. So, about 1 in 5,000 drivers die per year. Tesla has released FSD Beta to ~160,000 drivers. So, to first order, we can approximate that as ~32 Tesla drivers will die a year due to a traffic fatality if they constitute a representative sample (they do not, but we are doing some quick estimates here). So, a system that is used as a full-time, unassisted replacement for their human drivers will result in, on average, one extra person dying per year per 3% worse it is than a human driver when applied to a mere 0.1% of the US driving population. If applied over the entire US driving population a system that is 3% worse applied to all driving interactions would result in ~1,200 extra people dying per year.
At the scales being discussed, extremely small differences applied over the entire domain result in very serious risks to human life. It is not okay to knowingly sacrifice people at the altar of moving fast and breaking things so that Elon Musk can make another couple billion dollars.
Also, it is not even close to being one of the better systems from a safety perspective. It is something like 400-800x worse than Waymo and 2,000-4,000x worse than Cruise [1]. It is so far behind so many other companies it is fair to say that they are not even in the race let alone a frontrunner.
They are not within 3% or even close. They are 2,000x worse than Cruise which is still at least 8x worse than human drivers. Being generous they are 16,000x (1,600,000%) worse at unassisted, intervention-less driving than humans. To put that into perspective, if every car in the US had Tesla FSD Beta and they were all using it as a fully autonomous system without babysitting, it would average 1,750,000 deaths per day and everybody in the US would be dead in 6 months. Within a week it would kill more people than have ever died from traffic accidents in the US. We are literally talking 1 deca-Hiroshima per day of badness. The only saving grace of this whole thing is that hardly anybody is insane enough to use it unattended more than a few times so we do not see the sheer catastrophe that would occur if it was actually used as advertised.
I'm not sure flat risk per distance is the right model to use. If we consider a model like n classes of issues that all need to be handled one after another, then after most changes the incident rate will still be far above human, until it suddenly becomes much more safe. In that model, the failures come from the software failing categorically, not probabilistically.
About 40,000 people die per year in the US from traffic fatalities. There are about 200,000,000 people licensed to drive in the US. So, about 1 in 5,000 drivers die per year. Tesla has released FSD Beta to ~160,000 drivers. So, to first order, we can approximate that as ~32 Tesla drivers will die a year due to a traffic fatality if they constitute a representative sample (they do not, but we are doing some quick estimates here). So, a system that is used as a full-time, unassisted replacement for their human drivers will result in, on average, one extra person dying per year per 3% worse it is than a human driver when applied to a mere 0.1% of the US driving population. If applied over the entire US driving population a system that is 3% worse applied to all driving interactions would result in ~1,200 extra people dying per year.
At the scales being discussed, extremely small differences applied over the entire domain result in very serious risks to human life. It is not okay to knowingly sacrifice people at the altar of moving fast and breaking things so that Elon Musk can make another couple billion dollars.
Also, it is not even close to being one of the better systems from a safety perspective. It is something like 400-800x worse than Waymo and 2,000-4,000x worse than Cruise [1]. It is so far behind so many other companies it is fair to say that they are not even in the race let alone a frontrunner.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33227450