[cespare]

I guess to me it seems like common sense that a system that has substantially fewer crashes also has substantially fewer deaths. Maybe we can't make definitive statements about the expected number of deaths yet, but I think the most reasonable best guess with the information we have is that waymo deaths will be much lower.

The alternative requires a scenario where waymo is especially likely to get into fatal accidents while being very good at avoiding non-fatal ones, right? Seems far-fetched.

[dontreact]

I would not make the same inference because we know that ML systems generally struggle with robustness and the long tail, while humans tend to be exhibit much more flexibility to adapt to distribution shifts or unusual situations. For a concrete example of this in computer vision, see work such as the Imagenet—C dataset where simple distribution shifts generally tank ML models but do not impact human performance.

But regardless, the claim here isn’t “under some assumptions that some people (and not others) find reasonable, we can extrapolate and predict that self driving cars will be found to be safer”

It’s “self driving cars are safer”, which there isn’t enough evidence to claim yet.