More so when you take her actual statement in context: that they're actually reducing deaths by being safer. The comments on lemmy are turning out to be just as biased and ungrounded in reality as they were on Reddit.

Waymo robotaxis are so safe that, according to the company’s data, its driverless vehicles are involved in 91 percent fewer crashes compared to human-operated vehicles.

And yet the the company is bracing for the first time when a Waymo does kill somebody — a moment its CEO says society will accept, in exchange for access to its relatively safer driverless cars.

There’s around a million people dying from cars every year and we just shrug and normalize them. Human or not, we just have to have cars and “accidents” are just that.

The difference is accountability. If a human kills another human because of a car accident, they are liable, even criminally liable, given the right circumstances. If a driverless car kills another human because of a car accident, you're presented with a lose-lose scenario, depending on the legal implementation:

1. If the car manufacturer says that somebody must be behind the wheel, even though the car is doing all of the driving, the person is suddenly liable for the accident. They are expected to just sit there and watch for a potential accident, but the behavior of what an AI model will do is undefined. Is the model going to stop in front of that passenger as expected? How long do they wait to see before they take back control? It's not like cruise control, a feature that only controls part of the car, where they know exactly how it behaves and when to take back control. It's the equivalent of asking a person to watch a panel with a single red light for an hour, and push a button as fast as possible when it blinks for a half-second.

2. If the model is truly driverless (like these taxis), then NOBODY is liable for the accident. The company behind it might get sued, or might end up in a class-action lawsuit, but there is no criminal liability, and none of these lawsuits will result in enough financial impact to facilitate change. The companies have no incentive to fix their software, and will continue to parrot this shitty line about how it's somehow better than humans at driving, despite these easily hackable scenarios and zero accountability.

Humans have an incentive to not kill people, since nobody wants to have that on their conscience, and nobody wants to go to prison over it.

Corporations don't. In fact, they have an incentive to kill people over profits, if the choice presents itself!

Nobody cares about cars killing people and animals.

I think that's overstating it a bit, of course many care, and we have people who are responsible for setting safety standards.
Just because accidents are unavoidable doesn't mean we aren't trying to minimize them and avoid fatalities.

Mandatory safety belts is an example of this. But other than that there are actual scientific studies into road safety, and even city wide implementations of such studies. At least in Europe there is, but I'm guessing USA has it too.

Just because traffic accidents happen, and we obviously need "traffic" to be able to move around, doesn't mean nobody cares.

As an anecdotal example, here (Denmark) the speed limit was increased from 110 to 130 on our equivalent to Autobahn, which may seem like accepting more accidents for convenience or efficiency. But in reality it was to divert more traffic to the safer "Autobahn" to actually reduce the number of accidents on smaller roads.

Traffic safety is as much about psychology as it is about making safer systems.

PPS:
Regarding the animals we have just had warnings about deer, and some places have small tunnels made for frogs.
And there are warning signs where deer tend to cross in almost any country that has them.

Self driving cars will have far less accidents and deaths than human driven cars. But the idea of being killed by human error is acceptable to us but the idea of a machine fucking up and killing us is terrifying, even if it means one self driving accident will create algorithms to avoid that same incident on all cars. Whereas human error can happen over and over in the same situation