According to Templeton, regulators and policymakers are proving more open to the idea than expected—a number of US states have okayed early driverless cars for public experimentation, along with Singapore, India, Israel, and Japan—but earning the general public’s trust may be a more difficult battle to win.

No matter how many fewer accidents occur due to driverless cars, there may well be a threshold past which we still irrationally choose human drivers over them. That is, we may hold robots to a much higher standard than humans.

This higher standard comes at a price. “People don’t want to be killed by robots,” Templeton said. “They want to be killed by drunks.”

It’s an interesting point—assuming the accident rate is nonzero (and it will be), how many accidents are we willing to tolerate in driverless cars, and is that number significantly lower than the number we’re willing to tolerate with human drivers?

Let’s say robot cars are shown to reduce accidents by 20%. They could potentially prevent some 240,000 accidents (using Templeton’s global number). That’s a big deal. And yet if (fully) employed, they would still cause nearly a million accidents a year. Who would trust them? And at what point does that trust kick in? How close to zero accidents does it have to get?

And it may turn out that the root of the problem lies not with the technology but us.

Ref: Summit Europe: When Will We Let Go and Let Google Drive Us? – SingularityHub