Technically, crashes caused by Google's self driving car is not "12 per 1 million," it is "0 per 1 million." which is significantly better than "1.85 per millio

Technically, crashes caused by Google's self driving car is not "12 per 1 million," it is "0 per 1 million." which is significantly better than "1.85 per million" for humans. Inversely, crashes caused by humans involving a self driving car is 12 per 1 million. Not a good record for humans. :) It's also important to take note where the driving is. In densely populated regions, you are more likely to have minor accidents such as fender benders than on the open road. However, the open road is more likely to get you killed if you are involved in an accident due to speed. All this "techy-BS" is not belittling humans by creating self driving cars. I strongly believe the opposite is true, humans are amazing because we can build artificial intelligent systems to handle these kinds of tasks for us and let us focus on bigger and better problems than steering a car. Your same argument falls flat with other technologies. Why have a computer add numbers when we have a wonderful brain that can do the same? I argue that it is because we build systems to augment and work around our deficiencies. One of those deficiencies is our driving skill. Over 30,000 in the US alone die due to auto accidents. Self driving cars has the potential to eliminate most of these deaths. Ideally, we'll get to a point where a death on the road makes national news because of its rarity.