Driving is essentially a spiritual activity. By normal standards, it's insane to expect non-experts to maintain and operate heavy machinery, in public streets,

Driving is essentially a spiritual activity. By normal standards, it's insane to expect non-experts to maintain and operate heavy machinery, in public streets, half asleep or half paying attention. It's also a pretty absurd way of providing mass transport in most places. So if you're going to throw out normal risk assessment as a starting point, where do you go from there? People know how bad quality software can be, how ubiquitous bugs are, and how often programs are deep morasses of strange and perverse hacks, and how it only doesn't (normally) kill people because the stakes are small. Then Uber's car actually did kill someone, and predictably, the familiar problem of bad, buggy software looms larger, as a risk, than the dull and more or less commonly accepted fact of cars hitting people all the time. Very common threats, like pneunomia, poverty, or cancer, tend to get depreciated in comparison to symbolic, unusal threats - and I think it's pretty unsurprising that on HN, people feel threatened by the possibility of bugs not only ruining their day, but actually running them over.