Yeah, accountability is the entire point. Are the corporations, executives, and shareholders going to be held responsible for this?

Also, every human driver is different. So it's up to each driver as an individual to ensure they're following traffic rules and driving safely. Human minds are also complex and capable of adapting to evolving circumstances, even at a moment's notice, to deal with unexpected situations when they arise, such as near-miss emergencies.

Machines don't have that; they're algorithmic and deterministic, which means there will always be some possibility of events outside the scope of their programming.

Also, comparing the robots to human drivers isn't a good comparison, because as far as we're concerned the hardware and software are nearly identical between each robot. So if one of them was capable of causing a multi-vehicle accident, that means they all are.

So calculating probability using something similar to the manhours of each robot on the road is foolish. What they did was (incidents) ÷ (robots × time), to make it look like a comically small chance of having an accident.

A more accurate formula would be (1 – (incidents ÷ time))^(number of robots)^

And that gives you the probability of (time) elapsing without incident. The more robots there are, the smaller that number gets, meaning the likelihood of an accident increases with each additional robot. Not decreases.

So for example (1 – (1 accident ÷ 4 years))^(100 robots)^ = 0.75^100^

In other words, without a software update requiring significant technological improvements, with 100 of these robots on the road, the chances of going another 4 years without an accident is on the magnitude of 3.207 × 10^(-13)

I'll leave you to determine what that makes the likelihood of x number of incidents per year.

You're right that I didn't have to call them an idiot though, I apologize for that. My temper was a bit spun up from arguing with trolls in a different thread, but I shouldn't have let that seep out here.