From Tesla's statement: "contrasted against worldwide accident data, customers using Autopilot are statistically safer than those not using it at all"
I think this is a foolish statement: fatal accidents in the US are 1.3 per 100M miles driven. Tesla reports autopilot has driven 100M miles. That's not enough data collected to draw this kind of conclusion.
There's a parallel here with software testing. I've seen bugs that happen 25% of the time, for example, and take 10 minutes to run a test. Our test guys have great intentions, but if they test 5 times and see no bug, they think the bug is gone. There is no instinctive understanding that they have insufficient data to draw a conclusion.
I think this is a foolish statement: fatal accidents in the US are 1.3 per 100M miles driven. Tesla reports autopilot has driven 100M miles. That's not enough data collected to draw this kind of conclusion.
There's a parallel here with software testing. I've seen bugs that happen 25% of the time, for example, and take 10 minutes to run a test. Our test guys have great intentions, but if they test 5 times and see no bug, they think the bug is gone. There is no instinctive understanding that they have insufficient data to draw a conclusion.