There's actually a potential safety advantage from the public's irrational reaction to autonomous driving deaths (irrational if compared to their response to human driving driving deaths):
Autonomous driving deaths will be much more scrutinized. In the press, by regulators, by competitors, by the companies involved. There's likely to be a lot more data involved. The scrutiny may ironically increase as it becomes safer, maybe becoming a lot like plane crashes, in fact, where each one is scrutinized by groups of experts and fixes are put in place to prevent that kind of thing from happening.
The safer it is, the rarer and more novel the fatalities are and therefore the more resources will be spent on fixing the safety issues.
That is, if autonomous driving is allowed. If it's not allowed because overall irrational fear of autonomous driving, then that feedback cycle can't happen.
So the paranoia isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as it doesn't cause paralysis.
Autonomous driving deaths will be much more scrutinized. In the press, by regulators, by competitors, by the companies involved. There's likely to be a lot more data involved. The scrutiny may ironically increase as it becomes safer, maybe becoming a lot like plane crashes, in fact, where each one is scrutinized by groups of experts and fixes are put in place to prevent that kind of thing from happening.
The safer it is, the rarer and more novel the fatalities are and therefore the more resources will be spent on fixing the safety issues.
That is, if autonomous driving is allowed. If it's not allowed because overall irrational fear of autonomous driving, then that feedback cycle can't happen.
So the paranoia isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as it doesn't cause paralysis.