>Of course in practice, we know that people's fears are not rational. Things like shark attacks and nuclear meltdowns scare people in a manner vastly disproportionate from their actual impact. It could be that the public has a lesser reaction to a plane going down with a person at the helm than an automated flight crashing.
In an analogy to self-driving cars...even if the math is sound, people will take issue until the technology is universally so far above a human driver that the accident rate is neglible.
I'm not sure about that. Even if the accident rate is half, that's still an immense gain - over 10,000 lives saved each year in the US. Even if it's equal (or slightly greater than equal), the productivity boost would be substantial. Do we really think that people with hour+ long commutes would reject a self driving car with half the accident rate of a human driver?
I don't know, probably not, but to your point about people's fear being irrational, I can see people strongly rejecting the idea of dying to a software glitch they don't understand.
In an analogy to self-driving cars...even if the math is sound, people will take issue until the technology is universally so far above a human driver that the accident rate is neglible.