The difference is that no one (or nearly no one) dies taking the stairs. If you're going to replace one perfectly safe means of travel with another, the new one should also be perfectly safe.

But cars are anything but perfectly safe. In many parts of the world automobile accidents are a leading cause of death. Even in parts of the world where seatbelt laws and stringent safety requirements have reduced automobile deaths, they're still significant. What's worse, unlike other "preventable" causes of death such as smoking and obesity, automobile deaths disproportionately affect the young.

For all these reasons, I think the standard for driverless cars should be somewhat relaxed. Unfortunately, I'm guessing the "robots killing humans" mentality may still dominate...but if we can get past that I think driverless cars will have a larger impact on the demographics of death than almost anything else in the last 50 years.

According to this[0] nearly a thousand people in the US died from falling down stairs in 2000. I've injured myself on stairs, albeit not badly, but never in an elevator.

http://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm

My dad is getting old, and whenever we have to take the stairs with him, I definitely fear for his life.

I'm sure more people die taking stairs than do die taking elevators. The elevator is always the safer option. Unless there is a fire...and even then it's a toss up if you are elderly or have mobility problems.

... and even worse, cars do not limit themselves to killing their occupants, but are responsible for huge numbers of pedestrian deaths, of which many are not even in the road (deaths involving cars mounting the sidewalk and killing people, or even crashing into buildings and killing people, are a regular occurrence). ><

Most of those deaths are caused by horrendously irresponsible and unsafe behavior by drivers. However awful driverless cars are (and I suppose especially in the beginning they will be pretty primitive), the bar is already set really, really, low.

Numbers 10 and 9 both seem to be incidents where people died in falling elevators: http://listverse.com/2011/12/23/10-tragic-elevator-accidents...

It seems possible that the falls were not caused by the elevator car dropping from a snapped cable, but rather the cable (and possibly the pulleys, motors, etc.) falling onto the car, which then (being pushed by a much greater momentum) dropped, but they are described here as falls.

The 99% invisible podcast[1] actually went pretty deep into this topic in episodes 170 and 171, and they were excellent shows. I actually learned about the elevator showing off the safety of his elevators from another amazing podcast, Memory Palace.

1: http://99percentinvisible.org/

Very interesting background - thank you.

Are there any recorded deaths from self-driving cars at this time, I wonder?

Pre-empting other people's responses of 'not enough data yet', or similar - at the time Otis felt it was necessary to demonstrate in this way, there was a perception of insufficient data also - lack of data is a truism for all new technologies.

Although there would seem to be practical scenarios where autonomous vehicles are much closer than in the general case. I can easily imagine that limited access highway driving with a competent/licensed operator not paying attention or actively steering could be such a relatively near-term scenario. Maybe you need radio beacons at construction zones, be in active cell communication range, weather within certain parameters. But definitely doable, and perhaps with an overall improvement in safety given that a tired or distracted driver drifting across a lane or plowing into the car ahead at high speed is a major source of accidents.

I'm not convinced that foregoing that in absence of robo-Uber (which I personally expect to be many decades out) is the optimal path.

Looks like there have been some other elevator falling deaths:

http://listverse.com/2011/12/23/10-tragic-elevator-accidents...