I'm going to guess it's the potential the technology has. In the US in 2016 almost 40,000 people died in car accidents and millions were injured [1]. Also the average commute round trip in the US is almost an hour [2].
Self-driving cars have the potential to eliminate a great deal of human suffering AND unlock a ton of productive time that has been held up in commuting (back of the napkin calculations suggest tens of millions of hours). If we consider what could be done with all of that lost human potential, the value of self-driving cars is staggering.
Disclaimer: That doesn't mean that self-driving cars shouldn't be made and developed in safe and properly regulated ways. But the promise of the technology likely makes the engineers working on them feel a bit better.
It makes me wonder how folks that work on weapon systems that are used to kill innocents in poor countries like yemen feel..probably much worse than Tesla engineers?
Why would you chose to work on a weapon system if you are unable to handle the fact that weapons are used to kill people? It's literally the job description.
That is the difference between them and Tesla engineers - people killing is a bug in self-driving cars, not a feature.
I doubt it. Such people take the job knowing that the products of their endeavours will be used as weapons. Those who dislike this will either not apply for the job or will leave it relatively soon. On the other hand engineers going into the car business go into it with the knowledge that their products kill and injure fewer and fewer people per kilometre travelled every year so each actual death looms larger.
You have that problem in every industry where your products can kill people. If you produce cars, medical devices, Space Shuttles or drugs there is a good chance that a mistake will kill people. There is no way around it and people have to deal with it. You only hope that you can be confident that you have done your best with the knowledge you had at the time.
We are doing work that will save lives. It will be a long, difficult road, and we will make mistakes; But when we finish this work we will be responsible for saving lives every year. This is the right thing to do, even if getting there means the loss of innocent people.
In almost all realms of human progress, lives have been lost along the way. People died when ships sank, so we made ships safer. People died when rockets malfunctioned, so we made those safer too, and when bridges collapsed, when trains crashed... just about everywhere we have brought in technology to improve our lives. It can't be denied that we are remarkably complacent and usually need people to die to prompt these actions, but in almost every example, those deaths aren't in vain. Something is learned from it. Those who do, make the future safer. It doesn't explain away people dying, but maybe some can be comforted that at least they did not die for nothing.
This makes me wonder (without judgement) how the engineers at Tesla and Uber are mentally handling the recent events.