| This entire article is clickbait, where the author wants you to believe he is being persecuted or something. > Despite a storm of clickbait media reports, there is still little evidence that self-driving cars are safer than humans. This is the central thesis, but the author made up the idea that we are supposed to already have these cars that are safer than humans. Nobody thinks this. Nobody. These cars will hopefully exist and hopefully be a lot safer than humans but they certainly don't exist yet. The author thinks that killing 30,000 people per year is a-okay and worth it for the 'freedom'. I disagree. It's not even freedom you get from driving yourself. You still have to stay on the roads and use a seatbelt and use your turn signals 100% of the time, etc. I would place a large bet that when the author drives, he breaks 10-20 safety laws each drive. Everyone does. We should aim for 0 deaths per year and do everything in our power to get there. Taking the epic weapons away from people is not a reduced freedom. Self driving cars do not take away your freedom just as not owning an AR-15 does not take away your freedom. The goal of self-driving cars is 0 deaths/year. If that is not your goal of safety without self-driving cars, then you don't care about safety period. The selfishness exhibited in "I don't care if more people are dying on average, I want to drive and you can't take it away from me" is insane. > If our safety was the experts' first principle, the billions invested in self-driving cars would have gone to subsidizing free professional driving school, raising licensing standards, and making critical safety technologies like seat belts, airbags, ABS and automatic emergency braking (AEB) standard as soon as they were invented No that is not what they would have done. They would be building self driving cars if they cared about safety. People are not going to be better drivers if you give them more classes. They will still get drink and kill 5 innocent people on their way home from the bar. |
Even if fully autonomous cars remain impractical for real world commercial use cases because it can't match human capability to handle edge cases the investment in a programme pay off in terms of driver aids. And the fun of hands on a wheel can always be had on a racetrack.
But the goal of autonomous driving isn't "zero deaths" it's "sell cars", and convenience gets mentioned as least as often as safety as a selling point by its promoters. Since the errors autonomous vehicles make are different from those made by humans (and there's no reason to believe they will ever be zero), there's a strong argument that accidents can be further reduced by retaining an alert, responsible human driver, even if that driver's slightly less alert and responsible than they otherwise would be. That's been the case for Waymo's programmes so far (there's certainly no safety argument for making their backup drivers remote at this stage; that's all about a public show of confidence). The safety/convenience tradeoff isn't straightforward, because perfectly convenient fully autonomous vehicles means a safety benefit from fewer miles with inadequate or even drunk drivers having access to controls, but you probably wouldn't shoot for full autonomy and no controls if safety was the real goal. Frankly, even if the responsible human driver did absolutely nothing useful they'd probably net reduce road deaths simply by ensuring self driving technology doesn't massively inflate the number of miles driven per capita