[Semirhage]

When push-button elevators were installed, they worked. Can you imagine if the pitch had been, “sometimes this elevator will kill the odd person, thanks for helping us work out the bugs.” As a bonus, the actual working elevator might not emerge until decades after installation began, and the early models only worked on alternate Wednesday’s.

[aetherspawn]

They’re still working out the kinks in the elevator in my old office; it spent 6 months of the year out of order every day being repaired, and numerous people got trapped in it. Eventually, people just stopped using it, even when it was “fixed”.. because it never really was.

It behaved like a chronic dud. A bad self driving car would probably develop the same reputation.

[regulation_d]

This might be a valid point if the current system of driving wasn’t already killing millions of people per year.

[sverige]

"Millions" is an overstatement. Annual deaths worldwide are around 1.25 million. And deaths in the U.S. have declined significantly from their peak in the '70s.

All of that begs the question of whether autonomous cars will save lives. It is always asserted that it will "because humans are such bad drivers compared to computers," but there's no actual, real-world data to back up that claim. Oh yes, some of these vehicles have been tested with millions of road miles, but that is far from the scale of billions or trillions of road miles on every kind of road under all conditions where people travel currently.

[jonhendry18]

Of course, it's not the elevator buttons that kill, it's the entrance.