...which works out to roughly 3-7 million people. Unless you want to pay them UBI, you're going to have to help them find and transition to other categories of jobs.
I used to drive a taxi. Now I write code. I paid for my own training. I'd expect to find that self-help is the most usual way to transition into other jobs.
The reality is, this is just not a functional pathway for the majority of people. So it’s not a solution
It might be possible for some minority that has a particular penchant for this type of work, but neither the jobs nor the training exist at such scale that would be able to absorb the entirety of the driver workforce into the “write software for automated driving“ job.
That's 1-2% against the interests of almost everyone else that would benefit from driverless cars. Their plights matter, but at they same time they shouldn't have veto power over transformative technologies just because they'll be put out of a job.
Wait, aren't huge trucks slated to be the first ones to be replaced by autonomous equivalents? Making a self-driving long-distance truck is a simpler, more constrained, and easier to solve incrementally problem than making a self-driving passenger car.
This is the equivalent of saying, we need strong protections on the Internet, because child pornography exists
It’s not an actual argument because it doesn’t have specific measurable distinctions between deaths related to driverless vehicles versus driver vehicles
We don’t have these types of measurable capabilities because we don’t actually have the data that shows what is the fatality rate per million miles at the scale of integration that an entire fleet they have supplanted the taxi industry would do.
You’re better off actually evaluating what is the death rate of taxis compared to individual drivers because the individual drivers are not going to be replaced at the same rate as taxi drivers and so the taxi drivers is the first more important number to evaluate with respect to traffic fatalities
Unless you’ve done that specific math, and walk the dog out, including the Wayno reports, some of the cruise reports, and some of the reports from Tesla (which killed a guy if you recall) then you might have an argument
As it stands, all I see with driverless cars is we’re trying to replace humans in an entire labor category, and we have nothing for those people to do
I suspect that is actually a much bigger problem than the theoretical reduction in fatalities on roads
> This is the equivalent of saying, we need strong protections on the Internet, because child pornography exists
It's not remotely like saying this, and going straight to child pornography in is like going straight to the Nazis - the sign of an unserious argument.
> It’s not an actual argument because it doesn’t have specific measurable distinctions between deaths related to driverless vehicles versus driver vehicles
You're just not understanding the definition of the word argument if you think this is true. Also, these things are being measured, so we're getting to this understanding. If your argument is that we shouldn't put robotaxis on the road because we don't know if they're safer means that we can't measure if robotaxis are safer and thus regardless of their relative safety, we must ban them because we don't have measurements yet.
> I suspect that is actually a much bigger problem than the theoretical reduction in fatalities on roads
But that's not an actual argument because it doesn't have specific, measurable distinctions, no?
...which still only work out to 1-2%