If he's right, kill me now. I really don't want to live in that world.
That's exactly what's happening now. 37,000 deaths per year just in the US.
But it won't be the deaths that will cause the change to happen: if the US actually cared more about preventing fatalities than "freedom" it'd regulate guns. The trigger for outlawing manual driving in cities and on freeways will be the convenience factor: 150mph travel without slowdowns for congestion will cut travel time to less than half.
If you want to drive manually, go to the track, just like you do today if you want to drive over 100mph.
Yes, just as the shift to supersonic air travel radically reduced flying times.
>>If you want to drive manually, go to the track
"Take it to the track" has been chanted for decades. It has long been possible to build cars physically or electronically unable to break speed limits. No such product has ever been brought to market.
>>The trigger for outlawing manual driving in cities and on freeways will be the convenience factor.
No. The convenience of me parking my car 20feet from my door, being able to hop in and out of it without planning, is far more convenient than having to call a car via an app on my phone. The knowledge that I have a car available 24/7 cannot be replaced by a promised car delivered via a cellphone.
Driving is not hard. It isn't even remotely dangerous compared to many jobs (I'm wear camo to work). They will have to come up with something far better than a 0.01% decrease in my risk of dying before I trust Uber to get me to work each morning.
Counterpoint: Motorcycles are exponentially more dangerous than cars, yet they persist. Driving is not a purely rational act.
Nothing in the article or in my reply said you cannot have that. You'll still be able to buy self-driving cars. They'll cost tens of thousands of dollars, just like cars do today.
Hate to point out the obvious, but 35,000 people die every year in US because of driving. That's a lot of deaths. I would vote for avoiding those deaths - even though I enjoy a recreational drive once a year or so (all other times for me driving is a blood-boiling waste of life called commute).
Driving is not statistically dangerous. Doing it wrong (drinking) can make it dangerous but compared to any number of other activities (light aircraft, horse riding, scuba diving etc) it is remarkably safe.
> Driving is not statistically dangerous
Humanity is notoriously bad at making decisions regarding small probabilities, and tradeoffs between risk and money. We know that people give wildly different answers to the questions "how much would you pay to reduce your annual risk of death by X%" vs "how much would you charge to take on an additional annual risk of death of X%?" despite those being more or less mathematically identical. People have the freedom to make stupid, inconsistent choices of course, but that doesn't make them smart or consistent. Just freely chosen.
> 2,596,993 people die every year in the US. That number cannot really be changed. People have to die of something.
That's really, really not the case. Yes, all who live must die, eventually. But there's no conservation of annual human death that means that eradicating smallpox means an equivalent number of people die of choking on pretzels annually. I figure the proper number to track is not percentages, or minimorts, but average longevity.
Guns are regulated in the US. See: Gun Control Act of 1968, Volkmer-McClure Amendment, mandatory Instant Background Check for most gun purchases, etc.
That said, I don't understand your mindset. Why do you think that we'd want to "care more about preventing fatalities than 'freedom'"?
From where I'm standing, it seems that Freedom is the most fundamental principle of all. What's the point of living without freedom? Maybe you've heard the phrase "live free or die"? That's more than just some marketing slogan to a lot of people.
What we can do though, as a society, is try to maximize personal Freedom while acknowledging that no system is perfect. We can certainly make sure that your right to be armed, in order to protect yourself in many situations, is respected. We can also ensure that The People are armed as a final, last-ditch check on unrestrained exercise of power by the State.
In the end though, bad things sometimes happen. And I don't see the justification for running rough-shod over people's rights, in an attempt to prevent some potential, may-never-be-realized, harmful scenario.
I do want to live in that world and I live in the suburbs of vanilla tract homes, charter schools, and club soccer.
Vehicles are expensive in either time, money or both... I recently did the brakes of both our vehicles. It was super inexpensive compared to what I was quoted in price, but it cost me some time. I am looking at replacing one of our vehicles soon as the cost of repair may overshadow the vehicles worth. In all cases... it is a hassle and I would rather not deal with it. The alternative, public transportation and/or Uber is either too expensive (Uber) for our use case or inconvenient (public trans)...
If these self-driving vehicles get to parity with owning a vehicle in terms of cost of ownership and convenience. I will be standing in line to get rid of my cars.
But nobody was told "you have five years to trade your horse in on a car, or send it to the glue factory". Horse are still legal and used to this day, they just mostly lost out to market forces... that is, cars are simply a better mode of transportation for most people most of the time.
But you can still ride a horse if you want to (albeit probably not on freeways, but certainly on country roads). Now, if the proposal was that certain limited access, high-speed highways are restricted to only self-driving cars, I might be able to accept that, even if somewhat grudgingly. But outlawing human driven cars completely, even on backroads? I just can't see it.
The real change happens when it doesn’t make buisness sense to insure you.
Probably other countries as well. (I found that hunting is popular in France, Germany, and Austria, but I wasn't able to figure out if the landowners were mostly gentry or not. I got the strong sense that they were not.)