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Comment by pvarangot | Hacker News Reader

If you have to sell self driving cars as "more people will die but some people will have more free time" it's not going to be as easy as if they are unarguably safer for everyone.

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I don't think that's true. That's exactly how we were sold on cars in the first place -- you're more likely to die when you drive than when you walk, but you can get places faster to save time. Same can be said about e.g. caffeine. Humans are notoriously bad at estimating and considering tail risks.

Care to expand on what you mean by risk vs. return of caffeine?

People drink coffee (consume caffeine) because they wish to be more alert/are sleepy. This is a consequence of not getting enough sleep. Lack of sleep has many documented negative effects, but people trade sleep (health) for productivity/etc. via caffeine intake.

Cars didn't replace walking, they replaced horses.

I think you are begging the question - are cars more dangerous than horses? Just from reading random history, it seems like a lot of famous people were killed by riding accidents. And even today when the vast majority of people don't ride horses, I bet you can name a famous person who had a terrible accident.

Horse riding was much less popular than you think. What was much more popular was horse-powered carriages, which are much more convenient than riding, and also less dangerous. Horse riding was pretty much a hobby, a hobby of the rich at that. Try reading some books from the era. For example, in Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” there is a quite funny moment when Hamilton sons were going for dances, when two older brothers already took family buggies, the younger didn’t choose to ride on a horse, but did something quite different, which made his mother very unhappy.

Do you have any specific reason for believing the transition from horses to internal combustion engines increased casualties in the long run? Or is it just a gut feeling?

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