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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't include the self-driving tech among the world-changing progress. Climate change is a pressing disaster for our whole species; self-driving cars are not urgent enough to be pursued with the same intensity, and are dangerous enough to deserve more rigour.

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Automobiles cause over 1,000,000 deaths globally per year. Not to mention the number of human hours used to drive. Elimination of the need for people to drive and reducing auto deaths by, say 95%, I think would be world-changing.

What ratio of lives saved to extra deaths while creating self-driving tech would you accept?

You know the answer to that: zero. In the court of public opinion, existing risks are internalized and heavily discounted while new risks are always perceived as gargantuan no matter how small.

It's basic human psychology, it's why some people prefer to drive long distances instead of flying, and why a flu pandemic is conducive to mass hysteria, while the obesity and diabetes prevalence, orders of magnitude more deadly, barely appears on the radar.

Plus there's no way I'm trusting my life to some idiot programmer.

3.5 million new cars are registered every year in Germany alone. If we can replace a significant amount of that with cheap, shared, swlf-driving electrics it'll be a massive step towards carbon neutrality.

>3.5 million new cars are registered every year in Germany alone. If we can replace a significant amount of that with cheap, shared, swlf-driving electrics it'll be a massive step towards carbon neutrality.

Sell the electic cars today and sell the autopilot extension hardware and software where actually works, pushing the hype can have a huge negative impact like very strong autopilot testing regulations. because of dreedy corporation pushing things that are not ready or over the air updates that are not tested.

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