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Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

It seems so cowardly halting progress so fast just because of two harmless crashes. There's never going to be zero risk to anything. Still much safer than cars so far.

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Progress is not necessarily halted by not having something in production. Perhaps it needs more work in testing. The article says 3000 successes/2 failures. That is too high when you have 10kg things falling out of the sky.

2 packages falling from the sky over 3000.... sounds like a higher failure rate than the current vehicle delivery mechanisms.

I wonder what the score is for postal vehicles (similarly for crashes with other vehicles and the like)

The word "cowardly" seems completely inappropriate here. First off, the second crash clearly was only harmless by pure chance, it could have easily killed someone - would you have written the same in such case? Secondly, how many other countries' national postal services are even running experiments like this at all? And above a major metropolitan city nonetheless! This is exactly the right reaction, temporarily suspend in the name of safety, address the issue, and then resume.

The public has already accepted the risk of car crashes, but not the risk of drone crashes. "Safer than cars" assumes people have a purely mathematical approach to risk, but in fact people always err on the side of the status quo unless a new thing is way better.

This particular drone crashed near a school -- if it had hit a child, there would be demands to ban drone deliveries, and you just know that politicians never miss an opportunity to grandstand about public safety, particularly when children are involved.

It's better to back off for now, improve the drones, and try again later, because one or two bad accidents could end the entire project. We are more likely to end up with drone deliveries when the drone companies are sensitive to managing the public reaction.

I don't think it's that people's natural conservatism when it comes to technology has changed, but rather our inclination to indulge (and enforce) such conservatism on nation wide levels. If merry-go-rounds, swings, and climbing polls were not already staples of childhood play, would we allow them today? I mean a child can get quite high in a swing and fall out. He can even die. Indeed looking at the numbers just between 1990 and 2000 some 147 children < 14 years old died on playgrounds in the US alone. [1] About 45 of those deaths were on public playgrounds. Injures requiring emergency room visits are exponentially more common with the majority occurring at schools.

I think the answer is a resounding no, we would not even consider allowing playgrounds today. And that's quite pitiful.

Taleb wrote an interesting article on how the most intolerant within a society eventually come to determine its fate, nearly regardless of their size. [2] It may be only a few percent of society that would not allow playgrounds, but so long as these people complain loud enough - they will win. Because their aversion to any sort of risk whatsoever is unlikely to be countered by a group that happen to be equally fervent 'playground enthusiast.' And so the path of least resistance is to simply ban playgrounds. Hahah, hopefully this post doesn't give somebody the idea to go start an attention seeking social media campaign to ban playgrounds. It might very well succeed!

[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Playground-Inj...

[2] - https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

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