That doesn't imply Uber has the right chops to solve the problem, but I hope someone does.
Look at Europe (or heck, NYC) for alternatives to a car-dominated society:
* walkable, mixed-use, dense neighborhoods
* public transportation (rail-based, in particular)
* car-free streets (and cities)
The solution to traffic deaths is not self-driving cars. It's moving away from the Levittown-style suburbs that have proliferated the US since WW II.
Not impossible, but less than likely in the short horizon. We'll probably get working SDCs sooner.
We used to have streetcars. We tore then down. We can put them back.
[1]https://www.wired.com/story/siemens-potsdam-self-driving-str...
Moving the world to a traffic free societies is not happening in a hurry, if ever. I'm writing this from a pedestrianised area in London but we still have plenty of cars.
Self driving type tech however has the potential to transform things in the next decade or so. Even if we don't have actual self driving the collision avoidance tech is getting quite good eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21388790
And I haven't met anybody working on the problem who thinks it is easy. But a lot of them do think it's worth the hassle if it will save even a fraction of tens of thousands of lives a year (even if fully autonomous operation is decades out, the semi-autonomous driving enhancements that have come from the research are already saving lives). Adopting and enhancing mass transit is also an excellent idea, but I think it's unrealistic to assume that will work exclusively. America has had quite a few decades to decide mass transit is something that everyone will jump on to, and it seems to not be happening.
Public transport doesn’t work in the US because of how garbage it is. If the spent half an effort to build up a proper transportation system adoption rates would be different. I live in CA and we have some of the better transportation systems in the country. It takes me 1hr to get to work via car or 2-3 hours via public transport. Solve that problem and you’ll see people adopt it real quick.
Further the real problem is people not obeying traffic laws. Not that they can’t, they’re choosing not too. An easy solution is to but a device in vehicles that automatically cites a person for things like crossing solid lines and merging with no signal, speeding etc.
... And SDCs can be programmed to obey traffic laws.
As for jobs, we're not going to see jobs taken away by self-driving cars in the near future. More likely, we'll see a fleet of vehicles with driver assist technology derived from attempting to solve the self-driving problem that will make the lives of career drivers, such as those in the trucking industry, that much better and safer.
I agree that improvements to mass transit would also help. But those aren't mutually exclusive problems.
We have to keep in mind, it's not in either-or story, it's a statistics and numbers story. on the same day this woman was tragically killed, nine other people were killed in traffic accidents. They just don't make the news, because that tragedy has become so ubiquitous that we are utterly desensitized to it.
We shouldn't be.
How many deaths would be prevented by automatically citing a vehicle for breaking traffic laws? This is a much cheaper and simpler option than an SDC.
SDCs can be programmed to obey laws, I never said they couldn’t. However a software system will not reach the same level of reasoning a human brain can in our lifetimes. Compute capacity isn’t even close yet. So again, an SDC / Software System / AI is no replacement for a human brain.
We have driver assist technology now. No company in the world is going to keep a human driver on the books when they can be replaced by a machine. History is there as proof. It’s not a question of if they will be replaced, it’s how long it will take to make the technology robust enough.
They don’t make the news because death is a normal, acceptable thing for us. People die, accidents happen. Covering every person that dies would not at all be time efficient.
There’s also something to be said for darwinism here, but I’m not going to get into that.
That's how human cognition deals with things we don't think we have control over. There was a time when smallpox deaths were just "part of God's plan."
I disagree the car crash body count is inevitable or needs to stay normal any more than some people's children just naturally succumb to smallpox.
> There’s also something to be said for darwinism here, but I’m not going to get into that.
Yes, I definitely wouldn't. It's an offensive attitude to have around people who have lost friends and loved ones this way to imply they weren't good enough to live.