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Comment by mountainboy | Hacker News Reader

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mountainboy·

1. not get in the car in the first place. unless proven out by 10+ years of human guinea pigs not getting killed.

2. life experience, software expertise, common sense.

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Lots of people used to feel this way about automated elevators.

https://medium.com/swlh/what-do-self-driving-cars-and-elevat...

I’ve tried to find the original source of that claim and come up missing. All of the online articles either don’t reference a source or they eventually link to an out of print book.[1]

At this point I’m pretty sure it’s not true. If past public sentiment was so against automatic elevators, there would be at least one newspaper clipping or digitized article.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25585122

Right, it's eerily similar. People say this about automated railways too. And as with the elevator on your hundredth trip you are not thinking "Oh no, this is automated, it might kill me", because of course it's automated, you're thinking about whether Jim meant to complement you or it was intended as an insult last night, and did you bolt the back door?

Wait, when in the history of taxis were there 10+ years of humans not being killed by taxi drivers?

Certainly not any recent (consecutive) 10-year period.

It's pretty rare though. It's far more likely that the taxi driver will be killed by a passenger.

In a typical year, NYC's human-driver taxis had a fatal-or critical-injury crash rate 3x the overall US average: https://www.ingberprovost.com/how-often-do-taxis-crash/

The US average is about 36,000 auto-caused fatalities per year: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...

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