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Comment by bparsons | Hacker News Reader

Also, humans are pretty horrible at driving. They constantly commit traffic violations and kill eachother. Driving kills about 1 in 103 people in their lifetime.

There is no other day to day activity where this level of risk is considered acceptable.

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What are you talking about? Humans are shockingly good drivers. It is a average of ~80,000,000 miles, or ~5,000 years of regular driving between fatalitys and that includes the motorcyclists, drunks, and people who do not wear their seatbelts who account for ~70% of all deaths if I recall correctly. If you are a average driver who does not drive drunk and who wears your seatbelt and you started driving when agriculture was invented you would not be expected to have gotten into a fatal accident yet.

Anybody who says humans are bad drivers is almost certainly underestimating the difficulty of replacing humans by a factor of 1000x.

I don’t know how we could say humans are “good” or “bad” drivers. What are we comparing against? We’re the only thing that drives cars (other than a few self driving cars).

Compared against any other activity or mode of transportation.

If someone had said said “trains are safer than cars” I’d agree with that comparison, but the question is are humans good at driving cars. I don’t know if we’re particularly better at driving cars than trains, trains are just better designs.

I mean, you wouldn’t say humans are good at tic-tac-toe, and bad at chess, right? Chess is just a much harder game.

What does "started driving when agriculture was invented" even mean?

If you Google "when was agriculture invented" it says, "approximately 10,000 years ago".

We can compare against another mode of human-controlled transportation. There are 1.37 deaths per 100 million passenger-miles driving in the US [1]. In comparison, there are ~0.2 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles flying. Converting into the same units, there are 137 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles driving. So you are 685X more likely to die while driving/riding in a car than flying. That's almost three orders of magnitude worse! Humans are pretty terrible drivers in comparison to how good we are at flying.

[1]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

We don't ask pilots to do basically anything. They are given dedicated lanes and have constant radar monitoring them anywhere near an airport where they may be expected to somehow come in contact with another plane.

Compared to sharing roads going opposite directions at high speeds inches away from each other, it is no contest that humans driving is the much more impressive number.

Pilots have mandatory sleep cycles, drug tests, significantly greater initial training, backup pilots, and dedicated airspace. If you could wipe out all of the tired, drunk/high, and teenagers from the road, I bet the driving stats would look significantly better.

This is a great example of why relative risk matters so little when the absolute risk is so low.

Flying (the type done commercially) is a much easier task than driving, well maybe except for takeoff and landing where the majority of miles are not spent. The pilot can basically sleep most of the way.

You should compare with GA to get closer to apples-and-apples. Comparing a highly regulated industry with everybody from 16 year olds to 90 year olds over and extreme range of experience and health isn't going to give you a useful result.

And even GA pilots are probably in much better physical shape than the general public that drives cars.

Why are you counting only fatalities? They are low because modern cars have lots of safety features. In 2021 there were 5,400,000 medically consulted injuries related to motor vehicles.

> It is a average of ~80,000,000 miles, or ~5,000 years of regular driving between fatalitys

That's actually not a very big number. 5000 years of regular driving is about the lifetime driving for 100-150 people. Which means one of them will have a fatal accident within their lifetime.

> Driving kills about 1 in 103 people in their lifetime.

More people have been killed by cars than I have.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_illusion

Let me be more precise. Human driving killed 42,939 people in the US in 2021.

Apparently it’s 45,404. That’s still a little bit less than people killed by a gun the same year (48,830), and killed by opioids (nearly twice as many: 80,411). Let’s not forget an estimated 300k/year deaths related to obesity. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm.

Whataboutism but puts those numbers in perspective.

The obesity deaths are comorbidity, which is… not to say that obesity killed them, but that it may have been a factor. E.g. obese 55 year olds that have a heart attack are in there, even though it is entirely possible for non-obese individuals to have heart attacks at young ages.

Guns… most of those are suicides, and that stat is uniquely American in terms of developed countries.

Opioids… also almost entirely self-inflicted (not willingly, but getting flattened by a bus is different than getting accidentally hooked)

Car stats also don’t count the incredible number of people who have lifelong or major injuries due to cars, which I would imagine is much higher. I feel pretty comfortable saying that a majority of people I know have been injured by cars, something that isn’t true for opioids or guns.

>Guns… most of those are suicides, and that stat is uniquely American in terms of developed countries.

That seemed unbelievable to me, so I had to do some checking. The CDC[0] put 48k suicides in 2021, and attributed 55% to guns. Leaving us with 26.4k suicide gun deaths. While still a large number, there are still a significant portion of GP's 48k gun deaths which were not self inflected.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html

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