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Comment by Veserv | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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

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