It's significantly more absurd to permit highly distractable, slow-reacting meatbags to operate the multi-ton high-velocity death barges in the close vicinity of pedestrians and other meatbags-cum-death-barge-pilots.
"""The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released its latest projections for traffic fatalities in 2022, estimating that 42,795 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes. """
"""The number of vehicle-miles traveled on all roads in the United States decreased by some 1.55 percent to approximately 3.17 trillion in 2022. "
Ignoring some important details, that means americans drive 75 million miles before a person is killed. That seems .... awfully damn good to me.
The US is #5 (of 26 countries for which the statistic is available) in fatalities / km. That's only "awfully damn good to me" if your goal is to kill more people.
As the sibling comment points out, miles driven per death for pedestrians isn’t necessarily being improved by the mass and visibility and safety factors.
Proportional to population, pedestrian fatalities have risen significantly since 2010.
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...
I do not disagree the numbers are trending up (although, I believe rates/miles driven might show a different story, but I didn't grab the miles driven for years 1975-2021 to normalize).
Americans drive 400 MILLION miles before a pedestrian death.
Let that sink in. 400 million miles per ped death. That's just absolutely gob-smacking amazingly good for something involving direct human control of an enormous ton+ vehicle.
Instead we’re going to YOLO a half-baked tech-bro fantasy onto the roads and hope for the best?
Also “meatbags” has the same tone as “sportsball” imo.
Yes, the answer is "very". Over one percent (1 in 93, National Safety Council, 2021[1]) of Americans will die in a car crash. That is insane.
The data so far is clear that autonomous vehicles are safer, and it isn't close.
> Also “meatbags” has the same tone as “sportsball” imo.
We're comparing humans to computers. Sue me.
[1]: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...
The data so far on fatality rates is near nonexistent. There' a fatality every 75 million miles in the US with a human at the wheel, with significant proportions of those fatalities considered to be humans operating so far below the threshold for acceptable human driving we jail them for it. Waymo hit 1m autonomous miles this year.
The argument is not that self-driving cars are very safe, but that we tolerate risks that are quite large when it comes to humans doing the driving. Risks so high that it might not take all that much for entire categories of drivers to be less safe than a computer.
If we need 50+ years of certainty for self driving cars, we will never have said certainty, because we'd not let them drive, ever. And yet, we have very old people, those that are easily distracted, and people who often drive impaired in the road all the time. We also put them very close to places where we have pedestrians, and let them drive with huge differentials over said pedestrians.
We aren't really making the cars safe enough as it is, and in the US we lack any practical roadmaps to make them safer, other than, 'never walk, and drive in an increasingly bigger car'. We are YOLOing every day, with large, single passenger trucks that will strike a pedestrian at chest height.
So yes, self driving research is a better way out than hoping to change human drivers, whose hardware and software are hard to upgrade. I won't necessarily assume a Waymo car is better than most drivers today, but I'd already trust it more than some that have licenses today.
The status quo is really bad and we are doing a terrible job of making them safer for anyone besides the occupants of the vehicle causing a collision. So yeah, we should really focus on pushing technology that can reduce the danger of distractable drivers. That mostly should mean investing in public transit, walkability and speed-limited small vehicles like bikes or golf carts. But the bar for driverless cars is basically: do they speed? Do they drive on sidewalks? Do they kill a few people a day? No? Then they’re better than the status quo, because the status quo is awful.
What would make you happy with a self-driving safety record? Why not be excited about the future?
I understand when some folks think that the focus would be better spent on public transportation, but you just seem like a hater.
Gestures broadly at the world
I mean I guess you have a point. Go nuts with the driverless cars.
And yes, this money would be better spent on a huge number of things — public transit among them.
There are growing pains, absolutely, but at 2:15 am, crossing the street next to the bars, which driver with a red light are you going to step out in front of, crossing the street.
I know which one I'd choose.
Interestingly missing from these discussions is: What does the distribution of accidents look like across the population of drivers?
It's possible to introduce an automated driver that is better than an average driver, but if the only people that use it are above-average drivers then you could end up with more accidents.
These cars can be hacked as used as weapons ... for terrorist attacks. As well malfunction and lock you in driving into the bay or off a cliff or etc.
Open to your rebuttal ;-)
It previously happened in Charlottesville sometime ago (https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2015/5/1/20...) and will surely happen again but possibly not just one car but a fleet as others in this thread agree/noted.
There's two sides ..either you're all for them or on the fence or against. Im on the fence with trusting Waymo more then Cruise as Waymo's been at it for more then a decade but am concerned about all things I noted.
I did not insult anyone it was tongue and cheek. As well i was just responding to the drinking and driving analogy which my argument and that are two different ones.