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.
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.
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.