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Comment by SirMaster | Hacker News Reader

I have no doubt that robots are safer than the average human. So overall incidents would go down.

But are robots safer than all humans? Safer than the humans who religiously follow all safety protocols?

It's hard to fault a person who normally operates very safely for being afraid of losing control of their equipment to a robot which could be unpredictable.

Surely it's valid to worry about a robot making a deadly mistake that you wouldn't have ever made yourself.

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You're conflating a great deal by not defining "robots".

The choices are:

1. Ordinary machines under human control

2. Machines that perform fixed, repetitive operations automatically

3. Machines that perform variable, repetitive operations at unexpected times, automatically

4. Autonomous machines that perform a variety of operations without human control

5. Tanks, UAVs, and rifles under human control

6. 5. but under semi-automatic human control (At present time, the US mil absolutely requires an officer to issue a lethal order.)

In my mind, 2 and higher all qualify as robots.

Any factory I have been to calls the machines that do fixed repetitive motions, automatically, robots.

To be honest, I would expect the robot to have more accidents than a human. However, the consequences of a robot being crushed under a steel beam are acceptable. Not so much the death of a human being. There is a reason that robots are surrounded by cages to prevent humans from entering the area around them.

If humans were rational the human average would keep going up as anyone bellow average leaves it to robots, but instead it sounds like a lot of people with illusory superiority will keep hurting themselves..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority

So even though overall fatal traffic accidents would go down with self-driving cars for example.

You personally wouldn't be upset at all if a loved one died to a bug in the software that caused the self-driving car to make an obvious mistake that the loved one would never in a million years have made themselves?

I can see how people can have concerns at least, when control it taken away.

I think you should expect to die if you spend a lot of time on the road. Does it matter what bug the driver has that runs you down?

Get over yourself. If you don't speed, don't drink and drive, and don't road rage, the odds of dying on the road are not that bad.

Riding a motorcycle is 60x more dangerous than a car per mile.

I have easily done over 100,000 miles on a sportsbike in California traffic.

That's the equivalent of 6 Million miles in a car. I have had one close call in 10 years. Never even stubbed a toe on a motorcycle.

> Get over yourself.

I consider ceasing to interpret my own survivor bias as skill instead of luck, getting over myself.

Are you denying that skill exists in the world? But beyond that, not speeding, not drinking and driving/riding, and not raging on the road are not exactly 'skills'.

But honestly, I am a pretty skilled rider. I just don't have to use most of it on the road... I said myself I only had one close call in 10 years. Only that moment really involved skill.

It's called Dunning-Kruger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

The smart and the wise seek automation and others to multiply their effort. The lazy and the less molecular wedge-like instruments do things the hard way(tm) themselves. It doesn't take a particle physics PhD to be resourceful, improvisational, and productive.

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