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Comment by fc417fc802 | Hacker News Reader

But you can in fact argue exactly that. If (arbitrary example) pedestrians are being killed due to poor road engineering practices it isn't reasonable to point at cars and say "see those are the root problem" when in fact it's due to a willful lack of sidewalks or marked crossings or whatever. Being adjacent to something bad doesn't equate to being the root cause.

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History shows the timeline of dependence here. Before the introduction of cars, “poor road engineering practices” wouldn’t result in those deaths. So clearly it’s cars that are necessitating sidewalks, etc.

Same deal here, if something “becomes a problem” because of the introduction of AI, it’s AI that is the root case of the resulting issues. Many people are tempted to argue that flawed humans can’t implement the perfect system that is Anarchy, Communism, Recycling programs, or whatever but treating systems as needing to operate on the real world is productive where complaining about humans isn’t.

Well I (thought it was obvious that) I was referring to roads constructed relatively recently. If cars necessitate sidewalks and the city chooses to cut costs by not putting those in that isn't the fault of automobile designers or manufacturers or dealers or private owners or whoever.

To your example, technology changes and that necessitates infrastructure changing. That doesn't mean that fault for mishaps in the meantime can be attributed to the new technology. A user operating the new technology in an obviously unsafe manner is solely at fault for his own negligence.

The safest street designs still result in automobile fatalities. You can at best mitigate the issue with better street designs but not address the underlying issue.

Failing to acknowledge cars as the root cause may be comforting, but it blinds you to viable solutions.

Indoor shopping malls for example solve many of the issues with cars by forcing people to move around on foot in a little island surrounded by a sea of very low density parking. They are’t perfect solutions, but they still saved a lot of lives and time.

Saying people are misusing a new technology is just another way of saying that technology is flawed. This doesn’t mean you can’t utilize it, but pretending flaws don’t exist has no value.

> Before the introduction of cars, “poor road engineering practices” wouldn’t result in those deaths.

Death by adverse horse encounter was very common before the 1920s. Not sure how many of those deaths can be blamed on poor quality road engineering. But putting a bunch of humans, carts, and excitable half-ton animals in the same crowded streets seems like poor engineering practice.

very common here is a gross exaggeration compared to cars.

After vast improvements in safety ~1.3% of American deaths are still coming from automobile accidents. Horses were never close to that, meanwhile back in 1970 cars where around twice as likely to kill you.

This article states higher per-capita horse deaths in 1900 New York City than automobile deaths in 2023. This stat does not account for the significant disease caused by all that manure mixing with water supplies. Its unclear if automobile pollution is overall worse from a public health standpoint than mountains of horse poo.

https://horse-canada.com/horses-and-history/the-poo-conferen...

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