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Comment by xvedejas | Hacker News Reader

And how would you control for the causal possibility that those who will eventually develop Alzheimer's early on might tend to have undetectable memory issues that prevent them from becoming taxi drivers in the first place? You can't control for profession, since that's behind the very claim itself.

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Its even worse than that, i can imagine people with undiagnosed early Alzheimer's self selecting for car accidents and cardiac issues through additional stress of mental fatigue while their brain tried to compensate for loss of function.

So you have people self selecting out of the profession, self selecting for early death within the profession, and on top of that, a general life expectancy discrepancy that is near impossible to adjust for.

What happens in the age of self driving cars?

No taxi drivers

Fewer car accident deaths, leading to more elderly people, which inevitably means a higher population of people with Alzheimers.

(Unless people highly predisposed to dying in car accidents are also highly predisposed to mudering people who will have, but don’t yet have, Alzheimers. But that seems sufficiently unlikely for the purposes of this hypothetical.)

Jokes aside, the serious answer depends on whether the link is causative or merely collerative.

At one point the amount of human induced accidents will increase since no human can account for sudden erratic brakes of a self driver, even though it predicted a correct incoming accident with another V2V connected car.

I'm still waiting on someone unbiased to study the data and tell me something. Those who have obvious biases tell me self driving cars are good, but their bias makes them suspect sources. So far I've not found someone without an obvious bias who had the data and is talking.

This is mentioned in the article as well.

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