Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway092834 | Hacker News Reader

Human-driven delivery trucks hit and kill dogs, cats, men, women and children every day. On average, 16 people will die in any given day in a truck related crash. One in eight traffic fatalities involves a large cargo truck.

Driving vehicles on roads is incredibly dangerous. I don't think it's possible for drones to do a worse job.

View on HN

Human-driven delivery trucks hit and kill dogs, cats, men, women and children every day

And gasoline-powered vehicles of all sorts catch on fire all the time in collisions, yet one or two of Tesla's catch on fire and all hell breaks loose. Our mass media has an extremely regressive, anti-intellectual, pro-status quo bent.

Status quo bias is a condition of humanity, not just the media.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias

Right, but this particular societal institution has a rational preference for the status quo. This is mentioned as an exception right on the page you just linked.

You don't think that the media has covered (and exaggerated) other kinds of vehicle failures from non-electric vehicles before? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9311_Toyota_vehicle_...

It would seem like many on HN has a very extremely regressive, anti-intellectual, pro-status quo bent as well. See old threads about Dropbox and the comments on this story about Prime Air. It seems like a large number of commentaries here are just looking for every excuse to complain or find fault, yet those same folks would think Bitcoin was the cat's meow, despite a myriad of potential issues with that.

Well, to be perfectly fair, it's not really acceptable for people to fill threads with "me too", "I really like this!", or "I can't wait for this to come out!" sort of drivel. When people try to come up with meaningful points to discuss about a particular topic, it's a lot easier to find faults with a particular idea than it is to find positives or predict the potential of the idea.

It's true, and Tesla appears to survive as a company regardless.

I think the dynamic is a bit different for Amazon. The so-called risk wouldn't even potentially be borne by the user, which is much different from the Tesla case.

>And gasoline-powered vehicles of all sorts catch on fire all the time in collisions

Gasoline cars do not "catch on fire all the time in collisions". Not remotely.

It's unlikely the Teslas do, either. But Tesla's vehicles are both relatively novel, and real-world-untested and hence are both a news story and deserved of scrutiny.

Just like these drones.

Okay, maybe not just in collisions. But vehicle fires are extremely common. Like, we're talking every couple of minutes in the US.

The problem is that at some point society became insanely risk-averse, especially for new things.

Cars are OK despite being the most insanely dangerous things on the planet because we grew up with them. American Football is OK despite the ludicrous amount of fatalities and injuries.

Hell, if one of these drones just damages a house plant I'm sure the lawyers will be climbing over each other to take the case.

I doubt there will be enough plant carnage to warrant a class action case and a single plant is barely small claims court material.

That's not the point being made by the people who say a single killed dog could nix the program, in fact, it's the opposite. The point is that the public responds irrationally to new minute dangers like this. Commenters pointing this out aren't rooting for failure, and they're not making an argument about the danger. They're just observing that this thing has failure modes because people are dumb.

> They're just observing that this thing has failure modes because people are dumb.

Yeah, and people were damn scared of electricity when it was first introduced to the masses and many did not want it. Go forward 10, 20 years down the road and it was massively adopted. Of course there are always failure modes, but what's more critical to look at is, what's the benefit of this new technology, and will the benefits outweigh the failure modes? I'd suspect the answer will be a clear yes.

The first electric installations and equipment were relatively dangerous actually. No good isolation of metal parts, no separate earth wire, metal body, etc. Things like hair driers were often electrocuting people.

Even the improvements took a long time to become popular. I remember some electric tools from 80s that were known to zap people from time to time, but "that's just the way they are". So yeah... I suppose that the first people to adopt electricity at their homes actually did have something to worry about.

I don't think it's so obvious. Nuclear power is a good example of a tremendously useful technology that languishes because of public ignorance. (Even if you think you have some good argument why nuclear power isn't such a good idea, it's clear that this isn't what's caused the failure.)

Yes, all that are facts. But out of how many truck related deliveries? With your logic, one could say that even if 100% of drone deliveries resulted in a fatality, it would be enough to do < 16 deliveries a day on average and be able to say "Drones are not doing a worse job"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com