3 ms·
In the US, 32,719 died in 2013 from automobile crashes. Any wide-scale deployment of an automobile technology on public roads will mean that people die in crash
by afarrell 11y ago
In the US, 32,719 died in 2013 from automobile crashes. Any wide-scale deployment of an automobile technology on public roads will mean that people die in crashes with car which have that technology.
- marvy 11y agoThat number alone proves nothing. You could try to say that "even if a self-driving car is a thousand times safer than the average human, that still leaves 32 deaths per year". But I don't buy that logic. You need a breakdown by cause. For instance: how many of those involved at least one person being drunk? Sleepy? Going above the speed limit? There are large classes of failure modes that self-driving cars are not prone to. Is it really too much to believe that some day we will have a civilization that can move people from place to place without killing anyone? I remain optimistic. But even if not, we can at least get this thing off the list of top k causes of death, for some integer k. Already it's responsible for less than two percent of US deaths. (source: wolfram alpha) A bit more work and we can move it onto lists like this instead: https://xkcd.com/369/ https://xkcd.com/369/