3 ms·
> A shift to technologies safer than human-driven cars would dramatically reduce human suffering and should be welcomed. Car-for-car I'd easily wager that manu
by zamalek 10y ago
> A shift to technologies safer than human-driven cars would dramatically reduce human suffering and should be welcomed.
Car-for-car I'd easily wager that manually-driven cars have been involved in far more accidents than the one or two Tesla accidents that have occurred over the same time period (not to dilute the terrible result of the most recent accident).
The problem is that a typical person doesn't care. Car accidents where a human is at fault are "normal." We live in a society where speeding, aggressive driving and/or DUI are routinely practiced. From personal experience: even when you dial the convenience factor to 11 (Uber/Lyft) people are still adamant that they are OK to drive. The driver is blamed, not the fact that the driver is doing something that evolution has never had to solve.
Additionally, the non-technical crowd are very used to machines breaking and doing the wrong thing. So when you come along with a story about how a machine killed a person in, what is very strictly, a motor vehicle accident everyone's built-in beliefs about machines are merely reinforced. Few step back and consider how embarrassingly incompetent humans are at driving, and how a machine that doesn't yet have the sensors required to properly perform the task still runs circles around our very rich set of senses.
- aidenn0 10y agoThere's also a significant tort issue. Consider the case where a drunk driver kills himself and someone else. Now consider the case where an autonomous vehicle kills its passenger and the passenger in another car. A jury needs to award damages against A) the grieving widow of the drunk driver or B) A large corporation. I suspect the latter will be at least an order of magnitude higher. This means that until autonomous vehicles are an order of magnitude safer, the car companies will have to absorb more damages than the sum of what all of their customers would have.
- zamalek 10y agoInteresting point. Is this how the rulings are going right now?