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>1 in 5 organ donations comes from the victim of a vehicular accident So preventing 35,000 deaths a year, may lead to 6,000 less organ donations? I'd take that
by sigmar 10y ago
>1 in 5 organ donations comes from the victim of a vehicular accident
So preventing 35,000 deaths a year, may lead to 6,000 less organ donations? I'd take that deal.
The article goes on to talk about changing from opt-in donations, to opt-out donations. Which seems completely orthogonal to self-driving cars, as (regardless of projected stats on future donor numbers) we should do whatever we can to decrease the number of people waiting on organ transplants.
- foota 10y agoIt's true that some people already support increasing organ donation (I do), but this might be a convenient political argument to do so. i.e., we'll lose significant number of organ donors and so need this to become opt-out.
- mamon 10y agoYou got that wrong: 6000 is the number of people are currenly dying from organ shortage, not the number of organs extracted from road accidents victims. Since one donor can provide more than one vital organ for transplant the balance is more like: 32 000 less deaths on the road, 100 000 less organs donated.
- sigmar 10y agoIf 1 in 5 donations come from a car accident victim, and there are 30,970 organ donations a year in the US[1]. That means 6,194 of those donations are from car accidents. [1] https://www.organdonor.gov/statistics-stories/statistics.html https://www.organdonor.gov/statistics-stories/statistics.htm...
- MereInterest 10y agoNot entirely orthogonal, as they both have an effect on the number of donations. The fact that the shortage will be caused by self-driving cars is unrelated to the solutions to a shortage. As you mention, we can't ethically prevent this shortage by increasing car accidents, so we should look for other sources.
- thescribe 10y agoI don't know why, but the idea of moving something that is currently opt-in to opt-out really bothers me even if it is a good cause. As the world becomes a more free place more and more things should be opt-in.
- unclenoriega 10y agoI recently had this discussion on reddit, and I don't get this position. As long as it's as easy to opt out as it was to opt in, I see the two as equivalent. I suppose it could be more problematic in situations where the 'in' isn't such an obvious good.