5 ms·

Folks are glossing over this quote too easily: > “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,” It do

by tspike 9y ago

Folks are glossing over this quote too easily: > “Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or death caused by flaws in a machine,” It doesn't matter if it's objectively safer; people have no issue doing dangerous things so long as they can maintain the illusion of control.

Retric 9y ago
I don' think that's true in terms of transportation systems. In terms of cars: Streets where built for people or animals walking on them and cars quickly started killing large numbers of people. The response was not to make cars safer by say physically limiting them to 10 MPH, but to remove people from streets. A fairly high fraction of early aviators where killed, that did little to slow adoption of aircraft. Astronaut deaths where sadly common, but also expected and did little to slow progress.
- zip1234 9y ago
  Cost/benefit--if the rewards are judged to outweigh the risks and there is a clear benefit, people will adopt it. If money/time can be saved, it will be very popular.
- vertex-four 9y ago
  > The response was not to make cars safer by say physically limiting them to 10 MPH Umm, reasonably sure that implementing a legal speed limit was an initial response, in the UK at least. It took a number of years (and likely a lot of propaganda, though I haven't looked that closely into it and history is, of course, written by the victors) to allow motorcars to use roads at anything close to a reasonable speed. Check wikipedia out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#History
  - Retric 9y ago
    I am referring to a governor which would prevent cars from being capable of 10MPH even on empty roads. Actual in town speed limits would presumably be lower. Now, with our infrastructure that seems like a huge issue, but cites used to be built for walking and even small towns simply had vastly higher density. Watch this and suddenly those mentioned speed limits are completely reasonable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=954L9MpfCEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=954L9MpfCEo Note, 10MPH would allow for 2-3x the speed of a horse over long distances. So, in this alternate history cars would still have been very useful.
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      Indeed, the speed limits are completely reasonable if you don't want to remove people from the streets - but your suggestion seemed to be that people were near-immediately removed from the streets instead of limiting what cars can do at first. There were 30 years when cars were lawfully limited to 4mph in rural areas, so your "even on empty roads" point is moot.
      - Retric 9y ago
        There where not exactly a lot of cars over most of that 30 years. However, my point was more cars had strong advocates pushing adoption where pedestrians where simply used to how things where and never really organized to protect how things where. Thus you get jaywalking as a crime, and justified many deaths as people breaking the law instead of the naritive that cars are insanely dangerous and should be banned. In theory cars could have been banned, but in practice their advocates had little trouble changing perceptions.
        vertex-four 9y ago
        Note that jaywalking is very much not a crime in the UK. Off of a motorway (which is a relatively recent invention), roads are still for people to some extent. Hopping off the pavement for a couple of seconds to bypass someone who's decided to stop right in front of you is semi-normal, much of rural UK doesn't even have pavements, and we get taught how to Stop, Look, Listen, Live in order to cross a road without a traffic light as kids. If a pedestrian starts to cross the road, they have right of way. I've been on roads in some city centres where vehicles have to be very, very careful as there's a road through a pedestrianised area and people are rather bold crossing the road. If the vehicle was to cause injury, the driver would likely be liable.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>the illusion of control. No, it's literal control. They'd rather operate a vehicle in a way that's statistically less effective (where effective is defined by a collection of algorithms, we all know how perfect algorithmic generated routes are) than lose that control for a small benefit. Control itself is worth something to people.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  A very large factor in this reasoning is that people look at the statistics and then intuitively decide the statistics will not apply to them because they are much better than the average driver.

by tspike 9y ago

Retric 9y ago

I don' think that's true in terms of transportation systems. In terms of cars: Streets where built for people or animals walking on them and cars quickly started killing large numbers of people. The response was not to make cars safer by say physically limiting them to 10 MPH, but to remove people from streets. A fairly high fraction of early aviators where killed, that did little to slow adoption of aircraft. Astronaut deaths where sadly common, but also expected and did little to slow progress.

zip1234 9y ago
Cost/benefit--if the rewards are judged to outweigh the risks and there is a clear benefit, people will adopt it. If money/time can be saved, it will be very popular.
vertex-four 9y ago
> The response was not to make cars safer by say physically limiting them to 10 MPH Umm, reasonably sure that implementing a legal speed limit was an initial response, in the UK at least. It took a number of years (and likely a lot of propaganda, though I haven't looked that closely into it and history is, of course, written by the victors) to allow motorcars to use roads at anything close to a reasonable speed. Check wikipedia out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#History
- Retric 9y ago
  I am referring to a governor which would prevent cars from being capable of 10MPH even on empty roads. Actual in town speed limits would presumably be lower. Now, with our infrastructure that seems like a huge issue, but cites used to be built for walking and even small towns simply had vastly higher density. Watch this and suddenly those mentioned speed limits are completely reasonable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=954L9MpfCEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=954L9MpfCEo Note, 10MPH would allow for 2-3x the speed of a horse over long distances. So, in this alternate history cars would still have been very useful.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    Indeed, the speed limits are completely reasonable if you don't want to remove people from the streets - but your suggestion seemed to be that people were near-immediately removed from the streets instead of limiting what cars can do at first. There were 30 years when cars were lawfully limited to 4mph in rural areas, so your "even on empty roads" point is moot.
    - Retric 9y ago
      There where not exactly a lot of cars over most of that 30 years. However, my point was more cars had strong advocates pushing adoption where pedestrians where simply used to how things where and never really organized to protect how things where. Thus you get jaywalking as a crime, and justified many deaths as people breaking the law instead of the naritive that cars are insanely dangerous and should be banned. In theory cars could have been banned, but in practice their advocates had little trouble changing perceptions.
      - vertex-four 9y ago
        Note that jaywalking is very much not a crime in the UK. Off of a motorway (which is a relatively recent invention), roads are still for people to some extent. Hopping off the pavement for a couple of seconds to bypass someone who's decided to stop right in front of you is semi-normal, much of rural UK doesn't even have pavements, and we get taught how to Stop, Look, Listen, Live in order to cross a road without a traffic light as kids. If a pedestrian starts to cross the road, they have right of way. I've been on roads in some city centres where vehicles have to be very, very careful as there's a road through a pedestrianised area and people are rather bold crossing the road. If the vehicle was to cause injury, the driver would likely be liable.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

>the illusion of control. No, it's literal control. They'd rather operate a vehicle in a way that's statistically less effective (where effective is defined by a collection of algorithms, we all know how perfect algorithmic generated routes are) than lose that control for a small benefit. Control itself is worth something to people.

jacquesm 9y ago
A very large factor in this reasoning is that people look at the statistics and then intuitively decide the statistics will not apply to them because they are much better than the average driver.