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> we’re pretty bad at driving Are we? I know it is a fashionable thing to say, but I am personally fascinated by the relatively low number of accidents given h

> we’re pretty bad at driving Are we? I know it is a fashionable thing to say, but I am personally fascinated by the relatively low number of accidents given how omnipresent cars are. For germany it's ~5 dead / 100000 motorized vehicles, and ~4 dead / 100000 inhabitants. [1] More anecdotal: Growing up I lived near a pretty busy street and never personally witnessed an accident there. Makes me think that we are actually pretty good at driving, even on average. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

notahacker 4y ago
It's a bit of both. We're pretty bad at minimising basic errors driving (at least until you consider we as a species spent a billion or so years of evolution travelling <20mph and generally picked up handling a vehicle in a few hours in our late teens) but so strikingly good at handling the sort of edge cases where people are at particularly at risk of death I'm not sure collision avoidance AI will catch up despite all its speed advantages.
ryandrake 4y ago
When measured by deaths per passenger mile, passenger vehicles are, by a large factor, the most deadly mode of transportation[1]. 1: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  7 deaths per billion passenger-miles. To put that into perspective, if walking had a death rate on par with passenger vehicles, a small village of 150 people going on a walking trip for 60 years, at 3 mph for 16 hours per day, should have seen one death in that time. I don't think we really quite appreciate how incredibly safe the modern world is.
bsder 4y ago
Germany has WAY more difficult driving licensing standards than the US. My high school English teacher father used to ironically remark about how students who failed his class repeatedly (often for all four years) somehow always managed to pass the drivers license test. Funny that. Your calculation also neglects the cost of auto accidents in terms of wasted life. There will be an accident on I-5 between San Diego and Los Angeles every single day--generally multiple. When that happens, an enormous number of people wind up sitting in their cars for an extended period of time. That accident may not have actively killed someone, but it caused many thousands of people to waste an hour+ of their life. If a thousand people waste an hour every day, that's one "dead" year of human life every 9 days. And that multiplies across the entire city and then across every city. The cost of automotive fender benders and the time they waste exceeds the "death toll" of driving by quite a lot. Humans suck at driving. It's a boring, repetitive task with sudden moments of sheer terror. As long as everything goes "normally", it's okay. When something unusual happens when driving, most outcomes are random. The lack of deaths and injuries due to driving is more due to automotive, traffic and safety engineering than it is due to active crisis decision making by human drivers.

notahacker 4y ago

It's a bit of both. We're pretty bad at minimising basic errors driving (at least until you consider we as a species spent a billion or so years of evolution travelling <20mph and generally picked up handling a vehicle in a few hours in our late teens) but so strikingly good at handling the sort of edge cases where people are at particularly at risk of death I'm not sure collision avoidance AI will catch up despite all its speed advantages.

ryandrake 4y ago

When measured by deaths per passenger mile, passenger vehicles are, by a large factor, the most deadly mode of transportation[1]. 1: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...

naniwaduni 4y ago
7 deaths per billion passenger-miles. To put that into perspective, if walking had a death rate on par with passenger vehicles, a small village of 150 people going on a walking trip for 60 years, at 3 mph for 16 hours per day, should have seen one death in that time. I don't think we really quite appreciate how incredibly safe the modern world is.

bsder 4y ago

Germany has WAY more difficult driving licensing standards than the US. My high school English teacher father used to ironically remark about how students who failed his class repeatedly (often for all four years) somehow always managed to pass the drivers license test. Funny that. Your calculation also neglects the cost of auto accidents in terms of wasted life. There will be an accident on I-5 between San Diego and Los Angeles every single day--generally multiple. When that happens, an enormous number of people wind up sitting in their cars for an extended period of time. That accident may not have actively killed someone, but it caused many thousands of people to waste an hour+ of their life. If a thousand people waste an hour every day, that's one "dead" year of human life every 9 days. And that multiplies across the entire city and then across every city. The cost of automotive fender benders and the time they waste exceeds the "death toll" of driving by quite a lot. Humans suck at driving. It's a boring, repetitive task with sudden moments of sheer terror. As long as everything goes "normally", it's okay. When something unusual happens when driving, most outcomes are random. The lack of deaths and injuries due to driving is more due to automotive, traffic and safety engineering than it is due to active crisis decision making by human drivers.