4 ms·

Is the cost to society (in lives lost) worth the cost to individual enjoyment?

barrkel 13y ago
The cost of all your enjoyment is your own life; you too will die. It depends on how much pleasure you get out of driving. I certainly think it's worth some fraction of a life. And of course, a certain amount of the risk comes from inattentive drivers who don't enjoy driving, and would rather read a book or eat cereal (or both) on the road.
- ewoodrich 13y ago
  Car accidents have unfortunate side effects, in that generally more than one driver's life is put at risk.
  - barrkel 13y ago
    Indeed. That's why I ride motorcycles instead.
- bdamm 13y ago
  There is, I believe, a certain amount of risk simply be being on the road at all. No self-driving car is going to prevent that. What I'd like to know, though, is that as self-driving cars become developed, the labs are calculating the risk factors of various intersections, streets, exchanges, etc. That is, different roads can be analyzed by the robot cars and independently assigned a risk factor for a given section of street. The resulting impact to traffic engineering and city resource prioritization could be a very interesting side-effect to the introduction of self-driving cars.
Crito 13y ago
Life becomes less valuable when you can do less with it. In the extreme case, we could all spend our lives in styrofoam boxes hooked up to feeding tubes, but what sort of life would that be? I would argue, a valueless one. Is a collective devaluing of human life worth saving a few individual lives? Consider if we cut down all trees within a dozen or so meters of roads, and installed guardrails everywhere. We could probably save many lives, but at the cost of devaluing the beauty of the countryside. Everyone's lives would become just that much more depressingly monotonous and sterile, for the sake of a preventing a few roadside deaths. Safety should not be our society's primary concern. Quality of life is a much better thing to strive for.
- saraid216 13y ago
  > Consider if we cut down all trees within a dozen or so meters of roads, and installed guardrails everywhere. You realize that we did that and it resulted in more deaths, right?
  - Crito 13y ago
    Whatever, bad example then. My point stands unless you lack an imagination. We could string safety nets between all skyscrapers and under all bridges. We could ban convertibles. We could put fences along all rivers and ban backyard swimming pools. We could ban fireplaces. There are any number of things that we could hypothetically do to prevent accidental or untimely deaths that we do not do because they would degrade the quality of our lives.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      Well, I wasn't trying to debate your point, but if you insist on being huffy, Skyscrapers generally don't have windows that can be opened or easily broken, and very rarely have balconies. When's the last time you heard of someone going through a skyscraper window? It's a safety net. We probably couldn't string safety nets under all bridges. However, we have already been fencing them off to prevent jumpers. I'm not clear on why you are targeting convertibles specifically; I'm unaware of any special danger they pose. However, I would argue that banning cars entirely would raise our quality of life, if combined with other measures. I'll concede the river one since there are too many possibilities there to argue exhaustively. I could prevaricate on the swimming pool thing, since my parents own one and our quality of life probably would be better off without it, but not worth it. I'm not clear on enough building codes to know how much we discourage fireplaces, but most new buildings don't seem to be built with them. We appear to have invented central heating over the last several decades, which is both safer and more effective. The point being that the reason we don't implement a lot of "safety" measures is not because they "degrade the quality of our lives" but because they don't work. In fact, most of the so-called safety measures you luridly imagine actually should be done because they'd increase the quality of our lives... so really, the question is why we haven't done them, if QoL is such an important factor.

The cost of all your enjoyment is your own life; you too will die. It depends on how much pleasure you get out of driving. I certainly think it's worth some fraction of a life. And of course, a certain amount of the risk comes from inattentive drivers who don't enjoy driving, and would rather read a book or eat cereal (or both) on the road.

ewoodrich 13y ago
Car accidents have unfortunate side effects, in that generally more than one driver's life is put at risk.
- barrkel 13y ago
  Indeed. That's why I ride motorcycles instead.
bdamm 13y ago
There is, I believe, a certain amount of risk simply be being on the road at all. No self-driving car is going to prevent that. What I'd like to know, though, is that as self-driving cars become developed, the labs are calculating the risk factors of various intersections, streets, exchanges, etc. That is, different roads can be analyzed by the robot cars and independently assigned a risk factor for a given section of street. The resulting impact to traffic engineering and city resource prioritization could be a very interesting side-effect to the introduction of self-driving cars.

Crito 13y ago

Life becomes less valuable when you can do less with it. In the extreme case, we could all spend our lives in styrofoam boxes hooked up to feeding tubes, but what sort of life would that be? I would argue, a valueless one. Is a collective devaluing of human life worth saving a few individual lives? Consider if we cut down all trees within a dozen or so meters of roads, and installed guardrails everywhere. We could probably save many lives, but at the cost of devaluing the beauty of the countryside. Everyone's lives would become just that much more depressingly monotonous and sterile, for the sake of a preventing a few roadside deaths. Safety should not be our society's primary concern. Quality of life is a much better thing to strive for.

saraid216 13y ago
> Consider if we cut down all trees within a dozen or so meters of roads, and installed guardrails everywhere. You realize that we did that and it resulted in more deaths, right?
- Crito 13y ago
  Whatever, bad example then. My point stands unless you lack an imagination. We could string safety nets between all skyscrapers and under all bridges. We could ban convertibles. We could put fences along all rivers and ban backyard swimming pools. We could ban fireplaces. There are any number of things that we could hypothetically do to prevent accidental or untimely deaths that we do not do because they would degrade the quality of our lives.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    Well, I wasn't trying to debate your point, but if you insist on being huffy, Skyscrapers generally don't have windows that can be opened or easily broken, and very rarely have balconies. When's the last time you heard of someone going through a skyscraper window? It's a safety net. We probably couldn't string safety nets under all bridges. However, we have already been fencing them off to prevent jumpers. I'm not clear on why you are targeting convertibles specifically; I'm unaware of any special danger they pose. However, I would argue that banning cars entirely would raise our quality of life, if combined with other measures. I'll concede the river one since there are too many possibilities there to argue exhaustively. I could prevaricate on the swimming pool thing, since my parents own one and our quality of life probably would be better off without it, but not worth it. I'm not clear on enough building codes to know how much we discourage fireplaces, but most new buildings don't seem to be built with them. We appear to have invented central heating over the last several decades, which is both safer and more effective. The point being that the reason we don't implement a lot of "safety" measures is not because they "degrade the quality of our lives" but because they don't work. In fact, most of the so-called safety measures you luridly imagine actually should be done because they'd increase the quality of our lives... so really, the question is why we haven't done them, if QoL is such an important factor.