Okay, I've designed a new pill. 1 out of 4 people have adverse reactions to its contents and die instantly, but people who don't live long virile lives until, on average, the age of 100!

Your expected gain would be nearly 5 additional years of life! Should I sign you up?

This is a pretty attractive proposition. The long, slow decline during your last decade of life is miserable, on both you and on loved ones.

There are certain strategic times in life where you'd want to take this, though. Ideally after the kids are grown up and don't need you anymore (so you either drop dead painlessly & predictably, or get a nice long life in great health so you can see the grandchildren grow up), or if that's cheating, in childhood or right after college so you haven't invested much into your life yet. Same reason they sell life insurance.

I'd suggest keep the pill in your pocket until you're about to die, and take it then. That way you have a 1/4 chance of the same result and a 3/4 chance of major improvement.

Not taking the pill already of course risks dying in your sleep.

The pill only works before you're 40 because it's a magic thought experiment.

These years aren't comparable because I'm trading years in the immediate future for years in the distant future. Not many people would trade next year for a year and 2 months when they're 80.

Okay. Suppose that you spend 30 minutes on your commute each day for the rest of your working life, until you're 65. That means you'll waste almost a full year's worth of waking hours driving.

I've invented a teleporter that will reduce your commute to 1 second every day. The only glitch is that your molecular makeup may be incompatible with my device, and there's no way to tell for sure. If it is, you'll disintegrate instantly the first time you try to use it.

Don't worry, only 1% of the population is incompatible. From a probability standpoint, you should expect to gain more than 1% of your life in extra time. Care to give her a whirl?

No.

Because your proposal is very different for two reasons. One risk vs reward. In the robo-car example the pay off is 20-80x of lost life to gained time. You get a lot of time for very little risk. But your example is 1.03x.

The second is the distribution of risk over the years. With the driving I take a little risk to gain a little time each day for 30 years. In your example I take all of the risk up front and then have small a pay out over the next 30 odd years.

Right. Point being that expected value of drawing from a probability distribution isn't enough to explain people's preferences. We care a lot about the whole shape. So it's a little reductive to just tally up the expected time cost and call it figured.

This is a well-reasoned answer, but probably not the same trade-off that most people would make. For example, if a car was twice as bad as the average driver (2 fatalities per 100 million miles), then you'd say 29.6 seconds per mile -- maybe something you wouldn't do at freeway speeds, but you would do at city street speeds.

But I don't think that most people would get into a car that was twice as likely to crash as an average human driver (including drunks and so forth). Which suggests that most people have a different approach to this question.

The average movement speed of a car over a trip is ~22 mph anyway.

The gains from coordinated robotic driving could very well be enough to actually reduce speed limits by a significant value, which not only reduces overall fatalities (due to laws of physics), but also makes the equation better for the robotic cars, which might convince more people to switch, leading to a positive feedback loop.

That's an optimistic scenario, though.

I think lots of people make this decision all the time without realizing it because it's not as intuitively scary to them as robo-driving. I would wager that the majority of people on hacker news have driven on 5-6 hours of sleep at some point and a sizable portion make this a habit.

[0]http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/12/06/50444863...

> But I don't think that most people would get into a car that was twice as likely to crash as an average human driver

I grew up driving with my grandparents who were over 70, and my friends/random people with a car who were under 20. I think that the decision would realistically be made mostly on how the question is framed.

"Will you get in the car that's twice as likely to crash?"

"Will you get in the car with grandma to go to the zoo?"

I would if the drive were limited to city streets, since a crash there has a much lower probability of injury and death compared to a highway.