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.