Re:G.M. Unveils Its Driverless Cars, Aiming to Lead the Pack
by LeifCarrotson on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @02:38PM
(#15810106)
> presumably an advanced understanding of risk....Back then it might have been perfectly acceptable to throw a bunch of horses and cars together and risk them crashing into each other.
> Today it should be unacceptable to throw automated cars in with human drivers and put the onus on the humans to alter their innate understanding of 100 years of traffic flow.
No one who drove a car in 1917 is still driving today, and horse behavior had far more than 100 years to become innately understood.
But I think that it's wrong to assume that our modern attitude towards risk is 'advanced'. It's different, for sure. Thousands of people were likely killed or suffered as a result of automobiles mixing with horses. Today, 1.25 million people die annually as a result of automobile accidents - that's more than one person every 30 seconds. And many people also died as a result of taking risks while developing air travel, which is now one of the safest ways to travel. An attitude towards risk which suggests that equivalent risks are unacceptable would not have resulted in the billions of lives that have been improved by and saved by advancements in transportation. The modern economy is completely dependent on automotive transportation, and the world is unimaginably improved because we have cars instead of horses.
If equivalent progress would be made 100 years from now at the cost of thousands of lives lost due to adding automated cars to our existing roads and traffic flows, how could you possibly argue that we should not take this risk?
> Today it should be unacceptable to throw automated cars in with human drivers and put the onus on the humans to alter their innate understanding of 100 years of traffic flow.
No one who drove a car in 1917 is still driving today, and horse behavior had far more than 100 years to become innately understood.
But I think that it's wrong to assume that our modern attitude towards risk is 'advanced'. It's different, for sure. Thousands of people were likely killed or suffered as a result of automobiles mixing with horses. Today, 1.25 million people die annually as a result of automobile accidents - that's more than one person every 30 seconds. And many people also died as a result of taking risks while developing air travel, which is now one of the safest ways to travel. An attitude towards risk which suggests that equivalent risks are unacceptable would not have resulted in the billions of lives that have been improved by and saved by advancements in transportation. The modern economy is completely dependent on automotive transportation, and the world is unimaginably improved because we have cars instead of horses.
If equivalent progress would be made 100 years from now at the cost of thousands of lives lost due to adding automated cars to our existing roads and traffic flows, how could you possibly argue that we should not take this risk?