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A comment on Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll. Parent comment

Re:Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll by zip1234 on Friday May 06, 2022 @08:35PM (#31291090)
The fact is that loads of people drive drunk, drive illegally, and drive dangerously--on public roads. Police enforcement clearly doesn't work. Automated enforcement would. Why should people get to endanger others? The leading cause of death for children and teens almost every year is 'motor vehicle crashes' and it wasn't the children and teens causing those.
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Re:Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll by wfhordie on Friday May 06, 2022 @08:59PM (#31291205)
>Why should people get to endanger others?

This is a dangerous frame for this argument. "Get to" implies a "right," or that the action is condoned somehow. It's not. Not everything bad in the world needs to be prevented by government action. We could stop all traffic deaths today by banning cars. We could stop all forms of obesity by making everyone drink Soylent. Personal liberty prevails because, in the end, the knock-on effects of removing liberty are a case of the cure being worse than the disease, in most cases.

Automatic enforcement.... That sounds like letting the algorithms put people in jail.

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Re:Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll by zip1234 on Friday May 06, 2022 @10:45PM (#31291731)
Obesity isn’t putting others at risk in the same way. Cars endanger others. People make a special exception to norms for cars because it is hard to look past the convenience of them.
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Re:Mercedes-Benz says Level 3 self-driving option ready to roll by zaroth on Friday May 06, 2022 @11:35PM (#31291947)
It’s not a stretch to say that the obesity epidemic in the US is causing limited health care resources to be redirected to a vast number of people with self-imposed health issues, leading to significant deaths and under-investment in populations with diseases that were not self-imposed.

However this is in no way is a convincing argument for government to take over control of what people stuff in their mouths.

Things can pretty much always be made safer by eliminating personal freedom. The safest human protected by the best 5-laws-safe robot overlords probably doesn’t get outside all that much.

[ Parent | on HN ]