Self driving cars could potentially save tens of thousands of lives a year not to mention all of the other social benefits and quality of life improvements. No doubt whoever gets it working first will make a ton of money, but society will see a massive benefit as well.
It provides a benefit to the owners of such a company, as the labor costs are reduced. In other respects this is like the same nonsense about how we would live better lives and work less as our jobs were replaced by robots. It turns out that an economic "system" based upon dog-eat-dog principles will not allow such altruistic results to accrue for society.
Like someone said above: "socialize the risks, privatize the profits"
I'm not quite sure how you think this will work. Is Google going to commission hitmen to kill 10s of thousands of people each year to make up for the deaths they prevent? Are they going to prevent those who can't drive now from using their cars? Or play irritating sounds in their cars to replace the stress of driving?
Automation will indeed do some harm to a certain group of people. The question is who should be responsible for bailing those people out (if at all). Is it society (aka, the govt), or the companies reaping the benefits of said automation?
Of course, economically, taxi drivers and others will lose while programmers/shareholders will win. The point is that for the 99% (or whatever) of us that aren't in either category, self driving cars will be a massive improvement to our lives. Especially to the 10s of thousands each year that won't die.
The problem is that we should be 100% sure that there will be less death and not allow the self driving cars on public roads before.
I don't think we have the real numbers, how many Km each car drive and how many times the human had to get involved to prevent a big crash. If there are laws and checks in place so the actual numbers are reported then I want to see them, I read all self driving topics here and never seen this laws.
Until we have the real number the fact that self driving cars will save more lives is just a hope for a far away future.
"Could potentially save tens of thousands of lives a year" is not the same as "will save tens of thousands of lives a year right now". The fact that a technology has the potential for huge benefits does not give it a free pass to kill people while it's being developed.
We don't really know if there will be any safety benefits at all, and while I believe we might get to that point, it's a bit farther away than some tech-giants would like us to believe.
If you listen closely to who say what, you'll notice that a lot of entrepreneurs claim that we will have full AI within a couple of years, while a lot of boring engineers huff and puff and are generally pessimistic.
I'm sure the there are great savings involved in self-driving transport - especially long-haul , so it will happen sooner than later, but this will initially mean more death - not less.
I'm not sure how wishful thinking it is. AFAIK no self driving car has been at fault in an accident. They have always been caused by a human driver and, at worst, the self driving car failed to avoid the collision.
For better or worse, I don't think a self driving car will be commercially successful until it shows it is at least as safe as a human driver. More likely it will have to demonstrate that it is significantly safer. It might be the case that whichever company first launches doesn't correctly gauge the safety of their car, but I definitely think the goal is to be safer from day one.
> AFAIK no self driving car has been at fault in an accident.
Nobody is saying the car itself was at fault. People are saying (justifiably) that the people who put the car out on public roads with faulty engineering are at fault.
> I don't think a self driving car will be commercially successful until it shows it is at least as safe as a human driver. More likely it will have to demonstrate that it is significantly safer.
I agree. And the incident under discussion illustrates that the technology has not yet reached that point.
Furthermore, "commercially successful" is not the first objective that needs to be met. The first objective is "safe enough to be allowed on public roads". The incident under discussion illustrates that the technology has not yet reached that point either.
