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Carrion Luggage #1089227 added May 13, 2025 at 9:33am
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The Drive to Innovate
From Vox, a report that's sure to freak out a lot of people.
As usual, I'm not just accepting this at face value. Nor am I rejecting it outright. When the concept of autonomous vehicles (AVs) was first floated in the real world, I knew immediately what was going to happen: the public would freak out, and anyone who stood to lose revenue would take advantage of the freakouts to come down hard against AVs on "safety" grounds, playing in to the general fear of robots. Municipalities, for instance, who stand to lose a significant source of revenue if they can't ticket people for speeding or rolling stop signs. And cops, who might have to switch to investigating real crimes like theft.
And boy, have they been harping on safety.
Humans drive distracted. They drive drowsy. They drive angry.
Even when we’re firing on all cylinders, our Stone Age-adapted brains are often no match for the speed and complexity of high-speed driving.
Ugh. They had to throw in a spurious reference to evolutionary psychology, didn't they?
The result of this very human fallibility is blood on the streets. Nearly 1.2 million people die in road crashes globally each year, enough to fill nine jumbo jets each day.
I admit I didn't check that statistic, but it tracks. I'm also not sure of the numerical comparison to ill-defined "jumbo jets," but I think the point is that every time we lose an airplane, "jumbo" or not, we hear about it for days or weeks afterward, while the road crashes are generally just background noise.
Here in the US, the government estimates there were 39,345 traffic fatalities in 2024, which adds up to a bus’s worth of people perishing every 12 hours.
I generally work with the nice round number 40,000 for average yearly traffic fatalities in the US. It's close enough to make the point I like to make, which is: that's about 110 fatalities each day, which translates to 4 to 5 per hour. Call it 4. Every time an AV so much as skins someone's knee, we hear about it, and it frightens people. And yet, if your phone pinged every time there was a fatality involving human drivers, you'd hear an alarm every 15 minutes or so. Injuries? Roughly every five minutes. We're used to it. As I said, background noise.
Obviously, there are a lot more human drivers than computer ones, so a direct comparison is more difficult. But my point remains: driving kills. In the US, it kills on the same order of magnitude as firearms,  and those deaths get talked about a lot also.
But the true benefit of a self-driving revolution will be in lives saved. And new data from the autonomous vehicle company Waymo suggests that those savings could be very great indeed.
Obviously, we need to be very careful using data from a company whose existence depends on continued development of AVs. Fortunately, the article uses "suggests," implying that it would be good to look into this further, preferably without an Agenda (for or against).
In a peer-reviewed study that is set to be published in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention, Waymo analyzed the safety performance of its autonomous vehicles... They then compared that data to human driving safety over the same number of miles driven on the same kind of roads.
And that alleviates some of my concerns about impartiality. Not all of them, but some.
Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that if the same 85 percent reduction seen in serious crashes held true for fatal ones — a big if, to be clear, since the study had too few fatal events to measure — we’d save approximately 34,000 lives a year.
Okay, first of all, I was morbidly amused at "the study had too few fatal events to measure." Look, I get that the number of motor vehicle fatalities can never be zero, unless there are no vehicles on the road whatsoever (and even then, I suspect it would still be nonzero). It would be ideal, sure, but it's unrealistic to expect that.
What I've been saying is that if AVs could be shown to reduce fatalities and other serious accidents by 10-20% (perhaps to an annual fatality level of 32,000 to 36,000, down from 40K), it would be worth it from a safety perspective. This study flips that script, implying a fatality rate of about 6,000 per year—a truly significant reduction, way more (pun intended) than my personal threshold.
Of course, there are plenty of caveats to the Waymo study and even more obstacles before we could ever achieve anything like what’s outlined above.
Yes, and I'm glad the article includes said caveats. You can read them there; I've already mentioned one of them (it being a company study).
Still, the data looks so good, and the death toll on our roads is so high that I’d argue slowing down autonomous vehicles is actually costing lives. And there’s a risk that’s precisely what will happen.
As with most things, there are other factors to consider. Accidental death is, obviously, a bad thing, so it's a fine metric for studies like this. But some other considerations include: personal loss of freedom (I can almost guarantee that AVs will have kill switches usable by law enforcement, which could be hacked or abused); economic impact (taxi drivers, rideshare gig workers, truckers, etc. to lose jobs); and ensuring that their routing is accurate (no driving into lakes or onto closed roads, e.g.); to name just a few. Not to mention the aforementioned loss of revenue to municipalities, which, frankly, I don't care about.
There's also the issue of liability. Right now if I hit a pedestrian on the street, I'd be personally liable. Who or what is responsible if an AV hits a pedestrian? Well, that's for lawyers to figure out and, hopefully, if this study holds water, there would be a lot fewer such cases. Which is another consideration: personal injury lawyers would make less money. Waah.
The article continues with a reiteration of what I've already said up there:
Too often the public focuses on unusual, outlier events with self-driving cars, while the carnage that occurs thanks to human drivers on a daily basis is simply treated as background noise. (That’s an example of two common psychological biases: availability bias, which causes us to judge risk by outlier events that jump easily to mind, and base-rate neglect, where we ignore the underlying frequency of events.)
As I said, if the news had to cover every traffic fatality in the US alone, we'd be getting four or five alerts an hour.
The result is that public opinion has been turning against self-driving cars in recent years, to the point where vandals have attacked autonomous vehicles on the street.
You know what that reminds me of? Luddites. Change is scary. Machines are scary. Also, we might lose our jobs, and that's really scary. In other words, I doubt that's all about safety or traffic fatalities.
To sum up, I'm not strongly for or against AVs. I do think that reducing fatalities is generally a good thing, but, as I said, there are other considerations, though maybe not life-or-death ones. We need more studies, preferably independent ones, but ideally, any switchover (which would realistically happen after I'm gone) should be based on statistics and science, not on fear. |
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