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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Every time one of these things happens, there's always comments here about how humans do these things too. Two responses to that:
First, human drivers are actually really good at driving. Here's Cory Doctorow explaining this point:
There's like a few hundred robot taxis driving relatively few miles, and the problems are constant. I don't know of anyone who has plugged the numbers yet, but I suspect they look pretty bad by comparison.
Second, when self-driving cars fuck up, they become everyone else's problem. Emergency service personnel, paid for by the taxpayer, are suddenly stuck having to call corporate customer service or whatever. When a human fucks up, there's also a human on the scene to take responsibility for the situation and figure out how to remedy it (unless it's a terrible accident and they're disabled or something, but that's an edge case). When one of these robot taxis fucks up, it becomes the problem of whoever they're inconveniencing, be it construction workers, firefighters, police, whatever.
This second point is classic corporate behavior. Companies look for ways to convert their internal costs (in this case, the labor of taxi drivers) into externalities, pushing down their costs but leaving the rest of us to deal with their mess. For example, plastic packaging is much, much cheaper for companies than collecting and reusing glass bottles or whatever, but the trash now becomes everyone else's problem, and at this point, there is microplastic in literally every place on Earth.
There's another difference between humans and computers you forgot to mention. Once a computer 'learns" something, (like avoiding driving into wet concrete), it will never make that mistake again. Prople on the other hand continue making the same error over and over.
You are using an argument that is not new .. pilots have used it for decades (and some still do) to complain about automation on the flight deck. Yet every day tens of thousands of airliners fly to their destination (and sometimes land there as well) with no pilot intervention. Pilots could easily be eliminated from airplanes .. the reason they are still flying has more to do with PR and a public not willing to fly without a human up front. But automation has made air travel safer by an order of magnitude. It will do the same for cars.
Airplanes don't have to interact with hundreds of other vehicles all constantly changing speeds and course headings