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And what about the hundreds of thousands of injuries we'll be spared?
Worldwide, fully-autonomous vehicles will be a public health victory on the scale of vaccines or antibiotics.
Sustained _due_ to motor vehicles. The base statistics also include pedestrian deaths. There's also a skew due to vehicles being multi-passenger.
Interestingly, it _is_ the leading cause of deaths for Americans between 15 to 29 years old. For females 15-24 the motor vehicle related death rate is 8.7. For males 15-24 the death rate is 21.5. From 24-75 the rates drop a few points for both sexes and then increase again after 75.
> In the medium term, fully-autonomous vehicles will eventually cut both of those numbers to virtually zero.
My point is, the statistics may be painting a different picture when viewed in the whole. Even if this specific case is true, we may just be trading one cause of death for another. There's no guarantee overall injury or "suffering" will be reduced.
> When they're available worldwide, fully-autonomous vehicles will be a public health victory on the scale of vaccines or antibiotics.
Maybe, and maybe when everyone can afford them. Yet still, even today in America, more likely to die to the Flu than you are to motor vehicle related injuries.
I'm all for automated cars, but I'm skeptical of the rhetoric that gets tossed around.
I believe a better standard is to look at QALY -- quality-adjusted life years. That deducts relatively little for, say, a heart-attack at age 85 (you're already at your maximum life expectancy), but would put a heavy weight to, say, a pre-teen girl crippled by an auto accident, but surviving for life.
https://plus.google.com/+MarlaCaldwell/posts/BUZH36tmjso
http://www.cbs46.com/story/31596864/two-children-hospitalize...
While self driving cars are part of the picture towards reducing deaths in this group, it's incomplete; and you might do just as well with better parental controls and driver behavior reporting embedded into vehicle control software. Some of this is already available, but I have a feeling it's used far less often than it otherwise could be; which speaks to differing levels of parental involvement in the safety of their teenagers.
At the same time nobody's discussing taking motorcycles off the road and we're not at a point where we can put the requisite technologies in motorcycles to grant them the same safety we're supposing automated vehicles will possess. These vehicles in particular kill a disproportionate amount of young males.
Even if we do add these technologies to a motorcycle, you can still buy an ATV, or a snowmobile, or a farm tractor or any number of other off-road gasoline powered gadgets that can quickly become lethal.
I have nothing against the advancement of the safety of human society through technology, but I don't like the taste of the automated vehicle kool-aid that gets passed around and I'd like us to hedge our bets. That's all.
The same is true when you prevent death by any means at all. Everyone dies eventually by some cause. This does not mean we shouldn't try to prolong life where we can by avoiding early, needless death! (Otherwise why would we even have airbags or seatbelts, etc?)
Also, you can sleep in the car, which would greatly solve our sleep deprivation problem, which would boost productivity massively.
Commuting is the worst part of my day by a big margin. If I can get 2 hours of extra sleep instead, I'd be way more productive
While autonomy is great and will definitely save many lives, it is absolutely not on the scale of vaccines or antibiotics. Not even close.
You're comparing the deaths of millions to thousands.
1.3 million people die every year. This very well may be on that scale.
There is a huge assumption underlying this: That computer systems would be more intelligent than humans.
I believe the opposite: Computer systems will be much dumber than humans, and increase the number of accidents if ever adopted on large scale.
