I’m going to inject some unpopular nuance here, so I’ll preface by admitting that I haven’t looked further into this event than the information provided in the linked article, which isn’t much. Nevertheless, a few points:
No system is perfect, including exclusively human drivers. Obviously zero accidents is ideal, but as you said, road ragin’ car-brained behavior is typical. How many people are killed every year by human drivers?
Obviously driverless system development should aspire to dynamic reactivity comparable to the best human driver. But when running a cost-benefit analysis for driverless adoption it’s worth considering if, normalizing each by their respective total hours-on-the-road, the mistakes made by driverless cars due to rigid adhesion to traffic laws outnumber the mistakes made by drivers due to their own flagrant disobedience.
I would respond that in court, the traffic laws are the traffic laws. It looks like the pedestrian is the accountable party here. But from a pedestrian perspective, cars that are only dangerous if you’re jaywalking are objectively an upgrade.
That’s an interesting comparison and something I’ve wondered about quite a bit. I would be surprised if machine drivers were not categorically safer than human ones, and if safety is (rightly) a priority in the cost-benefit analysis of driverless car adoption, then it’s hard to imagine not concluding that we ought to proceed in that direction.
But I think this specific incident illustrates very well that the human vs. machine driver debate is tragically myopic. If an infallible machine driver adhering perfectly to traffic laws is empowered to accelerate from a standstill directly into a violent collision with a pedestrian, then maybe it doesn’t matter how “safe” the driver is. I take it as evidence that car travel the way we have it set up is inherently unsafe. Our traffic laws emphasize the convenience of car traffic above everything else – including safety – and only really serve to shift blame when something goes wrong. Despite its certainty, there is very little builtin allowance for human error aside from the begrudging mercy of other parties.
To be fair, human drivers are an unmitigated disaster which we really need to do something about, but I think if we’re going to go through the messy process of reforming how we think about cars, we might as well go farther than a marginal improvement. We could solve the underlying problem and abolish the institution of car dependency altogether, for instance. Otherwise it just amounts to slapping a futuristic band-aid on a set of social and economic issues that will continue to cause unimaginable harm.
How do you intend to inject nuance of all things when you haven’t even bothered to read the article. Honestly.
Uh, I did read the article.
I haven’t looked further into this event than the information provided in the linked article, which isn’t much.
