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What? There's got to be over ten thousand miles of local streets that Waze is helping drivers abuse. You can't just make them all "no thru traffic"!

Fortunately there's no reason to stop people using Waze from taking most of those streets.

What? There's got to be over ten thousand miles of local streets that Waze is helping drivers abuse. You can't just make them all "no thru traffic"!

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Being better than the worst 5% of drivers would still make driverless cars far more dangerous than human drivers on average.

On average yes, but on average most drivers aren't crashing their cars. If the A.I. is consistently better than the worst 5% of drivers currently driving, that might be enough to dramatically reduce car accidents. I don't know what bar we need to hit to reduce the accident rate, but I'm not sure it's particularly high. There are a lot of drivers each day, but there aren't actually that many accidents as a proportion of the total number of drivers.

Let's consider Los Angeles, there are approximately 4 million commuters every day. I strongly suspect they have fewer than 200,000 accidents a day. In fact, it looks like there are around 220 serious car accidents in Los Angeles, on average, per day. If those accidents are largely attributable to the worst drivers, replacing all drivers with autonomous vehicles that are only better than the worst 5% would virtually eliminate accidents, because the those accidents would be largely caused by the worst 0.006% of drivers.

Now we can't be sure that all of those accidents are caused by poor driving, but these statistics indicate that more than a third of the accidents (162k) were attributed to speed (49k) or drunk driving (11k). I think that most people would agree that reducing the number of accidents by a third would be a pretty big improvement. If we look at this page that estimates that 80% of all traffic accidents are the result of driver inattention instead, then it's possible that relatively poor autonomous systems could still result in an 80% or higher reduction in accidents.

My point is that by limiting the worst behaviour on the roads we might trigger an unexpectedly disproportionate reduction in the rate and severity of accidents.

LAPD are the 'bad guys'. Just look at their track record.

Look like they are doing a pretty good job.

Yeah, because fat-ass related diseases like diabetes and heart disease are rampant in california. Where do you live? Maybe a southern state?

Nah, in a state of comprehension.

Not quite right. http://www.laalmanac.com/crime/cr67.htm says 8,553 sworn officers.

Cars should be banned within city limits. This simple rule will save more lives than the last 30 years of cancer research. Cars are like cockroaches, getting rid of them in cities would be a blessing.

That's just plain stupid. Take a look at the map of the city I live in. It's 30 miles in diameter, and there's nothing but other cities outside those city limits. There simply is no means by which a mass transit system could replace the road system in my city, as there is absolutely no "center" that people go to--- everyone lives somewhere else and goes to a different place to work. You probably live in one of those "cities" with 300K people that can easily be served by two light rail lines and a dozen buses. When you have a greater metropolitan area that's home to 12 million plus people that spans a dozen city entities in two counties, mass transit becomes a much bigger problem than can be solved by an idiotic handwave of "just ban cars from city limits".

I won't even begin to address the issue of what you consider "cars" and what constitutes a legitimately necessary vehicle. No... I will. Do you expect supermarkets to get food deliveries by bus? Is the plumber going to bring tools and 10-foot lengths of copper pipe to your house on the subway? Are old people who can barely walk expected to somehow drag 30 pounds of groceries home a kilometer from the nearest transit station? No, I'm guessing you'd suggest some sort of "permit" system that'd allow certain "special" classes of people to have personal vehicles... and like any such system, those with money would be able to game it and drive as they please. So what you're really suggesting is that poor people should be banned from driving in the city.

From the first link: In 1796, life expectancy hovered around 24 years. A hundred years later it doubled to 48. In our modern world of air conditioners, hand washing and booster shots, you have a good chance of living 63 years, which is the world average. However, for those fortunate enough to live in a first-world country, lifespan jumps considerably.

and before that: It is difficult to imagine, but most of our ancestors kicked the bucket before our modern legal drinking age.

Life expectancy figures are misleading because they tend to be dominated by the infant mortality rate. People tend to interpret this number as if it means "about how long a healthy individual might live before dying of 'natural causes'" but it is really just a statistical average of life spans. So when lots of infants are dying before the age of 1, that drags the average down. Sure modern medicine has allowed old people to become even older, and sure people died young of other things that are less of an issue now, but if you survived to adolescence, and didn't get sent to war, and didn't catch a plague, living into your 60s or 70s wasn't unheard of. It's not like in the year 1796, 24 was considered old and having one foot in the grave!

In may lazy search for a graph to demonstrate this, this was the best I found, infant mortality in LA county since 1920. When 50% or 75% of your babies are dying shortly after delivery, life expectancy is going to be low even if, should you survive your own birth, you have a good chance of living to be 80.

Nevertheless the harshness of life probably did play a role in people getting married and having children at what would be considered today a young age. I think it has more to do with the nature of societies in the past, and the fact that the most natural age for any species to begin reproducing is shortly after reaching sexual maturity. Regardless of what the life expectancy meant, people were having families in their teens and early 20s, and Mr. Scientist is full of it.

Though I'll have to remember his imminently convincing argument for the health of the human race when I'm 60. =D