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Google's Driverless Car and the Logic of Safety
mikejuk writes "Google's driverless car could save more than 1 million deaths per year and tens of millions of injuries. It is an impressive achievement, but will we allow it to take over the wheel? Sebastian Thrun puts the case for it in a persuasive TED Talk video. However it may be OK for human drivers to kill millions of people each year but one human fatality might be enough to finish the driverless car project — in fact it might not even take a death as an injury might cause the same backlash. Robot drivers might kill far fewer people than a human driver but it remains to be seen if we can be logical enough to accept the occasional failure of algorithm or hardware. Put simply we might have all seen too many 'evil robot' movies."
As someone who works for a-company-which-shall-remain-nameless-but-makes-a-self-balancing-two-wheeled-product, in a word, "Yes." That being said, the argument here is most closely aligned with the argument re: vaccines. Vaccines demonstrably save tens of thousands of lives, stateside alone, every year. And yet, one article by a (now-)discredited quack has thrown the whole program into a political and social quagmire. Why? Because people do *not* think as Spock did: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." This is, perhaps, most clearly shown by the gun lobbyists: guns kills thousands, every year. Home invasions in which guns could have prevented a victim's death are VASTLY fewer. While my sympathies lie with the thousands who die needlessly, this is not an easy question to answer based on body count alone.