Why humanity will come to regret inventing self-driving cars

https://nypost.com/2019/05/25/why-humanity-will-come-to-regret-inventing-self-driving-cars/

by RickJWagner • 7 years ago

11 11 7 years ago

Gibbon1• 7 years ago

Another reason is related to the Jevons Paradox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Self driving cars and or things like lift and uber externalize the personal hassle due to congestion. Reasonably then congestion will increase.

phren0logy• 7 years ago

If I were allowed to optimize my life around minimizing personal hassle (to any meaningful degree), my life would look a lot different.

Fjolsvith• 7 years ago

I personally call this "lifestyle upgrades". If I see something I can improve that will save me repeated future hassles, I will take the time and expense to change it. It's like I fight all those future battles at one time in the now.

jjeaff• 7 years ago

Congestion will increase assuming number of cars on the road is the only factor that causes congestion.

But it isn't. If you can reduce the number of idiots that don't know how to zipper merge and reduce the number of accidents that cause slowdowns and the rubberneckers that make it worse, I can imagine traffic getting a lot better.

And that doesn't even take into account the possibility of remote communication between the cars to better avoid busy streets and coordinate movements.

User23• 7 years ago

Being surrounded by autonomous kill bots is not a happy thought, even if they also happen to function as people movers.

Also how do autonomous vehicles handle jaywalkers? If they reliably stop then at least some people will just cross whenever they feel like it.

dTal• 7 years ago

A risky business, if even 1% of the cars are still driven by humans.

mullingitover2• 7 years ago

Also how do autonomous vehicles handle jaywalkers? If they reliably stop then at least some people will just cross whenever they feel like it.

Stop for the pedestrians, but also photograph them and forward the images to law enforcement for convenient automatic fines.

cyode• 7 years ago

Human drivers today reliably stop for jaywalkers. I imagine jaywalking rates in a total self-driving car world be about the same.

mullingitover2• 7 years ago

This article is ridiculous.

But what makes driving so magical is that it doesn’t require all of your brain, and the parts it doesn’t need are free to really enjoy other things. Things like conversations with whomever you’re riding with, listening to music, stories or podcasts and, perhaps most importantly, letting your mind wander into a sort of meditative state where you can really think about ideas or problems.

All of the above are distractions that increase risks to you and everyone else on the road. Over 30k people in the US alone die every year on the roads, we should be looking at this as a disaster. We should pursue self-driving technology with the fervor that we would toward winning a war that killed that number of people every year.

ddelt• 7 years ago

Amen - I came here to say exactly this; thank you for pointing it out.

hypervis0r• 7 years ago

OP seems to never have heard of public transport.

Wait, are they American? Most likely.

Why humanity will come to regret inventing self-driving cars

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