The Human Driving Manifesto
This entire article is clickbait, where the author wants you to believe he is being persecuted or something.<p>&gt; Despite a storm of clickbait media reports, there is still little evidence that self-driving cars are safer than humans.<p>This is the central thesis, but the author made up the idea that we are supposed to already have these cars that are safer than humans. Nobody thinks this. <i>Nobody.</i> These cars will hopefully exist and hopefully be a lot safer than humans but they certainly don&#x27;t exist yet.<p>The author thinks that killing 30,000 people per year is a-okay and worth it for the &#x27;freedom&#x27;. I disagree. It&#x27;s not even freedom you get from driving yourself. You still have to stay on the roads and use a seatbelt and use your turn signals 100% of the time, etc. I would place a large bet that when the author drives, he breaks 10-20 safety laws each drive. Everyone does.<p>We should aim for 0 deaths per year and do everything in our power to get there. Taking the epic weapons away from people is not a reduced freedom. Self driving cars do not take away your freedom just as not owning an AR-15 does not take away your freedom.<p>The goal of self-driving cars is 0 deaths&#x2F;year. If that is not your goal of safety without self-driving cars, then you don&#x27;t care about safety period. The selfishness exhibited in &quot;I don&#x27;t care if more people are dying on average, I want to drive and you can&#x27;t take it away from me&quot; is insane.<p>&gt; If our safety was the experts&#x27; first principle, the billions invested in self-driving cars would have gone to subsidizing free professional driving school, raising licensing standards, and making critical safety technologies like seat belts, airbags, ABS and automatic emergency braking (AEB) standard as soon as they were invented<p>No that is <i>not</i> what they would have done. They would be building self driving cars if they cared about safety.<p>People are not going to be better drivers if you give them more classes. They will still get drink and kill 5 innocent people on their way home from the bar.