I think the leading cause of death in "a few decades" will be profound boredom.

(Also, whilst a computer may indeed be well-suited to drive my car as a matter of principle, there is still the small matter of it being programmed by humans...)

The other tragic thing about car accidents is that your mistakes can kill not only yourself, but also many other people. You might argue (though I'd disagree) that someone who's been driving for 10 hours straight deserves to die in an accident, but you certainly can't argue that the family of 5 that he crashed into head-on deserved it too.

To suggest these countless people need to die to satisfy your need for thrills is somewhat like suggesting that vaccines are boring because they take away the excitement of not knowing which of your children will live to an adult age.

The issue is that there's a small minority of bad drivers who cause accidents. Removing everyones freedom to drive because of those few isn't very fair, and would result in a boring 'locked down' society.

You can't expect a 'freedom' to exist in perpetuity for something that can easily result in the deaths of others by the actions of one person.

I'd put it in the same category as things like not allowing people to smoke in workplaces, public buildings, etc, or allowing people to shoot firearms in the backyards of their suburban homes.

I just don't see there being a 'freedom to manually control tons of metal for the purposes of transportation' trumping the immense amount of benefits to safety, among others.

In the UK, it's about 8 deaths a day from driving. The road network is now eight times safer per mile travelled than it was in 1966.

Just for comparison, around 400+ people die each day in the UK from cancer.

Instead of wasting a ton of money making robotic driverless cars because it sounds good, I'd invest that money straight into cancer research.

In other words, one 9/11 every month. I refuse to believe that's as safe as possible.

I'd invest that money straight into cancer research.

Well, you'd have to look at the marginal benefits. Cancer research already gets lots of funding; it's unlikely that a relatively small percentage increase would result in drastic improvements. If we're going down that road, I'd rather invest in SENS and try to knock out all age-related diseases in one shot.

I'm a bit surprised at the opposition to this. I'm much more libertarian than average here, but I recognize that driving is by far the most dangerous thing I do on an average day. If automated cars can mostly eliminate that danger, I'd have no problem requiring them on public roads (or strongly encouraging them via insurance premiums). Plus, saving lives is only one of the major benefits. Look at rush hour traffic: ideally, automated vehicles would eliminate traffic jams, and even if not they would still allow commuters to do something productive or entertaining instead of slowly inching forward.

Ok, maybe some cyclists die of collisions with other cyclists, but I'd wager they're a tiny minority.

No matter how fast you react, if you go at reasonable speeds and I'm the idiot, you're going to hit me (kill is optional). I think that's what your parent poster was trying to say (because that way it is a sensible argument). Whatever you implement in vehicle safety: If I'm able to throw myself in front of the thing in the last moment, hopefully because I'm a moron and not intentionally, then no technology on earth can avoid the accident.

Unless... You want to add mandatory robot bikes and robot shoes...

First of all, it will have much quicker reactions - and in accidents, those extra milliseconds do save lives. Secondly, it can take calm reactions where a human would panic. For example, if a parson started stumbling around drunkenly on a highway, with human drivers zooming past at 70mph a deadly accident is guaranteed. With self-driven cars, it's not that unreasonable to assume that they will be able to spot the person some distance away and change lane to shift around him or her. It might cause a slow-down in traffic around that area, but there's a good chance the whole incident can happen without accidents.

The same ludicrous reasoning that will eventually force us into computer-driven cars will do the same for other forms of transportation, rest assured.

Sure you can, and many of us do. Freedom trumps damn-near everything as far as I'm concerned. And how many of us are planning on living forever anyway?

This can't be true. I mean, sure, you could take a rifle downtown, place a target on a brick wall and start honing your shooting skills across a busy road. You might even have every intention of avoiding causing other people any harm.

That doesn't mean I think you should have the freedom to do so.

>That doesn't mean I think you should have the freedom to do so.

Hyperbole? Driving is dangerous, on that we are agreed, but the activity in your example is far, far, far more dangerous. There is obviously some standard of danger at which we no longer ban people from doing things: you aren't allowed to shoot at people, but you are allowed to carry a gun in the first place, and even regardless of your own intention this admits the possibility that someone insane might steal your gun and shoot innocent people.

So I don't think that valuing the freedom to control your own vehicle can be immediately dismissed as absurd. The apparent danger of driving is exaggerated by the astounding safety of modern life: at no point before 1900 did any human enjoy anything remotely approaching a modern standard of safety. In industrialized countries, the vehicle fatality rate is commensurate with or below the suicide rate. The number of people who enjoy the freedom of driving is massive, essentially the entire adult population of those countries, and so this common experience perhaps should not be ignored.

Some of -- but not all of -- the value in freedom is reflected in the potential for damage in non-freedom. If some external agent controls the mobility of the population, the potential for abuse is massive.

I realize you use the word "somewhat", but I still stand by sipior. Autos are, for many, a necessary mode of transportation that have the unfortunate potential to be abused or misused. Knives can be used to prepare food or kill/maim others, as well. I hope no one thinks we should build robots to do all of our cooking for us on the chance we might slice a finger.

If 80 people died every day (source: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx ) in the US from chopping up their vegetables, sometimes entire families slaughtered by a wayward broccoli stem, building robots to do our vegetable-chopping for us should definitely be a high priority.

Bear in mind I'm not advocating the removal of cars - merely that great efforts should be made to introduce self-driving cars over the next generation or two.

A strange complaint, coming from someone who not twenty minutes ago compared mandatory automated cars to vaccination, the former being a significant infringement on freedom for an undetermined safety gain and the latter being the most successful medical program in the history of humanity.

>Bear in mind I'm not advocating the removal of cars - merely that great efforts should be made to introduce self-driving cars over the next generation or two.

Okay, and that's fair, but this thread started with someone saying automated cars should be mandatory, so surely you'll understand if we choose to argue against that point?

I support computers being used to improve highway safety. I am not yet ready to conclude that the best way to go about this is to mandate self-driving cars for everyone, no exceptions.

Personally, I find driving to be the definition of boring. The distant, halcyon past is the brief decades (out of the entirety of human history) where we were able to live under the illusion that we could build a road system that would handle the burgeoning amount of traffic without gridlock.

I'm not sure about your last point. Enormous strides have been made in designing road networks that are far more tolerant of heavy loads. But gridlock is also in some sense a social problem, and so a purely technological or algorithmic solution is perhaps unrealistic.

In general, driving is not a source of fun and excitement. In fact, commute times are strongly and negatively associated with self-reported happiness.

Your last point is certainly true. I used to commute to work via a combination of bike and train; getting a car cut my commute in half, and I am decidedly happier for it.

(In the same spirit as your prediction!)

The most obvious one that comes to mind is the familiar question: "What follows a ball?" While you can program the answer ("A child"), can you reliably say that your car will recognize a ball? What about a soccer ball? A basketball? A golf ball? A football?

Driving is one of the activities that humans engage in that requires true cognizance and awareness. The idea that a computer is "best suited" for driving is laughable until we start using cars where situational awareness and context no longer matters (let's get to work on those flying cars).

You're giving "human instinct" a whole lot of undeserved credit here.

Your car brakes. As hard as it can. Because - you know - there's a dove on the street. Or - god forbid. I have cats, so let me take a dog as an example - a bigger animal. Or a hare. Or - whatever. It might even _be_ a kid - see below for why. let's just say you avoid to hit - something.

You agree that this

- doesn't make sense all the time (You SAVED a hedgedog. Grats!)

- only works if the cars behind you (extrapolating: ALL other cars) handle just as quick and automatic as well? No 'rollout', you need to require it for each and every car if this should make sense.

Better a fender bender than a dead kid.

Human reaction time hovers at about .2 seconds, last I heard. Machines have much better reaction times. I would place far more trust in a self-braking car than in a human-braking car.

Furthermore, a machine is always watching the road. What percentage of the time do you think the average driver is watching the road, scanning for dangers, taking note of other cars and obstacles in the vicinity? I would wager that it's less than 60% of the time, though I admit that I don't have numbers to back that up.

> (You SAVED a hedgedog. Grats!)

Hitting animals can inflict significant damage to a car. Just putting that out there.

And to further your point even more, machines are much better at keeping the required distance for safely stopping. Stressed-out/aggressive humans tend to tail-gate ...

A computer also wouldn't be going fast enough in the first place that its panic braking could reasonably cause a driver to hit it. Tailgating one would make it slow down. But no one ever claimed that robotic cars could save you from other drivers' errors; that's the whole point, they should be universal because drivers kill other people.