Back then it might have been perfectly acceptable to throw a bunch of horses and cars together and risk them crashing into each other.
Today it should be unacceptable to throw automated cars in with human drivers and put the onus on the humans to alter their innate understanding of 100 years of traffic flow.
Your comment is cheeky and annoyingly inapplicable.
There's a tipping point where only people who want to drive will still do so which will likely make the insurance costs for those drivers very expensive because they're driving among automated vehicles which increases consequences of bad driving. (Fully automated, machines can talk to each other to avoid collisions).
This increased cost of insurance will encourage more people to switch to automated which will further encourage switching.
That tipping point is probably a relatively small percentage before it starts snowballing. All it takes is to get to a point where automated drivers are safer enough than driver-based that they can be insured significantly cheaper.
It won't take long after 95%+ of people are automated with the remaining 5% causing 90%+ of accidents for manual driving to be banned or shunned as a socially unacceptable risk like smoking.
I predict this will happen within 30 years.
Or very cheap because the people who self select to drive will be the people who care enough about driving to not do things like text and drive and when they do slip up the machines around them will prevent it from causing problems.
>shunned as a socially unacceptable risk like smoking.
Among the middle and upper class in Bubble Valley maybe. Everywhere else it's more of a "you do you" thing.
That is wildly overstating the complexity here. A teenager can learn to drive and pass their test with zero prior experience and maybe 10 hours of practice. "Altering" that intuition to account for the quite a bit simpler behavior of automated cars isn't going to be any harder.
This is just ludditism. The simple truth is that automated cars drive more safely, with fewer mistakes and much less velocity changing (i.e. lane switches, passing attempts, "oops" late braking, missed exit swerves...). They are easier to predict and understand, not harder.
Simple behavior is often more predictable, but not always. And it's predictability that matters.
> The simple truth is that automated cars drive more safely, with fewer mistakes and much less velocity changing (i.e. lane switches, passing attempts, "oops" late braking, missed exit swerves...).
> "oops" late braking
I'm not 100% sure what you mean here, so I'll split apart "oops" and "late".
A self-driving car might be less likely to brake late.
But everything I've heard says that a self-driving car is far more likely to "oops" in the form of sudden hard braking. Are you disagreeing? Can you back it up?
> Today it should be unacceptable to throw automated cars in with human drivers and put the onus on the humans to alter their innate understanding of 100 years of traffic flow.
No one who drove a car in 1917 is still driving today, and horse behavior had far more than 100 years to become innately understood.
But I think that it's wrong to assume that our modern attitude towards risk is 'advanced'. It's different, for sure. Thousands of people were likely killed or suffered as a result of automobiles mixing with horses. Today, 1.25 million people die annually as a result of automobile accidents - that's more than one person every 30 seconds. And many people also died as a result of taking risks while developing air travel, which is now one of the safest ways to travel. An attitude towards risk which suggests that equivalent risks are unacceptable would not have resulted in the billions of lives that have been improved by and saved by advancements in transportation. The modern economy is completely dependent on automotive transportation, and the world is unimaginably improved because we have cars instead of horses.
If equivalent progress would be made 100 years from now at the cost of thousands of lives lost due to adding automated cars to our existing roads and traffic flows, how could you possibly argue that we should not take this risk?