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Comment by ideamotor | Hacker News Reader

The metric to judge assisted driving technologies is primarily safety. Driving is not safe and I suspect will appear insane to a future generation. Which generation and how soon is another question. However, what the US needs to massive investments in rail, which address both safety and traffic.

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It's not that driving is unsafe, it's that cars are unsafe. Even if all cars were self driving, accidents happen, even with computers. A world without cars at all would be safer, albeit unrealistic. So the question is, would self driving put more or fewer cars on the road? I argue more. A lot more. So much more that it would offset the increase in marginal safety per vehicle.

It would also discourage the true solution around urbanization and continue to fuel more and more sprawling madness.

> Driving is not safe

This only appears true because we've made our entire world so safe that we can call one fatality every 100 million miles dangerous. Given everything we use cars for and the immense utility of them, being driven almost exclusively by amateurs ... cars are remarkably safe.

And if you could find a way to reliably remove the 1% that cause most of the problems, it would be even safer.

My sad related factoid to this is that suicide overtook car accidents as the leading cause of death of teenagers in Colorado. This is because although suicide is a worsening problem, crash safety and driver education have improved much faster than the suicide rate has been rising, causing them to flip for the first time.

Allowing FSD (in the next 20 years) to drive is unsafe, in my eyes. Investment in alternative transportation is the answer that doesn’t require driving from human or an algorithm.

It depends. It could be safe if it's self driving at 20mph on a constant pre-determined route.

People always bring up this idea that future generations will think it is “insane” to drive your own car. Will everyone in the future be very scared children in a far left monoculture? I just think people are more complicated than that. I think if people are really like that we will have very fragile humans.

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