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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I don't know where you're getting 40,000 road deaths from, because:

> According to the World Health Organization (WHO), road traffic injuries caused an estimated 1.35 million deaths worldwide in 2016. That is, one person is killed every 26 seconds on average. [1]

I also don't know what the breakdown you give has to do with. If we can save the lives of pedestrians, drunk people, and males under 24, then amazing.

Also, a quick Google search reveals that in the US:

> Deaths and injuries resulting from motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for persons of every age from 3 through 33 (based on 2003 data).

That sounds pretty dangerous to me if it's the leading cause of death. Maybe not that dangerous per-mile, but clearly those miles add up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

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> I don't know where you're getting 40,000 road deaths from, because:

US road fatalities. This is because NHTSA catalogs every one of them and the circumstances leading up to them. This product is called the FARS.

> If we can save the lives of pedestrians, drunk people, and males under 24, then amazing.

You're assuming they'll use the automation. Or you're presuming it will be forced on people. Which ignored motorcycles. Or bicycles. People use those.

> Deaths and injuries resulting from motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for persons of every age from 3 through 33 (based on 2003 data).

I'd like to know where you got that statistic from. In the US, it is not likely to be true. Accidental self inflicted injury, a separate category, is often the most common until Heart Disease and Cancer become factors.

The reason to use the US is because it is a developed country, a wide variety of different states and road conditions, and it has a single reporting agency covering it. Presuming that automated vehicles are going to lead to major improvements outside of developed nations is a bit unfounded.

But even saving up to 40,000 lives for 1% increase in electricity demand sounds like a good deal?

Depends on how that electricity is being generated. If it's clean then it might be a good trade-off. If it's dirty then we're probably worse-off.

True. And now we contrast this with the additional pollution deaths the increased energy and resource consumption will lead to. 1.3 million people isn't very many.

Currently we're in a paradoxical situation where there are two very contrasting mantras in society: 1. We need to reduce our carbon emissions, cut down on resource consumption and move to only producing energy from renewable sources. And 2. We should have more automation, more AI, more data, more computation in general.

Both directly contradict each other, anyone who's looked into the state of batteries and renewable energy knows we simply don't have a way for both to be true. In fact, we drastically have to reduce energy consumption if we want to make that green dream work, there's no practical way as of today to store all the solar and wind energy that would be needed for it.

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