Technology

Every time one of these things happens, there's always comments here about how humans do these things too. Two responses to that:

First, human drivers are actually really good at driving. Here's Cory Doctorow explaining this point:

Take the much-vaunted terribleness of human drivers, which the AV industry likes to tout. It's true that the other dumdums on the road cutting you off and changing lanes without their turn-signals are pretty bad drivers, but actual, professional drivers are amazing. The average school-bus driver clocks up 500 million miles without a fatal crash (but of course, bus drivers are part of the public transit system).

Even dopes like you and me are better than you may think – while cars do kill the shit out of Americans, it's because Americans drive so goddamned much. US traffic deaths are a mere one per 100 million miles driven, and most of those deaths are due to recklessness, not inability. Drunks, speeders, texters and sleepy drivers cause traffic fatalities – they may be skilled drivers, but they are also reckless.

There's like a few hundred robot taxis driving relatively few miles, and the problems are constant. I don't know of anyone who has plugged the numbers yet, but I suspect they look pretty bad by comparison.

Second, when self-driving cars fuck up, they become everyone else's problem. Emergency service personnel, paid for by the taxpayer, are suddenly stuck having to call corporate customer service or whatever. When a human fucks up, there's also a human on the scene to take responsibility for the situation and figure out how to remedy it (unless it's a terrible accident and they're disabled or something, but that's an edge case). When one of these robot taxis fucks up, it becomes the problem of whoever they're inconveniencing, be it construction workers, firefighters, police, whatever.

This second point is classic corporate behavior. Companies look for ways to convert their internal costs (in this case, the labor of taxi drivers) into externalities, pushing down their costs but leaving the rest of us to deal with their mess. For example, plastic packaging is much, much cheaper for companies than collecting and reusing glass bottles or whatever, but the trash now becomes everyone else's problem, and at this point, there is microplastic in literally every place on Earth.