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Comment by bluGill

3 days ago

I'm waiting for independent analysis of the data. According to those with access to data - but also with reason to lie with statistics - waymo is enough better overall than humans that I'm not comfortable with any human driving on any public road. If you like to drive then do it on a private track/course where your mistakes won't kill other people.

Of course the real data is hidden from me and nobody I trust to be independent has seen it and is talking.

I haven't seen the data, but I have sitting strong reason to believe that roads with no cars on them cause fewer motor vehicle accidents than ones with any distribution of human and/or autonomous vehicles, so I'm not comfortable with any cars driving on any public road. If you like cars to drive, than have them do it on a private track/course where your mistakes won't kill other people.

Alternately, we could recognize that figuring out where to draw the line for a diverse group with varying behaviors is pretty hard, and any possible place you try to draw it will be strictly less safe than where I might say to draw it instead, unless you're willing to ban cars entirely. I'm guessing you'd say that banning cars entirely isn't realistic, which I'd be forced to agree with, but if you follow up by suggesting that we just ban humans instead, I'll be very interested to hear your realistic plan for how we deal with the fallout of shutting down millions of restaurants and stores that aren't near public transportation, preventing ambulances for bringing people to hospitals, and transporting goods to anywhere that's not directly on a rail line.

Of course, I have an incredible bias on the conversation on whether humans should be allowed to drive, so you might not be able to trust me. Specifically, I haven't driven for over a decade, have never owned my own car, and don't even have an active license anymore, so I don't particularly care about the idea of people liking to drive. It's probably worth it to mentally adjust what I said above to be a bit more sympathetic to human drivers based on that.