Comment by exitb
9 days ago
You’ve picked an interesting example, as driving a car, even with all safety precautions, is pretty much the most dangerous activity we do on a daily basis. Yet somehow we decide that the benefits outweigh the risks.
9 days ago
You’ve picked an interesting example, as driving a car, even with all safety precautions, is pretty much the most dangerous activity we do on a daily basis. Yet somehow we decide that the benefits outweigh the risks.
It's a completely different story. For cars, it happened because of relentless pressure from the auto lobby. It took years of propaganda from oil companies, car makers etc. to make us think the road is for cars [1]. We demolished and rebuilt entire cities to accommodate cars, partly because they gutted the public transport sector [2]. This made our infrastructure so hostile to our own bodies that we have no choice but to use cars now. We bought their products because they forced them down our throats. There is nowhere near that kind of pressure behind the adoption of... oh dear lord.
[1] https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2022/06/how-lobbyis...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
I don't think the pressure of the auto lobby is really the reason.
People feel cars are more convenient and more prestigious than riding on a bus. Car lobby certainly accelerated the process, but car users were the main driving force.
The auto lobby invented the word jaywalking to shift the liability for dead pedestrians from the people doing the killing to the people doing the walking.
The US also had protests when drivers killed kids, but they were ultimately unsuccessful, except for the odd traffic light installation. https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-baby-carri...
Even in Amsterdam the original "stop the child murder" protests only barely succeeded, and it took a massive oil crisis and a population that could still (if only just) remember what life was like before cars took over their city to get there.
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Surely people feeling that way can be attributed to the industry?
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> Car lobby certainly accelerated the process, but car users were the main driving force.
Not really. We know it’s not as much of a natural force as some would like it to be because there are places where the lobbies lost, and while cars are common and widespread they’re nowhere near as dominant as they are in, say, the USA.
NJB’s next video (currently available on nebula) is about exactly that, Amsterdam’s (/ De Pijp’s) resistance to cars and car lobbying.
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Are there real acknowledgments cases of multiple companies coming together to bribe some state level people to increase their profit and splitting the bribe across the companies? Like GM, BNW and Honda coming together bribing and splitting the bill. Seems unlikely thou there was a RAM price fixing agreement caught but then again they were caught cause of the number of people aware
There was surely also a lot of political will coming from car users. Motorists are a large and vocal constituency.
Whether public or individual transportation makes more sense really depends on a country’s geography and people’s housing preferences. Public transportation is not always the best option.
I think it might be because people like to own and drive cars.
I mean that kind of seems like exactly what's happening for AI to me.
Typical comment that probably comes from a healthy, childless, young person with no disabilities that can’t understand why people not in that situation might have different requirements from transportation.
In case of driving the stakes are equally high for everyone on the road. Can we say the same for an agent?
Having an agent is like forever having a genius intern who'll almost always do the perfect job for you. But there is non-zero chance that they'll also come up with quirky solutions and execute those with confidence and no follow-ups. You don't grant the intern production access and hope they check with you.
I don't think the corporate equivalent of "dog ate my homework" flies, if the dog ate your files and your production DB if you are unlucky.
I don’t think that’s really true of driving, pedestrians and cyclists are at a much higher risk of getting killed by a driver than a driver themself. There are huge negative externalities to driving
> In case of driving the stakes are equally high for everyone on the road
The stakes are significantly higher for everyone outside a car. This seems like a pretty good metaphor for slop bombing people who don't use AI. People drive because they don't feel safe around everyone driving. People slop bomb because they can't handle all the slop.
What do you mean “somehow”? You make it sound like people don’t weight benefits and risks. If you do not live in a large city, the benefits are so immense in terms of mobility, they outweigh the risks for most, very clearly. That’s why in large cities, much less people own a driving license for example, the benefits are just not there anymore.
Granted, on the downsides, people look at cost more than risks.
I think they weigh the benefits and risks but then completely discard the risks, because humans are bad at evaluating risks.
More than a million people die each year on the road but for some reason terrorism and cancer dominate the risk assessment of people.
I bet any money that almost all people aren’t really afraid of entering a death box every day to drive to work.
How could they be; a lifetime of brainwashing doesnt let them asses the risk realistically
In cities the benefits don’t necessarily outweigh the risks yet cities are designed entirely around cars in many places to their detriment.
Yes, but we usually use cars as a means to an end. Have you ever met a manager who setup gasmaxxing policies and criticized employees for doing their job instead of driving?
I know sales people in pharma who spend all day driving, not only for sales visits but also drive doctors for their personal errands, and all this driving is encouraged by management.
Having played with Fable a bit, if it doesn’t kill tokenmaxxing I don’t know what will.
I'm interested in what you mean, if you could develop. Would it kill tokenmaxxing because it's so bad? Because it's incredibly efficient? Because it's way too expensive?
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Lots of people die driving because people drive a lot. It's something like 1 death per 100 million miles driven.
> Yet somehow we decide that the benefits outweigh the risks.
More like malicious lobbying and incompetence made it impossible in many places to use any other form of transportation, despite there being safer, faster, cheaper, and healthier ways to move around. Which come to think if it makes this a rather nice analogy for the current situation... :)
Not really. That decision was taken for you, (I’m presuming you live in the US) by the American car industry and their paid of politicians. Your cities used to have beautiful public transport until it was dismantled.
Unfortunately in Europe the German car industry similarly has a lot of power, hence why their shitty rail network fuck up the whole continents.
I take the train and tram.
user using computer is also the most dangerous activity to his data on a daily basis
The example wasn't "driving a car". The benefits of putting your feet up on the dashboard do not outweigh the risks, at least not where there is actual traffic. I don't think I saw a single person doing that in real life, ever.