Comment by Klathmon
21 hours ago
I feel like we have the technology to prevent a car from starting if the driver is significantly impared, but "solving" addiction, cancer, and heart disease are much harder problems.
Obviously it would need to be implemented carefully, but I personally would be more than fine blowing into a tube to start my car if it meant saving 12k lives a year with a very low false positive rate.
That being said I know it would never be implemented in a sane way in the US, and you would probably have situations like your car insurance automatically increasing due to a faulty sensor, so I'm ultimately against it unless a lot of other stuff changes.
But it's still much more possible than "preventing drug addiction"
> Obviously it would need to be implemented carefully, but I personally would be more than fine blowing into a tube to start my car if it meant saving 12k lives a year with a very low false positive rate.
I can already see two issues with these devices:
- They can’t reliably identify the actual driver. Criminals might simply ask someone else to blow into the device.
- With every car equipped with this safety feature, people might assume everyone driving isn’t drunk.
I’m not sure. It seems like this will only add extra hassle for law-abiding citizens while those for whom it was designed will likely find workarounds.