
Why humanity will come to regret inventing self-driving cars - RickJWagner
https://nypost.com/2019/05/25/why-humanity-will-come-to-regret-inventing-self-driving-cars/
======
mullingitover
This article is ridiculous.

> But what makes driving so magical is that it doesn’t require all of your
> brain, and the parts it doesn’t need are free to really enjoy other things.
> Things like conversations with whomever you’re riding with, listening to
> music, stories or podcasts and, perhaps most importantly, letting your mind
> wander into a sort of meditative state where you can really think about
> ideas or problems.

All of the above are distractions that increase risks to you and everyone else
on the road. Over 30k people in the US alone die every year on the roads, we
should be looking at this as a disaster. We should pursue self-driving
technology with the fervor that we would toward winning a war that killed that
number of people every year.

~~~
ddelt
Amen - I came here to say exactly this; thank you for pointing it out.

------
Gibbon1
Another reason is related to the Jevons Paradox

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)

Self driving cars and or things like lift and uber externalize the personal
hassle due to congestion. Reasonably then congestion will increase.

~~~
phren0logy
If I were allowed to optimize my life around minimizing personal hassle (to
any meaningful degree), my life would look a lot different.

~~~
Fjolsvith
I personally call this "lifestyle upgrades". If I see something I can improve
that will save me repeated future hassles, I will take the time and expense to
change it. It's like I fight all those future battles at one time in the now.

------
hypervis0r
OP seems to never have heard of public transport.

Wait, are they American? Most likely.

------
User23
Being surrounded by autonomous kill bots is not a happy thought, even if they
also happen to function as people movers.

Also how do autonomous vehicles handle jaywalkers? If they reliably stop then
at least some people will just cross whenever they feel like it.

~~~
mullingitover
> Also how do autonomous vehicles handle jaywalkers? If they reliably stop
> then at least some people will just cross whenever they feel like it.

Stop for the pedestrians, but also photograph them and forward the images to
law enforcement for convenient automatic fines.

