Oddly, this sounds about right considering the weight you would have to bear forever if you ever hear of some fatal incident involving some technology you built.
No question that thought is comforting, but that is the example of the benefit which never appears before your eyes (i.e. it is not tangible, unlike the converse). I am not saying people should stop working on autonomous cars, it was just a comment on how fraught with moral weight the occupation is, particularly for the pioneers.
But commercial aviation is extremely safe. I think the point is where it will be, not where it is.
This being said, having to balance business issues and safety of a system with as long a lever-arm as this seems blindingly difficult. I wonder hos much of the real work here is ultimately more like insurance than engineering ( as if there were any real difference to start with ).
I think you overdramatize. If lives saved is greater than lives lost, your doing great!
It's not like all military contractor engineers live under a constant cloud of self hatred and suicidal thoughts, either, and they build things that are about trading "many" "enemy" casualties for "few" "friendly" ones.
By contrast, self driving is doing almost entirely good along any moral spectrum.
Just trying to construct the cost model for that is pretty deep. The high-altitude view is that there will be a process that slowly eliminates safety hazards.
An analogous process is lineman safety in the electric grid; at one point the probability of fatal accident for electric linemen was quite high, and it declined to next to nothing as safety procedures improved.
I don't think it'll really be safe until autonomous cars have transponders and can negotiate space in real time, but then you still have all the legacy vehicles out there that don't have transponders.
In the United States, human error accounts for 95% of car accidents, with 33000 fatalities and 2.35m injured each year.
Behind the house, the second most expensive purchase in a typical person's life is their car, and yet in a car's lifetime, only 2.56% is spent driving on roads with the remainder spent parked or in traffic.
Under this model, drone operators should get paid $100M/year. I sincerely doubt the satisfaction from all the disability adjusted life years saved from facilitating the creation of autonomous cars would be overshadowed by the occasion life lost. It is a similar level of power as a commanding officer in a conflict situation.
The how much do you wish to pay the hundreds of thousands of people working for example, in aeronautics or railway, just to stay in the domain of transports? 200 times more?
