Autonomous Vehicles

Waymo's peer-reviewed study in Traffic Injury Prevention, PDF, 58 pages found its self-driving cars safely drove 56.7 million miles across four U.S. cities without a human safety driver. With 80-90% level reduction for different types of accidents.

56.7 million miles is a tiny fraction of the overall US miles driven, only about 0.002%. Current self-driving AI wouldn't be as good for all road types and conditions. But it will get there, the only question is when. When it does that 80-90% reduction in accidents means 34,000 lives saved in the US, and hundreds of thousands globally - every single year.

The day is going to come where the public conversation is going to be about banning human driving, like no-seatbelts and indoor smoking before it. I've a suspicion the same people who said losing a few hundred thousand lives to 'herd immunity' will be telling us that those 34,000 dead a year are a price worth paying, so they don't have to change anything about their lives or routines.