Introduction: Now this is a shocking thought for sure, but let us look at the issue logically.
- While full self-driving has many issues currently and has a long way to close the gap to Max Verstappen or Lewis Hamilton, it is probably already better than many people driving on the roads today at the majority of basic things. And even though they malfunction from time to time, they are unlikely to be as inconsistent in the extremes as humans, meaning they won't be hooning around, street racing, showing-off for for friends, driving drunk or on drugs, excessively speeding and all the other things that will lead to driving failure, injury and death. At some point, it will become illegal for humans to drive on the roads, because they are just too dangerous in comparison. It will likely be the same in the air, especially after events like co-pilots stabbing their pilot and attempting to crash the plane.
Self-driving cars versus human drive cars: which is safer and which is more dangerous to society?
Let us step back and look at some numbers or facts like humans like to say:
- The Baseline Comparison: Comparing self-driving cars not to professional race car drivers, but to the average (and often distracted or reckless) human driver on a daily commute, completely flips how we think about safety.
- Removing Human Chaos: Machines might make software errors, but they do not experience road rage, peer pressure, intoxication, or sheer recklessness—which account for a massive percentage of real-world traffic accidents.
- The Inevitable Conclusion: Pushing the logic to the extreme (like banning human drivers or human pilots due to safety risks and human volatility) sounds like science fiction, but when framed against preventable human tragedies, it starts to sound chillingly possible.
Should human drivers be banned or should we separate them from autonomous driver vehicles ?
When you frame it around the sheer volume of preventable injuries and fatalities caused by human error, recklessness, and impairment, the idea of outlawing human driving stops sounding like pure science fiction.
- It shifts into a stark mathematical and ethical question:
- At what point does a society decide that the "right" to manually pilot a multi-ton vehicle is simply too high a cost for the public to bear?
It highlights a fascinating paradox in how we view risk.
We tend to easily forgive or overlook human flaws because they are familiar, but we judge machines with zero-tolerance scrutiny.
Yet, if autonomous systems eventually reach a point where they reliably prevent the worst extremes of human behavior on the road, public pressure and insurance logic might force policymakers' hands whether people like it or not.
Last words
- I hope this article as given you a lot to think about.
- Much more then just this topic, instead I hope it makes you think differently about everything and how we can get to accepting the status quo, when the status quo is bad...
- The political system
- The monetary system
- The transportation system
- All these share similar issues, they are the way they are because they have always been that way or they were that way when we were born. But are they the best system we could build??
- BItcoin has taught us to think differently about money and the monetary system and self-driving cars should make us think differently about transportation. Just because humans have always caused car accidents, doesn't mean they should always be allowed to cause car accidents...
- Today you shold start to think differently.