Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy, it has much fewer casualties than gas, wind or solar. The difference is the risk of nuclear is indiscriminate, whereas people dying in a solar accident are the workers (rooftop fall).
If the driver is in control of their own car, they have themselves to blame (mostly). With self-driving, they are trusting their lives into a single entity they understand nothing about.
Nuclear energy is a good example of the situation that self-driving cars find themselves. A common saying in my industry is that with safety critical systems you do not get to decide whether the systems kill people or not, the best you can do is decide how many people get killed. Unfortunately for self-driving cars, like nuclear energy, even if the number is far less than existing technologies the public has little appetite for the indiscriminate death.
The census don’t, generally speaking, tend to believe statistics and facts. And the media will always spin a bad situation to boost their click through rates.
So, even though self driving cars may be 100% less prone to accidents (this is just an example), media headlines like “driver killed instantly when self driving car automatically steered into a wall without warning,” will cause the majority to push back and say they’re unsafe.
> “driver killed instantly when self driving car automatically steered into a wall without warning,”
Interesting example. A justifiable fear people have of self-driving cars is them crashing in scenarios where no (minimally competent, not ass-blasted drunk) human would reasonably crash, like randomly steering into a wall.
I think if self-driving cars were seen to crash in scenarios where a human could have made a similar mistake, their reputation would be better.
Not to say the media reporting of these incidents would be in any way accurate or fair.
This is why self-driving cars will feel more dangerous, even if statistically they are safer. I wouldn't much feel better if in the moments before my car drives into concrete barrier, after having determined impact is inevitable, it informs me that while it might have failed me and I will die, that statistically it has saved 10 other theoretical people.
If I had to guess, the decision will always be to protect the occupants of the car over everything else. No one is going to buy a car that will kill you to save others.
That's not what I was saying. That a car is statistically more safe is not comforting when it kills you in a way you would have easily avoided had you been driving.
I think the problem with nuclear energy is the overall number of people who die per incident. Because of this, the deaths are overreported.
We seem to be able to handle people dying one at a time, but once a whole town is in danger, even if this is something that happens once a generation (this is the hard part to understand), it crosses that threshold of "this isn't worth it".
That said, if self driving car deaths get reported as much as traditional car deaths (that is to say, not very often), perhaps people will think they are just as safe as driving themselves.
Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy, it has much fewer casualties than gas, wind or solar. The difference is the risk of nuclear is indiscriminate, whereas people dying in a solar accident are the workers (rooftop fall).
If the driver is in control of their own car, they have themselves to blame (mostly). With self-driving, they are trusting their lives into a single entity they understand nothing about.