Landsteiner posted:"This is the "dirty little secret" that the technology proponents don't want to talk about."
There aren't any secrets about this. Occasionally even the best technology will fail, as you say. But airlines are a bad example in my view. Highly trained, highly paid pilots plus extraordinary technology have made major airline disasters vanishingly rare. We would be idiots to mess with that, except by adding additional technology and still having at least two pilots on any commercial flight. It's working. End of story.
However, the current technology wedding cars and drivers is failing utterly and completely. 30,000 deaths per year, 100s of billions of dollars in medical expenses and property damage, not to mention incalculable suffering, demonstrate that the current model is an abysmal failure. Unless we can employ highly trained and disciplined drivers and high technology, as we have now on the airlines, nothing will change. We are not going to make 100 million+ drivers competent to drive, attentive to the road, never drinking alcohol or doing drugs. The only solution to these millions of preventable deaths over a lifetime is better technology, not better drivers. It's one thing to have a few thousand great pilots paid $100-300,000 dollars per year. We're not going to be able to do that for 200 million automobiles, are we?
That raises a good point, that comparing airline pilots to people driving cars isn't a direct comparison. Besides the fact that pilots are well trained, aircraft today are heavily automated as I pointed out in a new post, even if the pilot is making the decisions, they are doing so aided by, for example, computers controlling the flight surfaces based on their input, the idea of 'stick and rudder controlled directly' isn't true with modern aircraft, things like the modern fighters, the stealth planes, and even commercial aircraft cannot be flown totally manually per se (or at least some of them), computerized systems can make rapid adjustments that human beings can't, so they 'enhance' the ability of the pilot. I think the current model works, though you can argue that when problems happen often it is pilot error or human error of some sort, as rare as they happpen.
While thanks to the design of modern cars, between safety equipment, better structural design, things like ABS, lane detection and object detection/emergency braking applications, the actual death rates are down (30,000 dead, yes, but that is with driving miles many times more than they were 40 years ago; the death rate/100k miles is sharply reduced from the early 70's, when with less driving, 50,000 people died). One of the largest single causes of accidents and deaths is still DUI/DWI, despite all the increased penalties and such when groups like MADD forced change from lax laws, even though the overall rates have dropped.
Another reason for automation is outside really rural areas, most suburban and even exurban places, where most people live (and that trend is continuing on, by the end of this century some estimates are that only 5% of the people will live in rural areas) are saturated with traffic, and the current thing of building more roads and expanding existing ones doesn't keep up, peoples commuting times, especially where they drive to work, have increased tremendously since the 1970's, and one of the reasons is that highways cannot handle anywhere near their theoretical capability, because of the way people drive. Ever drive down the highway where someone in in the left lane at 30mph, or worse, a group of cars side by side are driving the same (slow) speed, or the person hunched over the steering wheel, afraid and constantly braking...and what about the large increase of us getting older, autonomous cars can mean older drivers keeping their mobility while also to be honest, without the issues that come along as people age, loss of reflexes, eyesight, etc? Autonomous cars can help more than a few issues on the road, if they get the technology right. Sure, people point to where autonomous cars have caused accidents or even fatalities, but these are still prototypes (uber and the rest are jumping the gun, to say the least), but guess what, how many people died in the early days of airplane flight, both in the wright brothers era, and even early in commercial aviation? How many people died perfecting the automobile, or for that matter, the steam engine on railroads? I am not saying driverless cars are ready to take over, or should, same with planes (or trains..hey, planes, trains and automobiles, should make a movie called that), just saying that new technology always has problems, has risks, and as time goes on the risks fall off as the rewards come into play, and eventually is adopted (or fails, too).
