In the UK, it's about 8 deaths a day from driving. The road network is now eight times safer per mile travelled than it was in 1966.

Just for comparison, around 400+ people die each day in the UK from cancer.

Instead of wasting a ton of money making robotic driverless cars because it sounds good, I'd invest that money straight into cancer research.

In other words, one 9/11 every month. I refuse to believe that's as safe as possible.

I'd invest that money straight into cancer research.

Well, you'd have to look at the marginal benefits. Cancer research already gets lots of funding; it's unlikely that a relatively small percentage increase would result in drastic improvements. If we're going down that road, I'd rather invest in SENS and try to knock out all age-related diseases in one shot.

I'm a bit surprised at the opposition to this. I'm much more libertarian than average here, but I recognize that driving is by far the most dangerous thing I do on an average day. If automated cars can mostly eliminate that danger, I'd have no problem requiring them on public roads (or strongly encouraging them via insurance premiums). Plus, saving lives is only one of the major benefits. Look at rush hour traffic: ideally, automated vehicles would eliminate traffic jams, and even if not they would still allow commuters to do something productive or entertaining instead of slowly inching forward.

Ok, maybe some cyclists die of collisions with other cyclists, but I'd wager they're a tiny minority.

No matter how fast you react, if you go at reasonable speeds and I'm the idiot, you're going to hit me (kill is optional). I think that's what your parent poster was trying to say (because that way it is a sensible argument). Whatever you implement in vehicle safety: If I'm able to throw myself in front of the thing in the last moment, hopefully because I'm a moron and not intentionally, then no technology on earth can avoid the accident.

Unless... You want to add mandatory robot bikes and robot shoes...

First of all, it will have much quicker reactions - and in accidents, those extra milliseconds do save lives. Secondly, it can take calm reactions where a human would panic. For example, if a parson started stumbling around drunkenly on a highway, with human drivers zooming past at 70mph a deadly accident is guaranteed. With self-driven cars, it's not that unreasonable to assume that they will be able to spot the person some distance away and change lane to shift around him or her. It might cause a slow-down in traffic around that area, but there's a good chance the whole incident can happen without accidents.

The same ludicrous reasoning that will eventually force us into computer-driven cars will do the same for other forms of transportation, rest assured.

Sure you can, and many of us do. Freedom trumps damn-near everything as far as I'm concerned. And how many of us are planning on living forever anyway?

This can't be true. I mean, sure, you could take a rifle downtown, place a target on a brick wall and start honing your shooting skills across a busy road. You might even have every intention of avoiding causing other people any harm.

That doesn't mean I think you should have the freedom to do so.

>That doesn't mean I think you should have the freedom to do so.

Hyperbole? Driving is dangerous, on that we are agreed, but the activity in your example is far, far, far more dangerous. There is obviously some standard of danger at which we no longer ban people from doing things: you aren't allowed to shoot at people, but you are allowed to carry a gun in the first place, and even regardless of your own intention this admits the possibility that someone insane might steal your gun and shoot innocent people.

So I don't think that valuing the freedom to control your own vehicle can be immediately dismissed as absurd. The apparent danger of driving is exaggerated by the astounding safety of modern life: at no point before 1900 did any human enjoy anything remotely approaching a modern standard of safety. In industrialized countries, the vehicle fatality rate is commensurate with or below the suicide rate. The number of people who enjoy the freedom of driving is massive, essentially the entire adult population of those countries, and so this common experience perhaps should not be ignored.

Some of -- but not all of -- the value in freedom is reflected in the potential for damage in non-freedom. If some external agent controls the mobility of the population, the potential for abuse is massive.