Safety is improving—despite there being more vehicles on the roads. …and yes, there are developments taking place with smart cars. e.g. Volvo Pedestrian Detection. Of course one issue is how to sell additional safety to consumer. It is often most visible in the price tag.
I suggest legislation. It’s hard to get someone to pay additional money to protect others, especially from themselves. It’s much easier to get them to feel the fuzzy moral righteousness of supporting a law that forces them to do so by making those measures compulsory.
This seems to suffer the same problems as robotics in surgery. People not only can’t readily understand the expected utility benefit of having a robot assist a doctor with difficult incisions, they go further and demand that we don’t act or talk about medical risk as if it is quantifiable. Most people tend to think that if you reduce their medical care down to a numeric risk, even if that number is very accurate and it is really quite beneficial to have it, then you somehow are cold and don’t care about them. I think an insurance company would have a hard time not alienating its customers (who are mostly non-rationalists) by showing interest in any procedure that attempts to take control of human lives out of the hands of humans—even if doing so was statistically undeniably safer. People don’t care much about what actually is safer, rather what is “safer” in some flowery model that includes religion and apple pie and the American dream, etc. etc. I think getting societies at large to adopt technologies like these either has to just be enforced through unpopular legislation or a massive grassroots campaign that gets younger generations to accept methods of rationality.
Safety is improving—despite there being more vehicles on the roads. …and yes, there are developments taking place with smart cars. e.g. Volvo Pedestrian Detection. Of course one issue is how to sell additional safety to consumer. It is often most visible in the price tag.
I suggest legislation. It’s hard to get someone to pay additional money to protect others, especially from themselves. It’s much easier to get them to feel the fuzzy moral righteousness of supporting a law that forces them to do so by making those measures compulsory.
That might take a while, though. What might help a little in the mean time is recognition and support from insurance companies.
This seems to suffer the same problems as robotics in surgery. People not only can’t readily understand the expected utility benefit of having a robot assist a doctor with difficult incisions, they go further and demand that we don’t act or talk about medical risk as if it is quantifiable. Most people tend to think that if you reduce their medical care down to a numeric risk, even if that number is very accurate and it is really quite beneficial to have it, then you somehow are cold and don’t care about them. I think an insurance company would have a hard time not alienating its customers (who are mostly non-rationalists) by showing interest in any procedure that attempts to take control of human lives out of the hands of humans—even if doing so was statistically undeniably safer. People don’t care much about what actually is safer, rather what is “safer” in some flowery model that includes religion and apple pie and the American dream, etc. etc. I think getting societies at large to adopt technologies like these either has to just be enforced through unpopular legislation or a massive grassroots campaign that gets younger generations to accept methods of rationality.
Yeah, definitely! They’d certainly like that, if they could be convinced it’d be cost-effective for them. Then lobbying occurs.
...except if safe cars become so abundant one day that no one will want to pay insurance for such an unlikely incident as dying inside a car.
Right—so support from insurance companies would be an interim measure—before we got to that point.