Self-driving cars:
Autonomous cars do have accidents, but significantly less than humans.
Over 1 million people die in road traffic accidents each year in the world, 20 to 50 million people suffer non-fatal injuries.
According to
this report , Since 2019, there have been almost 4000 autonomous vehicle accidents. with 10% of those resulting in injury, and 2% have resulted in a fatality. Far better than humans, in fact not even in the same ballpark. It’s safe to say (hee hee) that humans are bad drivers.Yet, with self driving cars, we are unbelievably critical. One Tesla or Waymo accident occurs and we are up in arms, screaming and yelling. I recall someone actually
dying in a self-driving car accident and we went ballistic.
Humans cause millions of car accidents
Humans drive impaired and distracted, self-driving cars do not. Approving self driving cars is a political rabbit hole, with some states in the US not even allowing them. Self-driving cars can optimize their driving route for mileage, safety, construction, whatever. Humans go by instinct, habit, and what we see. Humans have only 5 senses, some of which are not even relevant to driving. Good smell does not help me get to the supermarket. Self-driving cars have many more sensors than humans. I imagine the overall driving record for self-driving is tremendously better than that of humans. Why the double standard?
AI:
AI might be biased, but so are humans
We talk about bias in data training and results. Yet, humans are incredibly biased, emotional, vindictive, jealous,and naive. We talk about incomplete training data, yet do humans ever make decisions without all pertinent knowledge? All the time. In fact, humans even choose to ignore some data in decisions-making. AI can’t do that. We talk about AI needing to be told what to do through prompting, and the wording of those prompts is vital. Don’t humans require the same direction? We talk about privacy in data, yet humans are guilty of violating trust frequently. We talk about AI not being inclusive and accessible, but yet we have many human-created systems which are not. We talk about AI getting wrong answers. Humans get it wrong a lot. We talk about AI systems hallucinating. Humans daydream and get distracted all the time.
In some ways, I’ll even suggest AI is really not that different than humans after all.
Why are we more critical of technology and less tolerant of technology than of ourselves?
