Because very many people like to drive cars to drive cars and like to drive them despite the deaths they cause.TrueMetis wrote:How will it cut into people's autonomy?
The automobile is an invent that is a wonderful example how people instill symbolism and meaning into human creations. When it comes to cars it's the freedom to do what you want and go where you want up to a defined safety boundary that self-driving cars will change.
The fear I have is that the same old fire control arguments will be re-purposed for them, that a standard self-driving car will be declared the saftey standard, that people will begin to demonize more excessive vehicles and begin to work down the line over all piloted vehicles.
To sum it up "You don't NEED an SUV! You don't NEED a sports car! Look at all the deaths they cause!" Failing to realize that we're not saftey fixated societies, we balance safety with personal freedom and the price we pay for it. One ca see that in the way addictive substances are handled today. We effectively accept that whatever harm they may cause is worth the price of allowing people access to them when alcohol and vehicles are some the biggest killers (often when mixed).
One can also see that over the gun debate in the US when by and large, Americans are happy with fire arms despite the death toll they produce.
ATM the safety obsessed cannot attack vehicles because there is no replacement for the human pilot, once they become common I foresee them being quickly treated the way firearms are today.
That is applying meaning to life in a transcendent way that is practically religious.Okay, here's a devil's-advocate counterpoint to the classic Sci-Fi "AI goes crazy and kills us all!!!" trope: what if AI should replace us?
For me it would be a bunch of lights on but no one would be home. Machines are living beings and never will, anything they do with will be a machine going about its motions imitating life without there anything. If you want to get a gist of what I mean, play Thief 2 and thing about how the machines in it act.
None of those are going to kill us. Change climate will screw over civilization as know it but it will not kill us off.but between climate change and the ever-present threat of someone setting off World War III over North Korea or something similar, perhaps it's just the case that we are living in the twilight of our species.
Same goes with weapons of mass destruction with damage they can cause, like the fraud committed over Nuclear Winter by Sagan, being overblown by people wanting them to be more dangerous than they are.
About the only effective means of killing off Mankind would be to release series of global pandemics to not only cut the population down, but do so quickly enough that the survivors wouldn't have time to gather together and begin reproducing again. One pandemic wouldn't do it, you'd need at least three.
Problem is, if you're going to shred modern civilization like that and you're able to stay safe as you keep making new ones, how are you going to deliver and diffuse an agent over a thinned population where modern travel most likely cease when the first one reached critical levels?
About the only way you're going to kill us off is if you emulate the patterns of extinction events over history where multiple disasters happen with many doing so in a sustained manner, sustained over centuries or thousands of years in the same way the eruption of traps over extended periods of time pressured Permian life while other things did what they could to finish them of.
