Society Shouldn’t Drive

Timothy B. Lee argues accident rates can be dramatically lowered through the introduction of autonomous automobiles.

Timothy B. Lee has a wonderfully in-depth and postive article about self-driving cars called “The Future of Driving, Part II: Life after driving” on ars technica. Here’s an excerpt on how driverless cars will cause fewer accidents.

In short, a car that drives as well as the best human drivers would save tens of thousands of lives in the United States and hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide. And most likely, we’ll be able to do even better than that. Computers have much faster reaction times than humans do, and they will be “looking” in all directions simultaneously. Self-driving cars may be able to avoid many of the mistakes that even experienced human drivers make. They won’t have blind spots, they’ll have better sensors, and they will be able to react almost instantaneously to unexpected problems, giving them the ability to recover from dangerous situations that no human driver could have handled.

It’s really worth reading all the way through as he goes into great detail about how autonomous automobiles will affect human safety, reduce the cost of transportation, spur taxi service in the future, give back tens of billions of hours of our time to us, and transform the retail business.