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In today’s podcast, I discuss “The Waymo Paradox.” The paradox is that even though fully autonomous vehicles - cars that drive themselves - are quite likely still decades away, they are already 80-90% safer than the typical human driver. We don’t need the technology to be perfect for it to be worth it to aggressively scale up autonomous vehicles. Within a decade or so, we could save tens of thousands of lives by increasing the use of these cars.
But, as with so much of our current tech, we should be wary of corporate oligarchs controlling this technology. I argue that we should look at public utilities as a potential better way of managing autonomous cars.
Articles cited in the podcast:
Kelsey Piper, “We Absolutely Do Know that Waymos Are Safer than Human Drivers.” On The Argument substack
Yarrow Bouchard, “Self-driving Cars Aren’t Nearly a Solved Problem.” On her Strange Cosmos substack
