Death merely a speed bump for self-driving cars
There are always some casualties when a new form of transportation comes along.
In 1830, at the official opening of the world’s first railway, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, a well-known British politician, William Huskisson, was struck and killed by a locomotive. He was known to be clumsy and accident-prone, but it still cast a pall over the proceedings.
About 80 years later, an ancestor of mine was the first person in Newfoundland to be run over and killed by one of those new-fangled motor-cars. And now this: last Monday Elaine Herzberg of Tempe, Arizona became the first person to be struck and killed by an autonomous vehicle.
There was a person sitting, hands off, behind the wheel of the ‘self-driving’ car that hit her, because these vehicles are still in the experimental stage.
Uber, the company that was running these particular tests, issued the usual ‘‘our thoughts are with the victim’s family’’ statement and suspended its onthe-road tests in cities throughout the United States. But the halt is only temporary: this technology is unstoppable.
It’s also relatively safe, at least compared to vehicles driven by human beings. Around 100 Americans a day die in traffic accidents, but in developing countries it’s far worse.
About 400 Indians are killed in traffic accidents each day, although there are actually fewer motor vehicles in India (263 million in the US, 210 million in India).
What the robocars, trucks and buses are going to kill in very large numbers is not human beings but jobs.