Jonathan Slotkin at Noema Magazine:
We demand machines that function flawlessly, while accepting human-caused deaths and injuries as the cost of our daily travel. That double standard allows people to die by slowing the adoption of things that would save them. Nearly every driver believes they are above average. Psychologists call this illusory superiority, a hardwired tendency that shows up across countries and decades. We measure the safety of new technology against an idealized version of ourselves, so the evidence must be better than the driver we imagine ourselves to be.
The autonomous vehicle industry’s biggest adoption problem is that strong safety data hasn’t led to more public trust. Making a safer machine feel safe is a different discipline. Healthcare spent 30 years learning to manage the gap between being safe and feeling safe. That objective performance and how people perceive it are different problems; improving one doesn’t necessarily improve the other.
more here.
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