Blog Post

AEIdeas

My AEI colleague Michael Strain worries that our insta-reaction, Clickhole culture might slow our acceptance of autonomous vehicles:

What happens when one of these cars is involved in a fatal accident? Imagine this terrible scene: The car ahead of you, its back seat packed with children, screeches to a halt, and your car’s software directs your car to take a sharp right to avoid it, hitting and killing a pedestrian. Who is morally responsible? And who decides whether the car is programmed to change course, take the sharp right, and reduce the fatalities? The programmer working for the car company? The Department of Transportation? Congress? Whether to turn right is a question undergraduate philosophy majors grapple with every semester. The technology of driverless cars would centralize the decision. But the decision would still have to be made. Say this tragedy repeats itself only a few times per month. The number of traffic fatalities plummets relative to today. But since this is a new technology, the media reports on each death. A slow, steady drip of bad news ensues. Click-friendly headlines abound: “Driverless cars kill again.” How long until an ambitious state attorney general runs for governor on a platform of outlawing driverless cars? At what point does the federal bureaucracy step in with burdensome regulation? When the lawsuits pile up, how do the courts respond? Still, though, the economic benefits of driverless cars would be enormous. The improvement in people’s daily lives would be significant. While it’s easy to imagine government slowing technology’s march, it’s hard to imagine government shutting it down.

Three thoughts here. First, there is huge potential upside. With high penetration rates, research suggests, driverless technology could save 22,000 lives a year and $450 billion annually.

Second, one could also see a “bootleggers and Baptists” scenario develop with public-minded interest groups (maybe robo-apocalypse worriers or “for the children” types) allying with cronyists or rent seekers (this massively disruptive a technology is going to make some incumbent somewhere unhappy) to bring down the heavy hand of government regulation.

Third, there is a big difference between driverless cars where can you take naps or immerse yourself in a book and near-driverless cars where the driver must remain alert and ready to act. But humans aren’t very good at such passive observation. This from a New Yorker piece on challenges posed to airlines by automation and growing pilot inattention: