Autodrive: The Most Moral Technology Of Our Generation

We’ve let too many innocent people die.

Last night, a drunk driver plowed into the crowds at SXSW. Two people were killed instantly. Many more were seriously injured and will have their lives forever changed. It was an act of barbarism.

In 2012, 34,080 people in the U.S. were killed in motor vehicle accidents. That’s 93 people per day.

The numbers are more staggering worldwide:

Losing 1.24 million people per year is the equivalent of losing 10 jumbo jets filled with passengers every single day of the year. Yet somehow we accept automobile deaths as an unavoidable inevitably.

Here’s the key thing: over 90% of automobile accidents are caused by human error. So the overwhelming majority of these deaths aren’t caused by situations out of our control, but instead by our own fault. We get distracted by our phones. We drive tired. We drive drunk. And innocent people die because of it.

Self-driving cars, also called autonomous vehicles, are the answer. Autodrive technology sees better than any human being can. It reacts an order of magnitude quicker. Autodrive doesn’t get distracted or tired or drunk.

Autodrive will save innocent life.

The Internet has been greatly beneficial to humanity. So have incredible advances in biotechnology and medicine. There’s much work to do in the developing world on preventable diseases. But when considering technologies in the developed world that have the most potential to save innocent human life, autodrive is at the top of the list.

In the very near future, we’ll have the ability to create a society where motor vehicle crashes are as rare as smallpox. If we do this right, our ancestors will look back on the 20th and early 21st centuries as a strange moment in history when we accepted the violent deaths of innocent people to be commonplace in our communities.

There are more benefits to autodrive that haven’t been mentioned so far: a reduction in carbon emissions, less traffic, less land paved over for roads and parking, an overall increase in everyone’s quality of life. And there will be serious pains: those who make a living from driving will see their jobs disappear.

We have a moral imperative as a society to make autodrive standard. Moving several tons of steel at high speeds needs to become a very rare thing any one person does. There will be opposition along the way from powerful, established business interests. The disruption it causes to the way of life for professional drivers will need to be addressed responsibly and empathetically. But autodrive’s potential to save innocent human life must be realized. Our generation has the obligation to act.