A lot of arguments for legalizing autonomous vehicles in your city
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Trolley problem
17 min read
The article discusses AV safety decisions and tradeoffs between different harms - the trolley problem is the foundational ethical framework for understanding how autonomous vehicles should be programmed to handle unavoidable accident scenarios
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Pedestrian safety
12 min read
The article centers on whether AVs make streets safer for pedestrians and riders, citing crash statistics - this topic provides essential context on how pedestrian deaths are measured, prevented, and what interventions have historically worked
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Luddite
13 min read
The article describes city council members opposing AVs partly to protect ride-share driver jobs - the historical Luddite movement provides crucial context for understanding technology-driven labor displacement debates and why such opposition recurs throughout history
I was listening with horror to a Boston City Council meeting today where many council members made it clear that they’re interested in effectively banning autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the city.
A speaker said that Waymo (the AV company requesting clearance to run in Boston) was only interested in not paying human drivers (Waymo is a new company that has never had human drivers in the first place) and then referred to the ‘notion that somehow our cities are unsafe because people are driving cars’ as if this were a crazy idea. A council member strongly implied that new valuable technology always causes us to value people less. One speaker associated Waymo with the Trump administration. There were a lot of implications that AVs couldn’t possibly be as good as human drivers, despite lots of evidence to the contrary. Some speeches included lots of criticisms that applied equally well to what Uber did to taxis, but now deployed to defend Uber.
Most of the arguments I heard were pretty wildly off-base. Many of the speakers didn’t factor in the basic safety benefit of AVs to the riders or pedestrians at all, and many of the arguments fell apart when poked at. Here are all my arguments for why a city should legalize AVs, with some concerns at the end:
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