Why We Demand Perfect Machines Yet Tolerate Human Carnage

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Why We Demand Perfect Machines Yet Tolerate Human Carnage

The illusion that we are all somehow above-average drivers is quietly slowing the adoption of autonomous vehicles that could save tens of thousands of lives each year.

Shalinder Matharu for Noema Magazine

Credits

Jonathan Slotkin is a neurosurgeon, scientist and the chief medical officer for strategy and growth at Geisinger. He researches and writes about safety and trust in autonomous systems in public life.

On a Saturday night, five days before Christmas, a fire at a San Francisco power substation cut electricity to roughly 130,000 homes and businesses. Traffic signals went dark across a third of the city. The Waymo driverless vehicles moved through those streets exactly as they were coded to, treating dead signals as four-way stops and sometimes requesting confirmation from a remote operations team before proceeding. But requests came faster than the human ops team could clear them.

Videos on social media showed Waymos stopped with their hazard lights blinking, several of them clustered at the same dark intersections. Human drivers honked and cut around the frozen Waymos. San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood called for a hearing. Some safety experts declared it a warning about the readiness of self-driving cars. The incident was featured on local news.

On the same day, if it was an average day in the U.S., about 115 Americans died in crashes with human drivers. That did not make the news.

Waymo later reported that its vehicles navigated more than 7,000 dark intersections during the outage. The cars that stopped did so because of a failsafe designed to stop and ask when in doubt. No cars crashed. No one was injured.

But this story was not the one that circulated. That’s because being safe and feeling safe are not the same.

The Inflated Mirror

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.

But in the areas where these autonomous vehicles operate, they really are safer. Across more than 220 million miles of driving, Waymo’s vehicles have been involved in 94% fewer crashes that cause serious injury or worse than human drivers on the same roads. Pedestrian injuries are down 93%, cyclist crashes 84% and intersection crashes, among the deadliest we manage in the trauma bay, 96%. These are the company’s own figures, but analyses in peer-reviewed journals have reached similar conclusions. If the results hold as deployment scales (and, with each release, the data have grown more robust), the population-level health effect could rival those of seat belts or the decline in smoking.

Of course, not all autonomous vehicles are the same. Many of the scariest headlines come from the millions of vehicles with driver-assistance features that still require a human at the wheel. The best safety results so far, however, are from Waymo’s driverless vehicles. Other companies have also gotten in on this market: Tesla now operates robotaxis in Austin and other parts of Texas, and Amazon’s Zoox serves parts of Las Vegas and San Francisco. But fairly and effectively comparing them requires looking at total miles driven, crashes, the ride’s geography and the ability to compare the data with that of human drivers in the same areas. The data here is from Waymo because, so far, they are the only ones that provide such detail.

Technical malfunctions still happen. This June, Waymo recalled the software on all its vehicles and suspended highway driving after several cars entered parts of highways that were closed for construction. In April, an empty Waymo drove into high water in San Antonio after heavy rains, leading to another fleet-wide software update. Sixteen months prior, one sank into a patch of wet concrete that it had registered as a drivable road.

Driverless Waymos have been involved in crashes that resulted in two deaths and one injury that police reported as serious, and in all three cases, the driverless car was not at fault. In one case, a person going around 98 mph in downtown San...