According to the World Health Organization a person dies of car accident on average every 25 seconds.
Don't worry, I'm not here to raise awareness on safe driving or seat belts. I'm here to communicate my frustration.
"Safer" cars are a joke. There's no structural design that can fix the fact that our primordial brains are just plainly unfit for driving. That's clear as day from the statistic above. And I say this as a passionate motorcycle driver.
You can argue that 20 years ago there was little to do about it and you can't stop progress. Ok. But today we have the technology to build self-driving cars. There's no excuse for having humans still behind the wheel.
The problem is that car accidents are seen as unavoidable fatalities. Childs whose families are struck with tragic diseases grow up dreaming to become doctors or researchers. That doesn't happen with car accidents and engineering. There are no campaigns raising funds for building self-driving cars. Governments spend billions to protect from "threats", but it took private for-profit companies to make the first prototypes of cars that won't kill you.
I'm aware that reality is never like it's supposed to be, that everything is more complex than it seems, that computer vision is definitely a Hard problem. And that self-driving cars will kill (less!) people, too, and there will be outrage. I'm just torn that we could build a solution and we are essentially not doing it.
Sorry for the grim tone, I hope you have a great day nevertheless
Filippo
[email protected]
London