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Death of beloved neighborhood cat sparks outrage against robotaxis in San Francisco
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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Highlighting individual cases like this is a good way to capture human emotions but the focus should be on the big picture. The moment a self driving car is statistically safer than a human driver it becomes the objectively better alternative. The fact that accidents will still keep happening nevertheless isn't a reason to revert back to human drivers.
This same "trick" is used in charity advertisements: starving kid will capture the attention of people but a starving village will not despite the fact that it contains that same kid.
Good call out of the identifiable victim effect and the affect heuristic, where decisions are driven by emotional responses rather than objective analysis of risks or benefits.
I agree, it's not a trick however. It's a deliberate and strategic method of persuasion - a type of call-to-action; or manipulation.
The case of autonomous driving should technically result in safer and more efficient road environment. That is the result of a fully automated system - a user will not be able to misuse or excessively degrade the machine. The same comparison can be applied to manual vs auto transmission where the advantages are quite clear.
Such situation is attributed to the fact that most of it is exacerbated and facts are manipulated. Statistical evidence and comparison of pets killed per 100 vehicles is also missing - because emotions is all it takes for masses to listen.
You can hold someone accountable when a person runs over a child or a pet. Who is the responsible party when a waymo kills someone?
Even if we replaced every single vehicle in the US with self-driving ones that are 10x safer drivers than humans, that would still lead to 4000 people dying each year plus many more being injured. "Who is responsible" is more of an philosophical question at that point really. It doesn't quite make sense to punish the head of Waymo for cutting down traffic deaths ten-fold. The need to have someone to blame is something humanity needs to grow out of. Just like the need to drive.