With all due respect, the multi-ethnic empire of Austria-Hungary was constructed with little economic or political clout by most of its ethnic groups. Its economy and state capacity was weak against major European competitors at the time of Napoleon and its position against them had disastrously declined a century later, as was glaringly revealed by World War I.
I love Austria Hungary, but celebrations of pluralist semi-democratic European states can’t keep sleeping on Casimir the Great! There’s an uncomfortable historical truth (for those of us who favor Whig history) that democratic progress seems to have reversed in the early days of modernity. A lot of the fist European states were far less democratic or liberal than the more medieval institutions they displaced
I find it disturbing that you appear to advocate for whatever will sell, not for actual belief in a position. Perhaps you have a far better grasp of political reality than I. But it strikes me as a perfect way to further affirm the public’s distrust and contempt for the party. Here we go for Biden II, running as a moderate and governing as a minion of Progressive factions. I suspect that history proves that low-information voters are easily swayed by nonsense regardless of the party pitching it. On the other hand, a recent poll shows that the Democratic Party has a lower approval rating than ICE.
The problem with racial justice for things like YIMBYism is that it is pretty ill-defined. I mean for things that are pretty closely connected with intuitions about justice for individuals the racial justice framing feels intuitive -- black men shouldn't get ticketed for speeding more frequently than similar white men etc.
But when you get to more abstract and indirect policy goals it is less clear what racial justice means. You could understand it to mean something like: improving the welfare of racial groups who are less wealthy (happy?) than whites. But that certainly doesn't sound like justice in any way since it doesn't necessarily relate to any unfair treatment. I mean if Asians were historically treated just as badly as some other minority it is weird to call it justice to pick whichever is worse off and help them -- don't get me wrong that seems like good policy but something more like reducing racial disparity.
Ultimately the issue isn't this high theory stuff but exactly that the nature of the problem makes the issues more distant from things that are easily justice analogous.
I think in the email version, the lead photo is incorrectly captioned; it’s not MBJ shown playing two roles; it’s MBJ playing one brother and Wunmi Mosaku playing another role. Giving credit where it belongs.
As an affluent person, I’m perfectly happy to continue the current process where I free-ride on the diligence of poorer people that happens when pricing is not individualized. I don’t think it’s helping anyone to increase the amount of diligence needed when prices become individualized, and poor people already get a decent amount of free-riding from my ability to be more productive. It strikes me as poor public policy to increase transaction costs throughout the economy simply because it’s redistributive. Like everything else, redistribution should be done with as economically efficiently as possible.
I don't get the love given the Sinners screenplay. The first half was a series of characters and scenes that we have seen 1000 times before. The second half was a very by-the-numbers vampire flick.
And, (spoiler alert)
1. We are asked to care about the fate of several tertiary character (the Asian American woman, the object of the young hero's desire), but the script never develops them to the degree necessary for us to care
2. The climatic scene makes little sense -- the plan was for seven humans to take on 30 vampires? The screenplay couldn't come up with some sort of clever strategy whereby they could narrow the odds? Does the Hoodoo woman not have a trick up her sleeve? If not, what is the point of mentioning her expertise?
3. I am not a vampire, so perhaps I am wrong, but I am guessing that vampires keep very close track of when sunrise is scheduled for. Their failure to do so is = deus ex machina
4.Lastly, the script makes brief reference to the vampire community being an attractive place of belonging, etc, such that some characters might be interested in voluntarily joining, but it never follows up on it at all. (Not that it necessarily made sense in the context of a bunch of people very much celebrating their own community and culture at the juke joint. But still)
"I am guessing that vampires keep very close track of when sunrise is scheduled for"
The vampires had recently been in Indiana and lost track of Eastern vs. Central Time, plus local option Daylight Saving Time was in effect for the county!
The issue as ever is that what's electorally popular isn't always particularly good or needle-moving policy. And what is needle-moving policy doesn't really get rewarded electorally. Like Trump got himself elected by promising everyone a pony. Needless to say, he didn't deliver, and now his popularity is in the toilet. But policies that have had an enduring legacy-- Medicare/Medicaid, the ACA, etc.-- either didn't poll particularly well, or didn't help the president in office get re-elected after passing them. They became popular later, but that doesn't win elections in the moment.
>somewhat odd meme has taken hold of large swaths of the public that ethnically homogenous nation-states are a “natural” form of human political organization
It's not the natural form of large scale human organization though, whatever the charter says; empire is. Bigger states conquer smaller states and become considerably more ethnically diverse and in its best forms we get Rome (later the Byzantines) and the British empire.
The United States and to a certain extent the post-colonial imperial powers do it better. The post-war Soviet ethnic cleansing was a tragedy.
Well, I would take issue with Matt's framing of the belief as them being natural, versus being the only legitimate form. Regardless, it is hardly a mystery where the meme came from.
I think urbanism maybe have fallen into the trap of older environmentalists- they got married to a solution rather than an outcome, and their solution may have been better but technology has now made something else deliver that outcome.
For environmentalists, regulations strangled building after the baby boom and we focused on clean air and water. But increasingly some of their assumptions like overpopulation were proven wrong, and climate change is a different beast than clean air, and the best thing to do now is build and remove regulations and promote more building of housing and energy.
For urbanism, it is true that cars are unsafe and take up a lot of space with parking and traffic. Their argument that walking is the most anthropic and pleasnt way of getting around feels true, and prioritizing those shorter, walkable connections make sense, and for a long time cars got in the way of that. But autonomous cehicales are very safe and alleviate parking, if not traffic. In the largest cities, rails and busses will make sense. But in smaller cities and outlying suburbs (and even inner suburbs), autonomous vehicles will still give us pleasant, walkable spaces.
Im very much a believer in transit - but I also understand that cars do things transit cannot, and as a tool they have a lot of utility, and autonomous vehicles have even more. I think the traffic conundrum will still mean a robust subway is worth investing in, and I think cities like LA, DFW, and even SF should have better, faster busses (as well as, say, Queens and the outer neighborhoods of Chicago - bus lanes are a good thing). But the Chicagoland burbs and places like the East Bay will be greatly improved with autonomous vehicles
Here’s the big problem with cars: they are much larger than humans[citation needed] and they take up way more space than a pedestrian or a cyclist. Twenty drivers in twenty cars take up a huge amount of road space relative to twenty passengers on a bus.
To accommodate the space that cars require, you must space buildings farther apart, and that in turn ruins walkability. There’s just no way around it. Not with autonomous vehicles, not with electric vehicles.
An autonomous car either sits in a parking space while you’re at your destination, or it circles around waiting for you, generating traffic. In either case, it’s using up space.
Yea agreed. So ill fully admit to being one of those kids who loved trains and cars and so I became a mechanical engineer and I went to Michigan because of Detroit, because of cars.
My kinda frame on it is the fundamental mode of conveyance should be walking, or low powered wheeled mobility for folks who cannot walk. Transportation beyond that should basically support walking, stitching together walkable places. Sometimes busses, sometimes trains, sometimes bikes. And there will be a place for cars too, especially autonomous ones.
In really large and dense cities, youre absolutely right - any street that is more than 4 lanes, heck more than two, and is filled with cars is a detrimental to walking. Even if it us safe, it just makes walking less feasible and the streets less inviting. But in smaller cities or outer suburbs, cars can have a role in linking people from one walkable neighborhood to another. And an autonomous car that can come on demand to provide point to point transportation, and then go somewhere else to park (like a valet) - it doesnt eliminate parking but it does alleviate it. Theres no longer a need for parking lots at every destination.
Some places are so popular that the traffic will be bad, as it is today, or the parking for those cars too crowded, and those places should invest in busses and maybe even trains - they should do so today. But the reality is there has been blowback against bike lanes and bus lanes and train tracks even in a world where cars are dangerous and require on site parking. When we eliminate those requirements, im doubt there will be more support to make a place bikeable, bussable, or trainable.
But I am hopeful there will be more support for it to be walkable.
Very striking that you find French prices for acetaminophen/paracetamol low, when I find them very high compared to the UK.
UK price for 16 tablets of 500mg paracetamol from my usual supermarket: 35p. That's just over 2p a tablet. After a bit of a hunt, I have a US price of about $20 per 100, which is about 20c per tablet (it's hard to get a good price because most US pharmacy websites won't give pricing info to non-Americans). The French price you quoted was about €3 per 30, which is about 10c per tablet (Euro-cents are abbreviated as c the same as dollar-cents are).
Standard painkillers are subject to very limited regulations in the UK, which means it's effectively a commodity market. I'm always surprised that the US system doesn't achieve either the benefits of a free market or the benefits of a tightly regulated and subsidised system.
I don't have a membership myself, so I can't check directly, but Google AI claims that Sam's Club house brand acetaminophen sells for $11.98 for 1200 caplets(!), or just under a penny each (and basically a penny when you factor in sales tax).
When that's been observed in various Twitter discussions, the guess has been that the survey lumped responses about computer dating services (which already existed in the 1970s) into the "Online" category.
As someone who is highly pro-pedestrian safety and moderately pro-autonomous vehicles, I think this analysis is somewhat reductive and is making the same mistake as many pro-AI takes, of assuming that safety, moderation, etc are actually inherent to the technologies involved.
Self-driving cars are safer than human-driven vehicles, yes, but the data available comes from a very early period in which companies are on shaky ground with respect to public opinion and are still moving through regulatory processes, and are trying hard to win those battles. Of course in this environment they are heavily biased towards caution and safer driving decisions. But this can easily change, and already in San Francisco where Waymos are normalized now, we're seeing them inch up on pedestrians in the crosswalk, accelerate and brake more rashly, and other unnecessary human-like behaviors that they did not exhibit in earlier periods.
I don't think it's hard to imagine pedestrian safety being low, or lowest, on the list of priorities for companies competing for road space in a primarily autonomous world. If compensation for a road death is just the cost of an otherwise profitable business, why wouldn't they go for it? This is essentially the exact same attitude we have towards road deaths right now. Replacing all drivers with autonomous drivers doesn't automatically mean those cars will make safer decisions. Someone somewhere needs to encode pedestrian safety into future algorithms, and we don't have good track record on encoding pedestrian safety into our current laws.
This is theoretically possible but doesn't really accord with reality.
You're assuming little technological progress at a time of unprecedented progress and making vague assumptions about the behavior of these companies.
> I don't think it's hard to imagine pedestrian safety being low, or lowest, on the list of priorities for companies competing for road space in a primarily autonomous world. If compensation for a road death is just the cost of an otherwise profitable business, why wouldn't they go for it?
This just makes no sense. By the time they wouldn't have a PR problem with lots of deaths they can easily fix this.
> You're assuming little technological progress at a time of unprecedented progress and making vague assumptions about the behavior of these companies.
I'm not assuming anything and my point isn't really about technological capability. The assumption being made by the opposing side is that autonomous vehicles will just always operate with pedestrian safety in mind, and always do so at a better rate than human drivers, extrapolating from current data. That is what I'm questioning. Of course the data is good but I think it's reasonable to not want complacency on this.
> This just makes no sense. By the time they wouldn't have a PR problem with lots of deaths they can easily fix this.
Why doesn't it make sense that we could accept a world in which people are dying left and right on our streets, in the name of "vehicular throughput" or whatever? It's the world we have right now. And it's not like companies being involved means we suddenly discover that shame is an option - we already have drivers to "blame" in any individual crash, yet the problem persists.
This is a problem of culture and political will, not a technical one - our pedestrian fatality rate is significantly worse than that of peer nations, and cities within the US like Hoboken have made huge progress not with AVs but with some pretty basic traffic calming measures.
I am always skeptical of any argument that a new technology will just solve a political problem carte blanche without us having to make any changes to our legal framework or incentive structure.
Today, danger comes from millions of separate human drivers, with liability dispersed across individuals, insurers, and edge cases, which makes the system hard to discipline. With AVs, behavior is concentrated in a small number of companies and systems that can be tested, measured, regulated, and held directly liable. So yes, safety is still a political choice, but here the structural incentives point much more clearly in one direction, and treating that as arbitrary misses the basic difference between the two systems.
Hard disagree on price discrimination.
With all due respect, the multi-ethnic empire of Austria-Hungary was constructed with little economic or political clout by most of its ethnic groups. Its economy and state capacity was weak against major European competitors at the time of Napoleon and its position against them had disastrously declined a century later, as was glaringly revealed by World War I.
I love Austria Hungary, but celebrations of pluralist semi-democratic European states can’t keep sleeping on Casimir the Great! There’s an uncomfortable historical truth (for those of us who favor Whig history) that democratic progress seems to have reversed in the early days of modernity. A lot of the fist European states were far less democratic or liberal than the more medieval institutions they displaced
I find it disturbing that you appear to advocate for whatever will sell, not for actual belief in a position. Perhaps you have a far better grasp of political reality than I. But it strikes me as a perfect way to further affirm the public’s distrust and contempt for the party. Here we go for Biden II, running as a moderate and governing as a minion of Progressive factions. I suspect that history proves that low-information voters are easily swayed by nonsense regardless of the party pitching it. On the other hand, a recent poll shows that the Democratic Party has a lower approval rating than ICE.
The problem with racial justice for things like YIMBYism is that it is pretty ill-defined. I mean for things that are pretty closely connected with intuitions about justice for individuals the racial justice framing feels intuitive -- black men shouldn't get ticketed for speeding more frequently than similar white men etc.
But when you get to more abstract and indirect policy goals it is less clear what racial justice means. You could understand it to mean something like: improving the welfare of racial groups who are less wealthy (happy?) than whites. But that certainly doesn't sound like justice in any way since it doesn't necessarily relate to any unfair treatment. I mean if Asians were historically treated just as badly as some other minority it is weird to call it justice to pick whichever is worse off and help them -- don't get me wrong that seems like good policy but something more like reducing racial disparity.
Ultimately the issue isn't this high theory stuff but exactly that the nature of the problem makes the issues more distant from things that are easily justice analogous.
I think in the email version, the lead photo is incorrectly captioned; it’s not MBJ shown playing two roles; it’s MBJ playing one brother and Wunmi Mosaku playing another role. Giving credit where it belongs.
As an affluent person, I’m perfectly happy to continue the current process where I free-ride on the diligence of poorer people that happens when pricing is not individualized. I don’t think it’s helping anyone to increase the amount of diligence needed when prices become individualized, and poor people already get a decent amount of free-riding from my ability to be more productive. It strikes me as poor public policy to increase transaction costs throughout the economy simply because it’s redistributive. Like everything else, redistribution should be done with as economically efficiently as possible.
I was entirely unaware that One Battle After Another is based on Vineland! I actually want to watch it now.
Why do I have a feeling that personalized pricing won't lead to progressive redistribution
I don't get the love given the Sinners screenplay. The first half was a series of characters and scenes that we have seen 1000 times before. The second half was a very by-the-numbers vampire flick.
And, (spoiler alert)
1. We are asked to care about the fate of several tertiary character (the Asian American woman, the object of the young hero's desire), but the script never develops them to the degree necessary for us to care
2. The climatic scene makes little sense -- the plan was for seven humans to take on 30 vampires? The screenplay couldn't come up with some sort of clever strategy whereby they could narrow the odds? Does the Hoodoo woman not have a trick up her sleeve? If not, what is the point of mentioning her expertise?
3. I am not a vampire, so perhaps I am wrong, but I am guessing that vampires keep very close track of when sunrise is scheduled for. Their failure to do so is = deus ex machina
4.Lastly, the script makes brief reference to the vampire community being an attractive place of belonging, etc, such that some characters might be interested in voluntarily joining, but it never follows up on it at all. (Not that it necessarily made sense in the context of a bunch of people very much celebrating their own community and culture at the juke joint. But still)
"I am guessing that vampires keep very close track of when sunrise is scheduled for"
The vampires had recently been in Indiana and lost track of Eastern vs. Central Time, plus local option Daylight Saving Time was in effect for the county!
That sounds like a scene out of What We Do in the Shadows
The issue as ever is that what's electorally popular isn't always particularly good or needle-moving policy. And what is needle-moving policy doesn't really get rewarded electorally. Like Trump got himself elected by promising everyone a pony. Needless to say, he didn't deliver, and now his popularity is in the toilet. But policies that have had an enduring legacy-- Medicare/Medicaid, the ACA, etc.-- either didn't poll particularly well, or didn't help the president in office get re-elected after passing them. They became popular later, but that doesn't win elections in the moment.
>somewhat odd meme has taken hold of large swaths of the public that ethnically homogenous nation-states are a “natural” form of human political organization
This is a strange take. It has taken hold because it has been a foundational principle of the relevant international law for decades, not to mention the cause of the outbreak of WWI. It is the reason that the UN Charter refers to the UN being the creation of "peoples" and why the right to self-determination is the right of "peoples." https://www.ag.gov.au/rights-and-protections/human-rights-and-anti-discrimination/human-rights-scrutiny/public-sector-guidance-sheets/right-self-determination It is the entire concept behind nationalism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalism
Yes, some "peoples" are defined non-ethnically, but most aren't. https://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780190686345/cs/9/
It's not the natural form of large scale human organization though, whatever the charter says; empire is. Bigger states conquer smaller states and become considerably more ethnically diverse and in its best forms we get Rome (later the Byzantines) and the British empire.
The United States and to a certain extent the post-colonial imperial powers do it better. The post-war Soviet ethnic cleansing was a tragedy.
Well, I would take issue with Matt's framing of the belief as them being natural, versus being the only legitimate form. Regardless, it is hardly a mystery where the meme came from.
I think urbanism maybe have fallen into the trap of older environmentalists- they got married to a solution rather than an outcome, and their solution may have been better but technology has now made something else deliver that outcome.
For environmentalists, regulations strangled building after the baby boom and we focused on clean air and water. But increasingly some of their assumptions like overpopulation were proven wrong, and climate change is a different beast than clean air, and the best thing to do now is build and remove regulations and promote more building of housing and energy.
For urbanism, it is true that cars are unsafe and take up a lot of space with parking and traffic. Their argument that walking is the most anthropic and pleasnt way of getting around feels true, and prioritizing those shorter, walkable connections make sense, and for a long time cars got in the way of that. But autonomous cehicales are very safe and alleviate parking, if not traffic. In the largest cities, rails and busses will make sense. But in smaller cities and outlying suburbs (and even inner suburbs), autonomous vehicles will still give us pleasant, walkable spaces.
Im very much a believer in transit - but I also understand that cars do things transit cannot, and as a tool they have a lot of utility, and autonomous vehicles have even more. I think the traffic conundrum will still mean a robust subway is worth investing in, and I think cities like LA, DFW, and even SF should have better, faster busses (as well as, say, Queens and the outer neighborhoods of Chicago - bus lanes are a good thing). But the Chicagoland burbs and places like the East Bay will be greatly improved with autonomous vehicles
Here’s the big problem with cars: they are much larger than humans[citation needed] and they take up way more space than a pedestrian or a cyclist. Twenty drivers in twenty cars take up a huge amount of road space relative to twenty passengers on a bus.
To accommodate the space that cars require, you must space buildings farther apart, and that in turn ruins walkability. There’s just no way around it. Not with autonomous vehicles, not with electric vehicles.
An autonomous car either sits in a parking space while you’re at your destination, or it circles around waiting for you, generating traffic. In either case, it’s using up space.
Yea agreed. So ill fully admit to being one of those kids who loved trains and cars and so I became a mechanical engineer and I went to Michigan because of Detroit, because of cars.
My kinda frame on it is the fundamental mode of conveyance should be walking, or low powered wheeled mobility for folks who cannot walk. Transportation beyond that should basically support walking, stitching together walkable places. Sometimes busses, sometimes trains, sometimes bikes. And there will be a place for cars too, especially autonomous ones.
In really large and dense cities, youre absolutely right - any street that is more than 4 lanes, heck more than two, and is filled with cars is a detrimental to walking. Even if it us safe, it just makes walking less feasible and the streets less inviting. But in smaller cities or outer suburbs, cars can have a role in linking people from one walkable neighborhood to another. And an autonomous car that can come on demand to provide point to point transportation, and then go somewhere else to park (like a valet) - it doesnt eliminate parking but it does alleviate it. Theres no longer a need for parking lots at every destination.
Some places are so popular that the traffic will be bad, as it is today, or the parking for those cars too crowded, and those places should invest in busses and maybe even trains - they should do so today. But the reality is there has been blowback against bike lanes and bus lanes and train tracks even in a world where cars are dangerous and require on site parking. When we eliminate those requirements, im doubt there will be more support to make a place bikeable, bussable, or trainable.
But I am hopeful there will be more support for it to be walkable.
Very striking that you find French prices for acetaminophen/paracetamol low, when I find them very high compared to the UK.
UK price for 16 tablets of 500mg paracetamol from my usual supermarket: 35p. That's just over 2p a tablet. After a bit of a hunt, I have a US price of about $20 per 100, which is about 20c per tablet (it's hard to get a good price because most US pharmacy websites won't give pricing info to non-Americans). The French price you quoted was about €3 per 30, which is about 10c per tablet (Euro-cents are abbreviated as c the same as dollar-cents are).
Standard painkillers are subject to very limited regulations in the UK, which means it's effectively a commodity market. I'm always surprised that the US system doesn't achieve either the benefits of a free market or the benefits of a tightly regulated and subsidised system.
No bureaucracy before the sale, in the UK you can only buy two packets of medicine at a time and have to prove your age.
At my nearest pharmacy, 100 tablets of 500 mg acetominophen is $10 - 10c per tablet. If I go to Wal-mart, it would be $4 for 200 - 2c each.
I don't have a membership myself, so I can't check directly, but Google AI claims that Sam's Club house brand acetaminophen sells for $11.98 for 1200 caplets(!), or just under a penny each (and basically a penny when you factor in sales tax).
That seems right - BJs is $10 for 1000 caplets.
Was that sloppy curve-fit graphing, or did two percent of couples in 1970(!) meet online?
I picture these super nerds entering their profiles on a teletype terminal.
When that's been observed in various Twitter discussions, the guess has been that the survey lumped responses about computer dating services (which already existed in the 1970s) into the "Online" category.
As someone who is highly pro-pedestrian safety and moderately pro-autonomous vehicles, I think this analysis is somewhat reductive and is making the same mistake as many pro-AI takes, of assuming that safety, moderation, etc are actually inherent to the technologies involved.
Self-driving cars are safer than human-driven vehicles, yes, but the data available comes from a very early period in which companies are on shaky ground with respect to public opinion and are still moving through regulatory processes, and are trying hard to win those battles. Of course in this environment they are heavily biased towards caution and safer driving decisions. But this can easily change, and already in San Francisco where Waymos are normalized now, we're seeing them inch up on pedestrians in the crosswalk, accelerate and brake more rashly, and other unnecessary human-like behaviors that they did not exhibit in earlier periods.
I don't think it's hard to imagine pedestrian safety being low, or lowest, on the list of priorities for companies competing for road space in a primarily autonomous world. If compensation for a road death is just the cost of an otherwise profitable business, why wouldn't they go for it? This is essentially the exact same attitude we have towards road deaths right now. Replacing all drivers with autonomous drivers doesn't automatically mean those cars will make safer decisions. Someone somewhere needs to encode pedestrian safety into future algorithms, and we don't have good track record on encoding pedestrian safety into our current laws.
This is theoretically possible but doesn't really accord with reality.
You're assuming little technological progress at a time of unprecedented progress and making vague assumptions about the behavior of these companies.
> I don't think it's hard to imagine pedestrian safety being low, or lowest, on the list of priorities for companies competing for road space in a primarily autonomous world. If compensation for a road death is just the cost of an otherwise profitable business, why wouldn't they go for it?
This just makes no sense. By the time they wouldn't have a PR problem with lots of deaths they can easily fix this.
> You're assuming little technological progress at a time of unprecedented progress and making vague assumptions about the behavior of these companies.
I'm not assuming anything and my point isn't really about technological capability. The assumption being made by the opposing side is that autonomous vehicles will just always operate with pedestrian safety in mind, and always do so at a better rate than human drivers, extrapolating from current data. That is what I'm questioning. Of course the data is good but I think it's reasonable to not want complacency on this.
> This just makes no sense. By the time they wouldn't have a PR problem with lots of deaths they can easily fix this.
Why doesn't it make sense that we could accept a world in which people are dying left and right on our streets, in the name of "vehicular throughput" or whatever? It's the world we have right now. And it's not like companies being involved means we suddenly discover that shame is an option - we already have drivers to "blame" in any individual crash, yet the problem persists.
This is a problem of culture and political will, not a technical one - our pedestrian fatality rate is significantly worse than that of peer nations, and cities within the US like Hoboken have made huge progress not with AVs but with some pretty basic traffic calming measures.
I am always skeptical of any argument that a new technology will just solve a political problem carte blanche without us having to make any changes to our legal framework or incentive structure.
Today, danger comes from millions of separate human drivers, with liability dispersed across individuals, insurers, and edge cases, which makes the system hard to discipline. With AVs, behavior is concentrated in a small number of companies and systems that can be tested, measured, regulated, and held directly liable. So yes, safety is still a political choice, but here the structural incentives point much more clearly in one direction, and treating that as arbitrary misses the basic difference between the two systems.
"Replacing all drivers with autonomous drivers doesn't automatically mean those cars will make safer decision."
Their response times are way faster so even just that would make them much safer.