Glad to see that there really does see, to be significant disagreement here. let's get money going on this eh!

Ways the number could go low:

• peak oil, nobody drives cars

• all cars EVs, all slow, all robo controlled

• gov't mandates bad drivers install 3k USD camera system which forces them to not crash into people and can see better than they can

• us becomes poor, people don't drive that much anymore

• AI changes everything

• earth destroyed

• USA destroyed/population harmed

• disease causes lockdown 2: the revenge, with no driving this time

• drone takeover

I know I'm extremely optimistic but wow, to imagine that we'll just keep allowing 40k mostly poor people to get killed while driving/walking/sleeping in their friend's car on the road every year for the next 20 years when there already exists tech which if we just bothered to deploy it would dramatically lower the number, is just nuts to me. Yet I must agree, today we nearly never heard about this issue from anyone, what's to stop that continuing another 20 years. Where are the people whose relatives/friends/lovers are being harmed or worse by traffic? Are they on youtube? why don't they talk about it? I suppose I should search for it, to find them.

@Ernie I mean, 600,000 people die from malaria every year, a number which could be easily reduced with mosquito nets and other measures, but very little has been done. In general, we still prefer to spend millions on advanced cancer and rare disease research to slightly prolong the lives of elderly people in developed countries instead of spending a few dollars to extend the lives of impoverished people in underdeveloped nations who lack basic healthcare

@spiderduckpig interesting. chatgpt convinced me that my perception that people talk about malaria all the time is just the SF/rat/EA bubble. I swear though I literally never hear anyone talking about how FSD will work to solve the important traffic death issue. All the left prog city design/transport/biking yt channels seem dead set against FSD, probably due to bleedover from their distaste for elon. But if Elon were still lib I don't see how they would not love him for at least trying to solve the problem via a direct route. I suppose that he's using the market is also distasteful to that mindset, versus using committees/consensus/coordination and community?

@Ernie But man yeah I am self-praising here but like, the raw number of people killed and potentailly saveable if we just can develop a 5k usd priced installable camera+ai system into every drunk, every bad driver's car. So it just wouldn't let them kill so many people who are mostly innocent. That's a lot of death and suffering to remove; wouldn't it be okay to give some credit to AI/tech bros/Elon if we got to save all those lives in return?

@Ernie From what I've seen most urbanist/public transport channels connect cars with American-style suburbs, strip malls, highways, having a sedentary lifestyle etc. which they view as taking away community and dividing the places people work and live, so they view the traffic problem as more of a social and cultural issue beyond just traffic fatalities. They see biking and public transportation as a way for society to move to mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods, which can be a bit naive and optimistic in my view (I live in Chicago and the public transportation doesn't really give you a sense of community).

There certainly is a level of excessive backlash against FSD just because Elon is associated with it, but many urbanists seem pretty critical of Waymo and other FSD too. Of course, they usually aren't big fans of Silicon Valley either.