Dwayne Haskins

Ridiculous as it looks when I write it out, as a seriously over-invested Michigan football fan, the players who have played key roles in the annual Michigan-OSU game seem more present to me in a way that makes this kind of news particularly jarring:

Former Ohio State star and NFL first-round draft pick Dwayne Haskins died Saturday. He was 24.

Haskins was struck by a vehicle Saturday morning, according to Florida Highway Patrol. The crash occurred around 6:37 a.m. Florida Highway Patrol believes Haskins was trying to cross traffic lanes on foot when he was struck by a vehicle. A traffic homicide investigation is open. . .

Haskins was in South Florida training with Pittsburgh Steelers players for the 2022 NFL season.

A curious feature of human psychology is that we accept certain technological risks as “natural” because they’re long-time parts of the social background, when a similar risk level accompanying a new technology would be considered radically unacceptable.

NHTSA projects that an estimated 31,720 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes from January through September 2021, an increase of approximately 12% from the 28,325 fatalities projected in the first nine months of 2020. The projection is the highest number of fatalities during the first nine months of any year since 2006 and the highest percentage increase during the first nine months in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System’s history.

The new estimates come days after the U.S. Department of Transportation released the federal government’s new, comprehensive National Roadway Safety Strategy, a roadmap to address the national crisis in roadway fatalities and serious injuries by building multiple layers of protection with safer roads, safer people, safer vehicles, safer speeds, and better post-crash care. The strategy is complemented by unprecedented safety funding included in President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

“People make mistakes, but human mistakes don’t always have to be lethal. In a well-designed system, safety measures make sure that human fallibility does not lead to human fatalities,” said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “That’s what we will be doing for America’s roads with the National Roadway Safety Strategy and the safe system approach that it embraces.”

“We have to change a culture that accepts as inevitable the loss of tens of thousands of people in traffic crashes,” said Dr. Steven Cliff, NHTSA’s Deputy Administrator. “This will require a transformational and collaborative approach to safety on our nation’s roads.”

On the one hand motor vehicles are far less deadly than they were even a generation ago. When I graduated from high school in 1978 10,000 (!) teenagers were killed in car accidents — a number that has fallen by nearly 70% since then.

On the other, some quick back of the enveloping suggests that the number of years of lost life in this country over the last seven years or so from traffic accidents is probably similar to the equivalent number generated by the first two years of the pandemic that is about to record its one millionth official fatality. What role will self-driving vehicle technology play in ameliorating these totals?

My guess is that self driving cars, assuming the technology eventually advances to a point where they could become commonplace, will have to be somewhere between ten and one hundred times safer than human-driven cars per mile driven before the fatality risk they create will be considered acceptable. This is of course not rational, but people aren’t rational when comparing risks created by defective machines and those created by ourselves more directly.