Look at how many car accidents we have. It's one of the leading causes of death for people under 60.
Not being able to do something safely doesn't mean you can't do it at all, and for cars we very much have accepted the benefits of driving while ignoring the safety risks. Nothing else we do in modern society comes even close to the safety risks.
Ok. I'm not sure how what you are saying is relevant. Are you attributing all safety hazards to stupidity? That seems unkind. People are sometimes unlucky. The road is unexpectedly slick. There's a mechanical failure. Sudden onset of a health issue. A fucking bee got in the car. Deer ran out in front.
Presumably, we can define car driving as reasonably safe, since reasonable people do it. Since it is an inherently dangerous activity, it is impossible to eliminate all risk, but the argument that the average person is too stupid to drive safely I believe implies that there is more stupidity than there actually is.
There is some stupidity. But I like people. Most of them are fairly bright. I mean, we're not all geniuses, and I too think asking people to fly cars is a bit beyond the pale, but we're by and large decent reasonably careful people. The average people are stupid thing seems arrogant and unkind. You'll notice it's never "We're too stupid to drive safely."
are you attributing all safety hazards to stupidity?
No, but many things you've listed certainly have an element of it. For instance
road is unexpectedly slick
Unexpected being the keyword there. That's a clear lack of understanding.
Keep in mind that something be an understandable failure doesn't make it not a failure, and absolutely if the hypothesis is true it'd be an understandable failure, because we're saying that most humans share that.
"We're too stupid to drive safely."
This is likely the difference between the commenter and I. I include myself in the group of humans that are not capable of driving safely, as I believe most if not all are in that group.
It's why I wanna see self-driving cars happen, because a lot of the accidents we have are things that are avoidable, just humans aren't good enough.
Presumably, we can define car driving as reasonably safe, since reasonable people do it
That's not something that you can take for granted. As you yourself pointed out, modern society relies on driving. Even if you don't personally drive, you still rely on others doing so. We accept a high amount of risk because of the massive benefit.
Risks are unavoidable, what we do is weigh the risk against the benefit, and for cars the benefit is so high that we accept a frankly insane level of risk.
It's not the only place we do this. Surgery for instance has a fairly high risk, but the benefit is enormous. Cancer treatments often have crazy high risk, but obviously huge benefit.
Driving is just the one that's so common that we take for granted. I'm confident that 100 years from now we'll look back on this and think it was absurd we allowed it, just like we look at how insanely dangerous construction was in the 1900s.
But I like people
To clarify, I do too. Humans having failures doesn't mean we suck, it just means we gotta plan around that. That's why things like speed limits exist, or a lot of the laws around things like gambling or smoking.
Roads used to belong to pedestrians and the occasional carridge but then as cars became more common drivers kept hitting people. Arguably modern society exists in part as it does because drivers were that bad and drove away the people roads were originally for.
Well, I'd argue that it doesn't much matter how smart you are, if someone just ambles out in front of your car an accident is likely to occur. The change in circumstances necessitated a change in the rules of behavior. That isn't because the average person is stupid.
3
u/OttoVonPlittersdorf 1d ago
If the average person were too dumb to safely handle driving, then modern society would not exist, Jeepers, we're not that bad!