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Why the familiar feels safer (even when it isn’t)
The way we resort to double standards when judging the risks of what is novel against what is current can be an obstacle to genuine progress
A few years ago, a young man was killed by a car as he crossed my street. Not long after, the town responded by installing a pedestrian-controlled crossing — traffic safety often entails adding more clutter to our imperfect traffic system. What if, instead, the root cause was removed? Autonomous vehicles (AVs) could eliminate human fallibility: inattentiveness, recklessness, and even intoxication that claim so many lives. Yet one death caused by a self-driving car seems to weigh heavier than thousands caused by human drivers. Isn’t that odd?
More than framing
Our sceptical attitude to autonomous vehicles fits a pattern of wariness of the novel that shows up everywhere. Consider GMO foods: we scrutinize them for the slightest risk, while accepting conventional agriculture’s known environmental damage. Or take remote work during the pandemic: companies were fretting about possible productivity losses after having ignored, well, forever the well-documented inefficiencies of standard office life, from lengthy commutes to wasteful meetings. In both cases, the familiar…