The Disney movie Inside Out features the five emotions running through a girl’s head: joy, saddness, anger, fear, and disgust. It’s a great movie that you’ve probably seen and if you haven’t seen it, you should.
I think that self-driving cars are driven by a little bit of both joy and fear.
The fear comes from the number of current automobile accidents: 32,000 US fatalities and 1.25 million worldwide fatalities per year.
Those are huge, almost unfathomable numbers. I suspect they mean a lot more if you’ve been personally touched by an automotive fatality. Fortunately, I haven’t been affected directly by that.
So for me the driving emotion is joy, which seems like a funny word to use. Maybe excitement?
Self-driving cars seem awesome to me for the sake of the technology, and even more so for how they will change the world. I hope this is a bigger technology breakthrough than anything we’ve seen since the Internet.
I always feel a little badly that I’m less moved by the safety issues, but I am so incredibly excited by the potential to make day-to-day living better.
David Silver 