Self-driving cars might just revolutionize our daily lives.
Tens of thousands of men, women, and children die every year in car crashes. Millions are injured, or have their cars totaled, to the cost of $871 billion. This all could shrink to a tiny fraction of current costs if self-driving technology fulfills its promise.
Imagine a future where all the ride-sharing apps populate their fleets with self-driving cars, and so millions of households no longer feel the need to own their own car. Parents save thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours per year by shuttling their kids around in robot cars. The savings would disproportionately benefit lower-income Americans. Perhaps most remarkably, self-driving cars have been estimated to improve traffic flow by at least 35%, making commutes shorter and thus reducing housing congestion.
For all of the lives, dollars, and hours saved by this technology, self-driving cars simply have to achieve a lower collision rate than humans. With 5G technology ascendant, the future is near.
There’s just one little problem: 5G technology could interfere with weather forecasting.
Who really cares? After all, summer is hot, winter is cold, and fall and spring are somewhere in between. It’s no skin off your nose to keep an extra cardigan in your office, right?
According to a new YouGov poll, Americans’ priorities are elsewhere. A whopping 68% of the 2,805 polled said that they’d rather have accurate weather forecasts than self-driving cars, with just 16% saying the opposite. Richer people were more likely to prioritize accurate weather forecasts, with 75% Americans earning over $80,000 annually saying so, as opposed to 65% of those earning less than $40,000.
Perhaps emergent fears about the security and power of artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things affected people’s responses. Or maybe drama on the Tesla front dissuaded Americans from believing in the imminent viability of self-driving cars.
But it seems that Americans are less afraid of dying in car crashes than you might think. And they’re more afraid of robots and unexpected rain.
—By Tiana Lowe
