Robotaxi? Never!

Saying “I’d never trust a robot taxi” is usually not a serious argument. It is just fear
dressed up as common sense. People already trust machines with things far more important than a car ride. They trust autopilot in aircraft, elevators in skyscrapers, pacemakers in chests, MRI machines in hospitals, automatic braking on highways, and water-treatment systems that keep them from getting sick. Nearly every part of modern life depends on machines doing work humans used to do badly, slowly, or dangerously.

The truth people do not like to admit is that humans are not some gold standard of safety. Humans are distracted, drunk, angry, exhausted, reckless, impatient, and often stupid. Human drivers kill people constantly, but because that failure is familiar, people treat it as normal. Then a machine appears, and suddenly they demand perfection. That is a dishonest standard. We do not reject technology because it makes one mistake. We reject it only when
it performs worse than people overall. If autonomy can drive better than the average human, then opposing it is not caution. It is irrational attachment to old incompetence.

History is full of this same cowardly reflex. People feared trains, elevators, anesthesia, vaccines, bicycles, and automation in factories. Then those technologies proved themselves useful, and society quietly absorbed them. The pattern is obvious: first people mock, then they panic, then they depend on the thing they swore they would never accept. Autonomy is
not some radical break from human history. It is the latest example of humans offloading dangerous, repetitive, error-prone work to machines that can do it better.

If someone says, “I would never trust a robo-taxi,” the blunt response is: you already live inside a civilization run by machines. You just only notice when the machine is new.