At least few times less, up to few dozen times less. Like you said we don't know precisely how much. Drunk driver is around 13 times more dangerous as sober one. [0]
So what if some people are wrong? They are being corrected. Many places didn't allow vaccinated to ditch the masks. And I think nowhere they encouraged them to take unnecessary risk.
> Being both unvaxed and unmasked is unnecessarily reckless toward others, simply because one such spreader can put exponentially more people in danger than any single drunk driver.
Worst possible case regardless of likelihood is not a good metric. I'll bet the average drunk driver, and indeed the average sober driver, causes many more deaths than the average unvaxed unmasked person in a post-vaccination world.
At the .08 BAC legal limit odds of crashing a car are 200% higher than a sober driver. The risks obviously increase with higher alcohol levels. A .16 ‘double the legal limit’ drunk is 1500% more likely to crash. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/09/how-j...
So yeah, ‘safer than a drunk driver’ means basically ‘only about twice as likely to crash as an average sober human’.
A drunk driver might be 7 times, or 70 times, or 700 times as likely to have an accident. That range is plausible to me.
But estimates of the proportion of trips under the influence of alcohol that I was able to find were around 0.03%. (111 million out of 411 billion)
So I don't see a logical reason to rule out their driving increasing by ten times, or 100 times, or more.
And I don't see what the justification would be for assuming a self-driving system is within 20% of an arbitrary standard. Because drunk drivers are so bad, as you point out, there's a lot of space between "as bad as a drunk" and "as good as an average non drunk".
I think it's completely plausible that a system could be ten times or a hundred times worse than an average human and it not be obvious. That's because an average human has one fatal accident in approximately 100 lifetimes (in the US). Or, for another reference point, drivers had fatalities about 7 times more often per mile, in 1950 than now.
Without saying I know exactly what numbers to use, I'm pretty certain that betting on things matching to within 20% is unjustified without, well, a specific logical justification.
However, regarding penalties being the same, this seems like a lack of incentives that would mean neither lives saved nor lost.
Also, I don't think saving tens of thousands of lives per year is a possibility if we're talking about alcohol in the US. I believe there are only on the order of 10,000 fatalities per year.
I note that millions of people (again, in the US) seem to think 10,000 covid-19 fatalities in only a few weeks is not worth even wearing a mask to stop.
True, but also, the dangers are somewhat overstated. A BAC of 0.10 (3-4 drinks in an hour for the average American, so, a lot) [1] makes you 7X more likely to be involved in a fatal accident. Sounds like a lot, right? The risk of being involved in a fatal accident is baseline 10.7 per 100,000 per year. That 0.01% per year. So, if you spent the entire year with a BAC of 0.1, commuting normally, you'd have a 0.07% per year risk of dying. That's still three 9's of, uh, up-time.
Should you do it? No. Knocking back a couple beers and driving isn't the equivalent of walking off a sheer rock face though.
The only thing that's caught up with Quebec is their puritanical tendencies, see: the CAQ being elected.
No, it's not "you've been drinking" -> 20x more dangerous. Much idiocy has been put forth by people who are unable to understand basic layman's toxicology/pharmacology. Drugs have effects. More of the substance has more of an effect. Step functions where a little of a substance has zero effect, shifting to a major effect with a little more, are extremely rare. It is never the case, for example, that a dose of ionizing radiation goes from "not dangerous" to "dangerous" suddenly - we may measure a low dose at 5 cancers per 100,000 and a high dose at 5,000 cancers per 100,000, but there is always presumed to be some effect.
And yet we have media organizations saying things like:
"
Washington (CNN) -- A common benchmark in the United States for determining when a driver is legally drunk is not doing enough to prevent alcohol-related crashes that kill about 10,000 people each year and should be made more restrictive, transportation safety investigators say.
The National Transportation Safety Board recommended on Tuesday that all 50 states adopt a blood-alcohol content (BAC) cutoff of 0.05 compared to the 0.08 standard on the books today and used by law enforcement and the courts to prosecute drunk driving.
The NTSB cited research that showed most drivers experience a decline in both cognitive and visual functions with a BAC of 0.05.
"
Of course we have a decline in cognitive and visual functions - that's what a depressant does. At any dose. So long as we have drinking as a major societal institution, and we have bodies that slowly process alcohol, and we have an automotive-mobile culture, there is some nonzero number of deaths we will prefer to tolerate every year due to drunk driving, whether it's 1,000,000 or 10,000 or 100.
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While there may be some distribution of how well people deal with a certain degree of drunkenness, the basic objective fact that we possess to measure impairment is BAC. Limits vary geographically and through history - in the US we have had experience with thresholds at 0.05%, 0.08%, 0.1%, and 0.15% in various eras and places.
A BAC of 0.01% doesn't significantly harm anyone - it is barely detectable. A BAC of 0.05% poses some minor statistical increase in danger, and is generally the minimum people seek out to 'get a buzz'. A BAC of 0.1% indicates moderate impairment - about what you thought, several times more dangerous. It's only when you get to a BAC of around 0.2% that it becomes 20x more dangerous. At a BAC of around 0.3% and up, on the other hand, one generally loses consciousness. Death from alcohol intoxication (assuming no complications) occurs at an average of about 0.45% BAC (that is the approximate LD50).
I found literally the most conservative statistic I could for how dangerous drunk driving is - that someone whose impairment is literally on the threshold of legal is 3x as likely to have an accident than a sober driver.
I could have gone for a shock stat - 100000 people a year are injured in accidents involving drunk drivers. 10000 people are killed.
I could have taken the position that a typical drunk driver is probably actually 10x as likely to have an accident as a sober driver, based on those NHTSA numbers.
But I didn’t need to to make the point that a self driving car could be literally twice as likely as an average driver to crash and that would still be ‘better than a drunk driver’.
I don't think you can completely discard all comparisons, but people are intuitively right to recognize that if they don't engage in risky behavior (like drunk driving) they're less at risk of being in an accident. To argue otherwise is basically saying driving drunk is no more risky than driving sober.
They're not. It's not even close. You're more likely to kill yourself than get killed in traffic. You're actually more likely to be killed by a sober driver than a drunk one (due to the populations).
I'm not saying it's a good situation, but if getting hit by a drunk driver is the number one risk you face, you have a remarkably safe existence and I'd be curious how you eliminated the risk of heart attack or suicide.
It's 28% in 2016 according to NHTSA [0], 10,497 deaths.
Certainly auto-pilot is worth it if the driver is drunk. I wish that all cars were fitted with alcohol measuring devices so that the cars won't start if you're over the limit.
Drink driving is still a massive problem in Belgium where I live. Although you get severely fined (thousands of euros) it's up to a judge to decide if you should have your licence taken away [1]. Typically you have to sit by the side of the road for a few hours then you're allowed to continue. In the UK it is a minimum 1 year ban.
The good news is that if you always drive sober, you don't have to worry about drunk drivers.
The reality is, no vaccine is 100% effective (immune response isn't a binary thing), and the are lots of people that can't be vaccinated for medical reasons. Every person who is not vaccinated by choice is wilfully exposing others to risk.
So what if some people are wrong? They are being corrected. Many places didn't allow vaccinated to ditch the masks. And I think nowhere they encouraged them to take unnecessary risk.
[0] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...
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