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0 pointsFricken8y ago0 comments

The pharmaceutical industry tries to save lives, for money. They're driven by greed. They also have a long track record of fucking up big time and people dying because of it. Does this mean we should stop giving people medicine? Would letting people get sick and die be preferable than allowing imperfect industries with a profit motive try and save them?

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Slartie8y ago

What is currenly being done with self-driving car testing on public roads is basically like a pharmaceutical company mixing a new experimental drug into the dishes of random people at a restaurant, which neither are compensated in any way, nor did they have a chance to decline their involvement in the test.

Such a thing would be entirely unthinkable in the pharmaceutical industry of today. So if this comparison suggests anything, it is to much more strictly regulate self-driving car development and testing!

stevesimmons8y ago

That's a strawman argument... These driverless car tests are more like early phase clinical trials. Clinical trials are conducted under very tight controls, using participants who have given informed consent. Drugs don't get licensed until they can prove efficacy and safety and are approved by the FDA.

The current procedures for clinical trials are the result of decades of experience, where mistakes (and yes, occasionally shortcuts driven by greed) did result in avoidable deaths of trial participants.

For an example of how the pharma industry deals with this 'safety first' versus 'stifling innovation' dilemma, read this article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1526936/

The inevitable result of this crash is driverless vehicle testing will get regulated more like drug trials...

zach438y ago

That’s not really an apples-to-apples comparison. In the case of the pharmaceutical company, people don’t really have any other choice other than to take experimental medicine for terminal stage diseases.

On the other hand, there are widely used, cheap, and efficient alternative to self-driving cars on the roads today: human drivers, public transport, carpools, etc.

If you want to make analogies, I think the self-driving car accident is more like if an elevator company accidentally crashed an experimental high-speed elevator in a shopping mall. I think it would be grossly negligent on the part of the company to test such an unproven device on the general public, especially if people’s lives are being put in a position of risk which they did not to worry about before.

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