128. Baby, You Can Program My Car

[0] From APM, American Public Media and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace.

[1] Here's the host of Marketplace, Kai Rizdahl.

[2] Time now for a little Freakonomics Radio.

[3] It's that moment every couple of weeks.

[4] We talk to Stephen Dubner, the co -author of the books and the blog of the same name.

[5] The hidden side of everything is what he does.

[6] Hey, Dubner, how are you?

[7] Hey, Kai, I'm great.

[8] Hey, I've got a question for you today.

[9] How well do you think that a computer would do your job?

[10] posting this radio show.

[11] What are you kidding?

[12] You've been probing my nightmare as what?

[13] That's not a good question.

[14] Here's a thing.

[15] It strikes me at this very interesting point in history where we've all become very reliant on computers.

[16] And yet there are some things that humans do and will always do better, like radio hosting.

[17] But let me ask you this parallel question.

[18] How good are you at driving, let's say?

[19] Oh, well, I'm a man. So of course, I say I'm a great driver.

[20] There you go.

[21] Right.

[22] So no matter how good you are, even good drivers obviously pose a risk.

[23] I was talking about this with a fellow named Raj Raj Kumar.

[24] He's an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh.

[25] Because 93 % of accidents happen due to human error.

[26] We really are trying to basically take the human error tendency out of the picture.

[27] Okay, 93 % I get, but how do you take human error tendency out of the picture, dude?

[28] Here's what you do, Kai.

[29] You do not let humans drive, okay?

[30] So Raj Kumar heads up a Carnegie Mellon team that's been developing a driverless car.

[31] A couple weeks ago, I went for a ride in this car.

[32] Really?

[33] I was about to ask if you got to drive it, but I guess not.

[34] I didn't get to drive.

[35] Nobody got to drive it.

[36] So did you go out like on the city streets of where's Carnegie Mellon?

[37] Pittsburgh, right?

[38] We didn't.

[39] It's in Pittsburgh.

[40] In this case, we just drove around a big track that Carnegie Mellon is built on the site of an old steel mill.

[41] But there were on this track.

[42] There are other cars, bicyclists.

[43] There's a skateboarder in the road.

[44] There's stoplights.

[45] There's construction.

[46] All the elements of real driving.

[47] Does it, what does this thing look like?

[48] Does it have like the big camera turret on top so it can see what's going on and sensors and Actually, no. So that's the Google car that a lot of people have seen pictures of.

[49] So Carnegie Mellon is developing this car for General Motors.

[50] So this was a Cadillac SUV, and their mission is to build a driverless car that, A, doesn't look like a robot.

[51] And B, is relatively affordable.

[52] So all the cameras and sensors and radars are embedded in the bumpers and elsewhere.

[53] It looks pretty much like a stock car unless you open up the spare tire compartment.

[54] That's where all the computers are.

[55] And then there's also a big red kill button.

[56] button on the dashboard.

[57] Is that from when the car is about to crash into something and you're sitting there going, ah, and...

[58] Well, that's the issue here.

[59] Okay, so GM and Google are not the only ones developing driverless cars.

[60] There's a lot of competition, which I would argue is a very good thing.

[61] And from all the evidence so far, it appears to be astonishingly successful at low speeds and high speeds, city streets, highways.

[62] And it looks like a driverless car will screw up a lot less than a car driven by us, by humans.

[63] And so then the question gets to be, when do we get it?

[64] When does this happen for real?

[65] And what interests me really is what kind of effects will that have on society?

[66] Well, spitball it for me. I mean, what's going to happen?

[67] Well, honestly, I personally think it's a revolution waiting to happen.

[68] You just think about all the industries that get affected for better or worse.

[69] So the auto industry, of course, the insurance industry.

[70] Older people could live on their own longer if they don't have to drive themselves.

[71] Drunk driving wouldn't be such a big concern, which is good news for restaurants.

[72] bars.

[73] But to me, the biggest impact by a long, long shot is safety.

[74] Yeah, because lots of people die in car accidents.

[75] Thirty -four thousand traffic deaths a year, roughly in the U .S. And if you look worldwide, one million deaths from traffic fatalities.

[76] And there's injuries.

[77] And in the U .S., traffic accidents send more than two million adults to the ER each year.

[78] And of course, the economic cost of all this danger is massive.

[79] There's also the fact that most people enjoy driving.

[80] Pry this steering wheel from my cold dead hands.

[81] Well, that is a common sentiment.

[82] The fact is that most of us don't drive anywhere near as safely as we think about.

[83] Here, get this, Kai.

[84] About 80 % of drivers rate themselves above average, which is, of course, statistically not possible.

[85] And believe me, if we found out that human error by, let's say, public radio hosts, was causing one million in deaths worldwide, my friend, Kai, I would replace you with a computer in a heartbeat.

[86] Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics .com, is the website.

[87] We'll see in a couple of weeks.

[88] Thanks for having me, Kevin.

[89] All right, man, bye -bye.

[90] Hey, podcast listeners.

[91] On the next Freakonomics Radio, it's something you do every time you eat at a restaurant or get your haircut, but we're going to tell you everything wrong with it.

[92] I don't like to tip.

[93] Tipping's unpleasant.

[94] It's discriminatory.

[95] The more tipping you see in a given country.

[96] the more corruption you generally see in that country as well.

[97] Should tipping be banned?

[98] That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.