Sir: No one is more aware than I am that our technology moves forward by ceaseless experiment. Now, when I say that no one is more aware, I ought to qualify that statement by saying that Alex in the downstairs apartment in our duplex may in fact be more aware, because he’s an MIT alum and he’s always reading Technology Review. But what I mean is that I am adequately informed; I am well enough aware to have opinions. And it is my opinion that, while experiment is a good and even necessary thing in the forward march of technology, there are limits, and those limits have been reached when the experiments are taking innocent human lives.

Of all the inventions with which we interact every day, the automobile is one of the most potentially deadly. It therefore behooves us (this is a word I learned from Alex) to examine the results of any unusual experiments in automotive technology with concomitantly unusual care. (Alex is always saying “concomitantly,” and I think I’ve figured out what it means.)

Since 2019, there have been about 65 fatalities associated with self-driving vehicles. In that same period, there was an average of 102 fatalities per day associated with human-driven vehicles.

When experiment and research make the world better, they should be supported. But we can afford such experiments only if we candidly admit the failures. It is long past time to end this deadly experiment with human-driven vehicles. While they may have seemed like a good idea in the abstract, statistics show that humans simply are not capable of operating motor vehicles within acceptable limits of safety. In the future, human beings may be improved, perhaps by selective breeding, and then the question can be revisited. But for the present, we must take the human drivers off the road immediately and restore sanity to our streets and highways. —Sincerely, A Man Who Isn’t Leaving the Duplex Until This Thing Is Sorted Out.