# Self-driving cars can be safer before they are perfect

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/self-driving-cars-can-be-safer-before-they-are-perfect/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Marc Andreessen](https://realalpha.app/people/marc-andreessen/) · Marc Andreessen is a venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz. · Co-founded Netscape and co-created Mosaic, then co-founded a16z, a venture firm backing AI, crypto and frontier tech.
- Host: [Chris Williamson](https://realalpha.app/people/chris-williamson/) · Host, Modern Wisdom
- Show: Modern Wisdom
- Episode: [Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future - Marc Andreessen](https://realalpha.app/v/gn9YZP_Zm50/), Dec 14, 2024
- Moment: 1:02:10 to 1:07:25 of the episode (5 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/self-driving-cars-can-be-safer-before-they-are-perfect/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/gn9YZP_Zm50/?t=3730

## Quote

> “we have gotten used to **a very large amount of carnage** in return for the convenience of modern transportation and logistics.”
> — [Marc Andreessen](https://realalpha.app/people/marc-andreessen/) at [1:03:40](https://realalpha.app/v/gn9YZP_Zm50/?t=3820) · Modern Wisdom

## Takeaways

1. Road crashes kill at least a million people worldwide each year.
2. Human drivers create unpredictable situations for autonomous cars.
3. Self-driving systems can improve safety before reaching perfection.

## About this segment

Marc Andreessen compares the toll of human driving with self-driving systems and says today’s cars are already much safer. He argues society can accept improvement without waiting for perfection.

From “Elon Musk, The Changing World Order & America’s Future - Marc Andreessen”, Dec 14, 2024. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/gn9YZP_Zm50/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[1:02:15](https://realalpha.app/v/gn9YZP_Zm50/?t=3735) self-driving, sort of en masse self-driving? I don't know whether there is a more highly kinetic, high risk and heavily involved area of human life that is ready to be outsourced to AI. You know, there's other things where you can help you cook or it'll keep your food fresh or do whatever but there doesn't seem to be the same sort of mortal consequences uh you know people have a very strange relationship between car safety when it's done manually and when it's sort of pivoting to that is this just some conceptual inertia thing that we're moving through over time slowly as usual yeah so to start with cars today are a disaster from a safety standpoint right um and so uh cars to the current run rate of road deaths uh worldwide is at least a million people a year right and so it's about 40 000 road deaths a year in the u.s and about a

[1:03:08](https://realalpha.app/v/gn9YZP_Zm50/?t=3788) million worldwide and by the way that million may be a low number it may be much higher worldwide and they just we just don't know how to count it but it's at least a million worldwide and so you know it's it's sort of like again you kind of think about this like okay a million people you're dying from cars okay over the course of a decade that's 10 million people like when 10 million people die from something in modern world we use words for it like you know like you know apocalypse right genocide like you know this is like mass death at a very large scale um and so one is just like to your point like there's a psychological thing here which is we have gotten And by the way, for every death, there's many injuries, right?

[1:03:40](https://realalpha.app/v/gn9YZP_Zm50/?t=3820) Many people crippled and never recover. And so there's a psychological thing here, which is we have gotten used to a very large amount of carnage in return for the convenience of modern transportation and logistics. By the way, in the fullness of time as a civilization, it seems to have been a good tradeoff. I don't think very few of us not named Greta Thunberg want to. We go back to walking everywhere. You can never go back to riding horses because, of course, animal rights. It is amazing that we got there. By the way, implication of that being, if the car were invented today, imagine the conversation that we would have about the rollout of the automobile, which is like, okay, the plan is to strap people into 6,000 pounds of steel and glass, and then the plan is to shoot them down a road that may or may not be

[1:04:30](https://realalpha.app/v/gn9YZP_Zm50/?t=3870) in good shape at 60 miles an hour and then they're going to shoot them at each other and then we're going to have the safety measure the safety measure is going to be we're going to paint a line down the center of the road and that's going to keep them from crashing right and so like there's no way that you'd be able to like invent this today or launch this today so maybe it's good that it happened uh in an earlier era so so anyway to your point we're used to that um the self-driving both waymos and teslas today are far safer than that far safer and there's like edge questions about, you know, like, you know, this is the metric is like, you know, collisions per, you know, 1000 or 100,000 miles or something or desperate 100,000 miles. And like, it's just no question, they're just like tiny percentages relative. And it's by the way, not that they're

[1:05:09](https://realalpha.app/v/gn9YZP_Zm50/?t=3909) necessarily zero, but they're tiny percentages of what we what we experience every day with them. You know, with road deaths, by the way, I think as humans, we have a bad intuition on this because we can't see the other drivers, most of the time when we're driving. So I find the cure for people who need to think about this harder is to just go spend a day sitting at the DMV. and just watch the parade of humanity and watch the people who have to be physically steered by their relatives in front of the camera to get the new driver's license at age 90, right?

[1:05:36](https://realalpha.app/v/gn9YZP_Zm50/?t=3936) Like, so we just, you know, and then get like an x-ray machine into cars that are driving past you to see how many people are just texting, right? Or how many people have been hitting the vape for the last three hours, right? So like, there's no question that the technology we have is much safer. There's a societal question as to whether we want the, where we want the trade-off to be, right? right? Do we want the trade-off to be to stay to the current level of carnage because we're used to it, right? Or do we want, you know, and wait until the computers are perfect? Or, you know, is it just, is it enough for the computers to be much better, which is what's actually happening?

[1:06:07](https://realalpha.app/v/gn9YZP_Zm50/?t=3967) Interestingly and optimistically, we as a society have chosen to actually accept, we have chosen to roll out self-driving without the computers being perfect. And so, you know, there's Teslas and Waymos on the road all over the place. And, you know, and people are fine with it. And I actually think that's like, it's a very optimistic thing that we were able to do that. If you talk to the people who make self-driving cars, what they tell you is the problem is not ever a self-driving car colliding with a self-driving car. The problem is it's when you have other humans in the mix, right? As you'd expect, right? Because humans react in unpredictable ways. And so a lot of the engineering going into these cars is to accommodate the human drivers. There will be some future state, years in the future, where there are no more human

[1:06:47](https://realalpha.app/v/gn9YZP_Zm50/?t=4007) drivers, at least on public roads. And when that happens, these things will be like basically completely safe because then you won't have the human element in there and so one of the things that we we may want to drive you know we have to drive to ultimately is that um there are a lot of questions around that but that may be where we want to go to um i'm pretty optimistic about this i think that these companies are making excellent progress um i think that the the the this is pros and cons with the chinese auto industry is now coming online and i think they're also going to be quite good at this and i think they're they're coming now um and so i i think that this is this whole space is going to develop i think quite quickly what about uh personal autonomous vehicles