 Driven to madness Last month, a mob in San Francisco set upon a Waymo robotaxi, smashing it to pieces before setting it on fire. The vandalism was largely met with indifference or a kind of glee, writes Eric Newcomer in The Free Press: “For some, this was an act of righteous anger, rage against the machine, a cry for help from people fed up with our slide into automation.” But self-driving cars are not anti-human: On the contrary, they’re going to save lives, and they’re just getting good. It is “a little terrifying” the first time you sit in a car and it starts driving on its own. But self-driving cars are solving a huge problem: Dangerous human drivers. About 40,000 people die in car crashes in the U.S. each year. Soon, self-driving cars will be meaningfully safer. We shouldn’t wait for perfection, or hold robotaxis to airline-like safety standards: “We should build the best world we can, and that includes minimizing traffic deaths by reducing the number of human drivers on the roads.” Love, love me do Women, on average, are less interested in casual sex than men are, and are more likely to regret casual hookups. That “should come as no surprise to anyone who has touched grass in any meaningful way in their adult life,” writes the geneticist Ruxandra Teslo, but it’s a weirdly taboo topic. The refusal to address it is a problem: It leaves young women confused about their feelings, and creates animosity between the sexes. What’s more, it has left room for a backlash. “Reactionary feminists” argue that the sexual revolution has harmed women: That marriage rates are down, and that women were happier when more of them were in stable marriages. But Teslo says that’s nonsense. Women were essentially the property of their husbands until not long ago, and the fact that women don’t just want marriage is shown by the fact that most divorces are initiated by the woman. (Some) women’s regret of casual sex is an expression of “a yearning for love, actual love,” not just being in a relationship they are unable to get out of. Meat market Organ transplants are cheap. In Canada, a kidney transplant costs $26,000, plus $6,000 a year for lifelong medication. Dialysis is $60,000 a year. On average, a transplant saves the health system $380,000. In the U.S., those figures are even higher. They are growing ever safer and more effective, and they demonstrably save lives. And yet there are simply not enough organs to go around. There is a lesson to be learned from blood plasma, say Jason Hausenloy and Duncan McClements in Works in Progress. In the U.S., Hungary, Germany, Austria, and Czechia, plasma donors are paid: Those five countries contribute 90% of the world’s supply. It’s counterintuitively cheaper than relying on altruistic donors, because donors are easier to find and retain. A similar system could work for organs. In Iran, which allows paid organ transplants, there is no kidney waiting list. Some sort of payment-in-advance system would be needed for organs which can only be donated after death, and it might be a hard sell to the public, but, Hausenloy and McClements say, a market for organs could save lives and money. |
