The Safety Dividend Conundrum

**Brian** (0:01)
Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to another Saturday Conundrum. I'm Brian, and this week, we're talking about driverless taxis.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:10)
Well, sort of.

**Brian** (0:10)
Really, it's a bigger conversation. But the conversation was born out of something I read when I was bringing up on the show this past Monday, and then myself, Andy and Beth started having a conversation about it as well, and that's what led to this conundrum. And what I was saying was that I had read a quote from Elon Musk or saw something on TikTok. Elon Musk was, I'm paraphrasing, saying something to the extent that I don't think people realize just how much safer driverless cars will be in the future compared to human drivers, especially when you look at all the data, there's a lot of it talking about death and damage from human drivers. This conundrum takes a bit of a leap because before to work, you have to assume that in some future point, however many years that is, it will be scientifically proven that driverless vehicles are safer than humans. You have to start there for this conundrum to really work, but we do that from time to time where we go, okay, look, this isn't today today, but it's not necessarily 30 years out either. In fact, Elon Musk was quoted as saying, five years from now and certainly 10 years from now, probably 90% of all distance driven will be driven by the AI in a self-driving car, he said. So overwhelmingly, it'll be a quite niche thing in 10 years to actually be driving your own car. Now, Elon is famous for sort of over predicting, but regardless if it was five or 10 years or 15 years, which isn't really that long from now, and I think it's very realistic, there's going to come a point or realistically, probably become a point where self-driving cars, AI-driven cars, whether that's Tesla or Waymo or otherwise are safer than humans. Okay, so that's the starting point for this conundrum. Because what this conundrum really is about is like, what do we do in the age of AI when whole entire jobs get displaced? And of course, this doesn't only apply to taxi drivers or Uber drivers.
It applies all over the place, but it's more about how do you redistribute that money, that wealth? How do you handle it? So I'll give you the intro and then I'll give you the conundrum. And as always, we'll turn it over to our two trusty AI co-hosts to take us along the rest of the way. This is called the safety dividend conundrum. In the near future, we'll reach a point where self-driving vehicles are undeniably safer than human drivers, maybe five years away or perhaps more. Either way, the days coming where humans are considered too dangerous to put in charge of the vehicle. That shift will not replace every driver at once. You'll have specialized drivers, emergency operators, construction haulers, rural edge cases, and unusual transport jobs that remain human for much, much longer. The first major collapse will come in ordinary personal transport, taxis, ride share trips, airport runs, late night pickups, routine errands, and point to point city travel. Once that happens, the public gains something real, fewer crashes, cheaper rides, better access to people who cannot drive. Or four people, huh? Better access for people who cannot drive. Less drunk driving, less fatigue, a transportation system that works without waiting for a person to accept the fare.
But the money does not disappear. The wages once spread across thousands of drivers become savings, margins, lower fares, fleet revenue, software revenue, insurance changes, and city tax opportunities. The driver is removed from the vehicle, but the value created by removing the driver has to go somewhere. So here's the conundrum. One side says the safety dividend should flow quickly to the public. If driverless transport is safer and cheaper, cities should not burden it with labor settlements, transition fees, artificial quotas, or legacy claims. They keep prices higher and access lower. Taxi and ride share drivers would be disappearing because the function changed. The same way other jobs disappeared when the machine no longer needed the person.
The other side says this is not an ordinary churn. Human drivers carried the old system, followed rules set by cities and platforms, absorbed risk on public roads, and built the market that automation now replaces. If safer driverless transport turns their work into lower fares and private profit while leaving them with nothing, then a public safety improvement becomes a wealth transfer away from the workers who made the service possible in the first place. When driverless transport becomes safer than human driving, who should have the stronger claim on the value created by removing the driver? The public that gains cheaper and safer mobility, or the workers whose livelihoods were displaced to create that gain?