Much has been said about the ways we expect our oncoming fleet of driverless cars to change the way we live—remaking us all into passengers, rewiring our economy, retooling our views of ownership, and reshaping our cities and roads.
They will also change the way we die. As technology takes the wheel, road deaths due to driver error will begin to diminish. It’s a transformative advancement, but one that comes with consequences in an unexpected place: organ donation.
It’s morbid, but the truth is that due to limitations on who can contribute transplants, among the most reliable sources for healthy organs and tissues are the more than 35,000 people killed each year on American roads (a number that, after years of falling mortality rates, has recently been trending upward). Currently, 1 in 5 organ donations comes from the victim of a vehicular accident. That’s why departments of motor vehicles ask drivers whether they want to be donors.
It’s not difficult to do the math on how driverless cars could change the equation. An estimated 94 percent of motor-vehicle accidents involve some kind of a driver error. As the number of vehicles with human operators falls, so too will the preventable fatalities. In June, Christopher A. Hart, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said, “Driverless cars could save many if not most of the 32,000 lives that are lost every year on our streets and highways.” Even if self-driving cars only realize a fraction of their projected safety benefits, a decline in the number of available organs could begin as soon as the first wave of autonomous and semiautonomous vehicles hits the road—threatening to compound our nation’s already serious shortages.
Damn, talk about unforeseen circumstances. I certainly did not see this one coming.
However what advances in science taketh away, it cannot also giveth back.
In this case the solution to this problem may be organs grown in a laboratory for the express purpose of providing transplants to patients in need.
Of course that technology is still in its beginning stages, but desperate need has a tendency to expedite the scientific process.
It's either that or we build flaws into the autonomous car manufacturing so that every so often a car simply veers off into oncoming traffic and voila, new organs are instantly made available.
I'm not necessarily an ethicist but that does seem slightly wrong to me.
Source http://ift.tt/2iirC4d
