[MUSIC]
I want you to imagine a very dangerous day.
You wake up in the morning looking like this after a very, very peaceful night.
However, the house you've just woken up in is in an area that's surrounded
by a place which is very prone to earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes.
You get out of bed, you go down to your bathroom.
You fill up your bathroom sink full of water and
you push aside all of the electrical appliances next to you.
You don't get electricuted on the way out of the bathroom, on the way out of
the house you grab the only thing you can find for breakfast which happens to
be a very high in fat, high in calorie, high sugar, high cholesterol breakfast.
That's the only thing you have.
On the way out of the house you narrowly avoid your swimming pool,
you don't fall into your swimming pool, and you do not drown.
And as you get to your car, you narrowly avoid eye contact with your neighbor.
>> [LAUGH] >> Whom you know really hates you and
has an assault rifle in his back yard.
[LAUGH].
You get into your car, you start driving, you turn on the radio,
you hear stories of ISIS, Ebola, measles, all of these risks,
some of the most contagious and deadly diseases to ever reach American soil.
You get to your destination, which happens to be an airport.
You get into a giant tube of metal, you go up 35,000 feet in the air,
supported only by wings which are narrower narrow and thinner than your car door.
You're fine, and just before you go to sleep,
you are reaching to the seat pocket in front of you, you grab the bag of peanuts,
you read the choking hazard, you're fine.
You eat the peanuts, you go to sleep, everything's okay.
Pretty dangerous day.
Did you know that out of all of these risks that you had today, the peanuts,
the angry neighbor with the assault rifle, the high calorie breakfast, the swimming
pool, Ebola, none of these were the most dangerous things you did today.
It was actually getting into your car and driving.
Every year, 1.2 million people die on our roads.
To put that into perspective, that's the equivalent of a jumbo jet full
of people falling out of the sky every three hours.
Every three hours, every single day,
every single week, every single month, every single year.
Now I came to Stanford to think what can I do?
What is my role in preventing the massive spectrum of human suffering?
And what can I do to substantially improve human life?
And when I look at these statistics,
I think this is a pretty good place to start.
Why does this happen?
What can we do about it?
Well it turns out that 93% of accidents happen because of human error.
Why?
Because we are human.
>> [LAUGH].
>> We get careless.
We make mistakes.
We get distracted.
We're irrational.
We make bad decisions.
We are human.
The problem is though with accidents that when we get into one,
we don't just affect ourselves but we affect other people around us as well.
Therefore if you want to do something to substantially reduce the number of people
who die on our roads, we need to do something about taking out.
Some of the human elements from driving, and replacing it by computers
that can make better, faster, more accurate decisions on our behalf.
And it looks like this, an autonomous vehicle.
Now as soon as I say, replacing some of the human elements
of driving with cold hard computers, I'm already feeling this visceral reaction
that we have in this room about extracting from the warm, fuzzy,
emotional human elements and replacing it with cold, hard numbers.
But I want you to go with me for one moment.
Go with me for a second.
I want you to imagine a safer world.
I want you to imagine a safer world where 35,000 people
do not die on our roads every single year.
That's two people since this talk began.
I want you to imagine a safer world where you do not have to share your roads
with 65% of other drivers who are using their cell phones at the same time.
I want you to imagine a safer world where
the 112 million people who drive under the influence of alcohol are not driving on
the same roads that my future children and your children are going to be playing on.
And lastly I want you to imagine a, a safer world where you never have to look
for parking again, nor pay another parking fine, imagine that world.
Why aren't we there yet?
To me it comes down to how we make decisions about adopting new technologies,
both as consumers and also as regulators.
You see good decision making about whether to adopt new technology or
not, is made by understanding diligently the benefits and the cost.
If the benefits outweigh the cost,
then you do adopt the new technology, otherwise you do not.
The problem is that with a ton less vehicles,
we have no idea what the benefits are, because we haven't tried them.
We haven't given them a shot.
On the other hand, as soon as we start thinking of the risks, given that we
live in such a risk-averse society, we blow these risks out of proportion.
And we, we engage our irrationalities and fears to,
to make them much larger than what they are.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
And that's something to think about because when we want to understand which
technologies to adopt, we need to understand both of them.
Now, additionally to being at the GSB, I'm also a magician and my, and my job as
a magician is to understand where the line is drawn between perception and reality.
And when I think of the risks of autonomous vehicles,
I don't see reality, I see perceived risks.
I'll explain. You see, a lot of people
think it's terrible to give up their control of their driving to someone else,
but they have no issue about getting into an Uber and
giving up their control of the driving to someone they have no idea about.
They have no issue and we have no issue about getting into an airplane and
letting our flights be controlled by computers on autopilot.
We have no issue getting into a New York subway or London underground and
having the, the flow of the carriages controlled by co, co,
cold hard numerical algorithms there.
Computers already make life or death decisions for us on a daily basis,
and it's time to apply that to the number one cause of death
for people between the ages of 3 and 34.
So, what I ask of you is not to put aside your
fears of autonomous vehicles but, to keep them into proportion and
also give necessary credence to their benefits as well.
The fact that we don't have to live in a world where 35,000 people die
on just US roads every year.
The fact that you will not have to share
your roads with people who are either drunk or texting, the fact that you will
have countless extra hours every year of extra economic productivity.
What I ask of you is not to just discount autonomous vehicles as a new
in the thing, the new fad of Silicon Valley.
But to go out and to tell your friends, to tell your colleagues, to tell your
family about how much safer this world would be if we'd begin to adopt them.
One day, I want to look back into the world that we live in today,
where there was so much unnecessary human suffering and think that we and
autonomous vehicles were part of that solution.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC]