Haakon Erichsen

There's something deeply unsafe about safetyism. We wish people a safe flight—yet flying commercially is almost perfectly safe. We don't wish people a safe drive—yet US roads are the equivalent of a 737 crashing every 48h, killing everyone aboard. But we scare people when they get in an airplane but not when they get in a car. The biggest opportunity we have to improve road safety is self-driving, yet there's lots of anti-self-driving safety talk, and self-driving is held to a *dramatically* superhuman safety bar. The din about AI safety has reached extreme tenor—yet there have been zero material safety incidents. And the positive benefits of AI could improve and save many lives. But the safetyists say we must slow down. We destroyed the nuclear power industry in this country nominally out of safety concerns, yet joule for joule nuclear power is *by far* the safest form of energy, even accounting for Chernobyl (a genuine disaster) and Three Mile Island (generally a non-event). Building and fire codes are supposedly there to protect us from unsafe buildings. But actually the red tape makes development slow and sometimes impossible. So the safetyism protects us from jobs, innovation, and reindustrialization. TSA was there nominally to protect us from terrorist threats—yet to the extent it pushes passengers at the margins from safe airplanes to dangerous roads, it actually kills not just time and money but actual humans. Safetyism is deeply unsafe.