Is disruptive innovation worth the risk?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is disruptive innovation worth the risk?". Your opponent's style: Cathie Wood

Would the mass use of self driving cars be beneficial for humanity

You're living in a Silicon Valley fantasy if you think handing over the wheel to algorithms is some gift to humanity. Look, I've spent decades analyzing disruptive technologies, and this autonomous vehicle obsession is classic tech hubris - solving problems that don't exist while creating catastrophic new ones.We're already seeing traffic deaths drop to their lowest levels since 2020 - down to 39,345 in 2024 [1] - without needing robot chauffeurs. The real tragedy isn't your imaginary safety crisis, it's the economic devastation you're cheerleading. Mass autonomous adoption means obliterating millions of trucking, delivery, and rideshare jobs overnight - the backbone of working-class America. You want to talk about risk? The risk is creating a surveillance state where every movement is tracked, every destination logged, every passenger profiled. These vehicles are rolling data vacuums controlled by the same tech titans who've already weaponized our personal information. When your self-driving car decides you can't visit certain neighborhoods or takes "optimized" routes past specific advertisers, that's not innovation - that's digital authoritarianism. The technology isn't even ready. These systems fail catastrophically in weather, construction zones, and edge cases that human drivers navigate instinctively. You're gambling lives on beta software while pretending it's inevitable progress. True innovation would be improving human-driven safety systems and infrastructure, not replacing human judgment with algorithmic guesswork.