Human – Earlybirds Invest

I have some bad news: You are almost certainly a worse driver than you think you are.

Humans drive distracted. They drive drowsy. They drive angry. And, worst of all, they drive impaired far more often than they should. Even when we’re firing on all cylinders, our Stone Age-adapted brains are often no match for the speed and complexity of high-speed driving. There’s as much as a 2.5-second lag between what we perceive and how fast we can react in a vehicle traveling 60 mph, which means a car will travel the equivalent of two basketball court lengths before its driver can even hit the brake.

The result of this very human fallibility is blood on the streets. Nearly 1.2 million people die in road crashes globally each year, enough to fill nine jumbo jets each day. Here in the US, the government estimates there were 39,345 traffic fatalities in 2024, which adds up to a bus’s worth of people perishing every 12 hours.

The good news is there are much, much better drivers coming online, and they have everything human drivers don’t: They don’t need sleep. They don’t get angry. They don’t get drunk. And their brains can handle high-speed decision-making with ease.

The average American adult will spend around three years of their life driving. If robots could take the wheel instead, well, think of all the Netflix shows we could stream instead.

But the true benefit of a self-driving revolution will be in lives saved. And new data from the autonomous vehicle company Waymo suggests that those savings could be very great indeed.

In a peer-reviewed study that is set to be published in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention, Waymo analyzed the safety performance of its autonomous vehicles over the course of 56.7 million miles driven in Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco — all without a human safety driver present to take the wheel in an emergency. They then compared that data to human driving safety over the same number of miles driven on the same kind of roads.

The results of the study, almost certainly the biggest and most comprehensive research on self-driving car safety yet released, are striking.

A master class in driving safety

Compared to human drivers, the Waymo self-driving cars had:

81 percent fewer airbag-deploying crashes
85 percent fewer crashes with suspected serious or worse injuries
96 percent fewer injury crashes at intersections (primarily because Waymo detects red lights faster than humans)
92 percent fewer crashes that involve injuries to pedestrians.

Had the typical human-driven fleet of cars covered those same 56.7 million miles, the Waymo researchers project it would have resulted in an estimated 181 additional injury crashes, 78 additional air-bag crashes, and 11 extra serious-injury crashes.

But the numbers really get eye-popping when you extend this data across all 3.3 trillion vehicle miles driven by humans in the US in a typical year. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that if the same 85 percent reduction seen in serious crashes held true for fatal ones — a big if, to be clear, since the study had too few fatal events to measure — we’d save approximately 34,000 lives a year. That’s five times the number of Americans who died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.

Don’t get in the way of progress

Of course, there are plenty of caveats to the Waymo study and even more obstacles before we could ever achieve anything like what’s outlined above.

In part because serious injury crashes are (thankfully) very rare, even 56.7 million miles isn’t long enough for researchers to be really sure that such crashes would occur significantly less often with robot drivers, so more data will be needed there. Waymo’s cars were also being driven largely in warm, sunny locations, operating in geofenced areas that had been heavily mapped by the company. It’s far less certain how they might do in, let’s say, the snowy streets of Boston in the winter.

This is also a company-run study, though it has been peer-reviewed by outside experts. And even if we decided to go all in on AI drivers, actually producing enough autonomous vehicles to begin to replace human-driven cars and trucks would be an enormous undertaking, to say the least.

Still, the data looks so good, and the death toll on our roads is so high that I’d argue slowing down autonomous vehicles is actually costing lives. And there’s a risk that’s precisely what will happen.

Too often the public focuses on unusual, outlier events with self-driving cars, while the carnage that occurs thanks to human drivers on a daily basis is simply treated as background noise. (That’s an example of two common psychological biases: availability bias, which causes us to judge risk by outlier events that jump easily to mind, and base-rate neglect, where we ignore the underlying frequency of events.) This misapprehension is something I often see in news coverage and consumption, and it’s one of the reasons I started Good News.

The result is that public opinion has been turning against self-driving cars in recent years, to the point where vandals have attacked autonomous vehicles on the street. And of course, given that nearly 5 million Americans make their living primarily through driving, any wide-scale movement to self-driving vehicles would bring significant economic disruption.

But still, 34,000 lives saved on an annual basis would represent tremendous progress. Maybe, after about 100 years of trying, it’s time to give something else a chance behind the wheel.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

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As we look at our world, it seems that individual humans are increasingly on the edges and in the margins of the big stories that play out on our scrolling screens. The narratives that captivate and resonate with ordinary folks seem to exist at a scale beyond the reach of any one of us — Those big stories about economies, countries, and companies weave a narrative that can seem dire at times, or too big for an individual human to change in a meaningful way. But this is not the true narrative of the world, nor is it the right way to understand our own potential as humans.

Many who read this blog are inclined to believe that the Ethereum protocol will play a role (maybe even a major one) in that big narrative in the sky. If that is so, then we should ask ourselves: Who are the characters in our story?

We seek to understand Ethereum through the lens of the individual humans that use it as a protocol for coordination. By seeking out the context and nuance of human stories, we can better orient ourselves toward a collective vision of the future, and better prepare ourselves to enact it.

Today, we’d like to introduce five humans with stories to tell, who will be starting their Next Billion Fellowship at the Ethereum Foundation. These individuals are highly qualified, but represent only a small slice of the capable people out there working to solve some of humanity’s deepest coordination problems. We hope that their stories can serve as both a reflection of the true character of the Ethereum community-at-large, and an inspiration for how this open protocol might yet positively impact the lives of billions.

Fellows Cohort #3

Brian

Brian Limiardi builds for financial inclusion in Indonesia as co-founder of Copra Finance. While access to personal loans is available through banks, there are many contexts in which the only way to get a loan for business is through informal lenders (read: loan sharks). For folks that choose to work and invoice in cryptocurrency, access to even simple legacy financial tools like personal or small business loans can be an obstacle. For his Fellowship, Brian will focus on researching the needs and realities of the growing demographic of workers and small businesses who use crypto as a primary means of invoicing and bookkeeping.

Devansh

Devansh Mehta, co-founder of VoiceDeck, is interested in mapping out public good impact space. Impact methodologies and markets for environmental use cases are well-documented mechanisms, but sometimes ‘impact’ wanders into more subjective territory: Investigative journalism, for example, is undoubtedly a public good. How can the real work of journalists be documented and valued in a way that fits into the right funding mechanism? Devansh will work with citizen journalism newsrooms to explore methodologies of impact documentation using the hypercerts standard, with an aim to find a good mechanism of retroactive funding for positive social outcomes.

Masa

Masahiro “Masa” Fukuhara wants to spread the spirit of ONGAESHI, (恩返し, “To return a favor”) in the world of education. ONGAESHI DAO is exploring mechanisms of retroactive solidarity payments in education and employment. For his Fellowship, Masa and other ONGAESHI DAO team members will learn from pilot programs in which contributors to the public good of education like funders and teachers are rewarded when businesses hire their students.

Mulenga

Mulenga Kapwepwe is co-founder of the Women’s History Museum of Zambia. There are many African artifacts in museums around the world, but rarely do those items have a tangible connection to the people and communities who created them. For her Fellowship, Mulenga is working with the Zambian web3 community to create a tokenized artifact registry, experimenting with museum revenue sharing for community documentation of art, customs, and crafting methodologies still practiced by the descendants of those items on display in museums around the world. Even if the items won’t return to their places of origin in the near future, it’s a small step toward bridging a gap of ownership that spans centuries.

Valeriia

Valeriia “Ria” Panina is a user experience specialist and an advisor to the Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation. The war in Ukraine has shown that ingenuity and tenacity in human coordination is essential. When understanding the potential of protocols like Ethereum to be useful in such a time, pragmatism is wise. During her Fellowship, Ria will research the real drivers and blockers of adoption of cryptocurrencies and other decentralized applications for ordinary users to map emergent use cases and behaviors in Ukraine.

(dev)Connect with Fellows

Over the next six months, each fellow will drive forward a small project that works toward larger objectives in their story. Fellowship stories will be published over the course of 2023 on this blog, but there are more opportunities to meet and learn about their projects. If you, dear reader, are interested in learning about the fellows and their projects, consider attending devconnect in Istanbul and in particular the Next Billion World Café event, and connect with us in person!

To the many applicants to the Next Billion Fellowship cohort 3 not selected, we thank you for sharing your story with us, and are glad to know that you’re out there tinkering, building, researching, and creating the future of human coordination.