The world has now seen its first death by driverless car, in the U.S. city of Tempe, Arizona, as a pedestrian was struck down by an Uber vehicle. This is a big news story, even though about 40,000 Americans die from motor vehicle accidents each year. We're learning that this technological age, which seemed to start with the pretty innocuous act of emailing, has evolved to play into our more primal fears about feeling out of control.
Stories about how individual people die, or nearly die, are captivating. If a child is trapped down a well, the world will watch for days and spend whatever is needed to pull off a rescue. This is because we elevate highly visible deaths over harder-to-see deaths: Notice the news coverage of Islamic State beheadings of Western journalists, victims of mass school shootings and the recent attempted-assassination of a Russian former double agent in Britain. We should not, however, see our hurried responses as overreacting. Too often the natural human tendency is not to respond decisively to a tragedy at all. If the drama of these deaths mobilizes us, that may be needed to help fix the underlying problem.
The rush to respond is more problematic, however, when the visible deaths spring from a new technology. The first American citizen to be assassinated by a mini-drone on U.S. soil will be a big, big story. There is already a viral fictional video about this possibility. We will indeed be mobilized to action, but we may respond by shunning or overregulating drones, even if such action is unlikely to limit terrorist attacks.