Ahead of the Curve

The proposed unintended consequences start to get a lot darker, too, like the idea that there might be a sudden drop in organ donations when all those car accidents go away.
Five reasons for a self-driving car slowdown

As far as the unintended consequences of autonomous vehicles go, I can imagine a lot darker. But it does bring up one of the things about modern life that people don't often talk about; the fact that there are a lot of things that more or less rely on bad outcomes for some or another group of people. A significant portion of the American consumer economy relies on poverty in other parts of the world, reality television often relies on people being willing to be debased or humiliated on screen... and a significant number of organ donations rely on people making driving errors that cost lives.

Speaking of circumstances that would prevent people from being killed as having the unintended consequence that other lives would not be saved sound callous, but maybe that's a side effect of the fact that it's only rarely discussed. I wonder if a greater willingness to admit to the undesirable circumstances that certain limited good rely on would lead to lowering the need for those undesirable circumstances. Not that I know what, at this point, would allow people to create new organs from scratch so that they wouldn't need to rely so much on otherwise healthy people dying suddenly, but I'm given to understand that lab-grown organs (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/growing-organs) show promise for the future.

And, of course, so do autonomous vehicles, which haven't yet made it into general production much less taken over the everyday vehicle market. So there is still time. And if it's understood that shortages of transplantable organs will only grow deeper once driving becomes orders of magnitude safer, then perhaps that calls for prioritizing research into creating organs. There is a difference between unintended consequences and unforeseeable consequences. And perhaps more open discussion of the unintended, but predictable, is the key to avoiding them.