Recently I decided to look into the potential impact of autonomous vehicles on organ donation and found that this is a subject that many others have covered — even years ago. Surprisingly early in the history of AV development. Why this topic resulted in so many articles I don’t know. I’ve written about systemic risk and autonomous vehicles before but barely mentioned the potential impact on organ donation. However, after looking into the topic I came to the opposite conclusion of the other authors.
All the articles I found pointed to a coming shortfall of transplantable organs due to AV safety. However, I do not think that the impact will be big or even noticeable. Note that I am using a range of data I found about this, much of which seems noisy. If you have better sources or work in related industries, let me know if there are more accurate inputs that I should use.
(Note that this is different way than I usually write. In this article I’m not identifying an unintended consequence as much as I am saying that a stated one does not exist. And also note that this is a macabre subject.)