I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism.

In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero?

Simply doing your job, being a decent human being.

A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by

their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism with me,

Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. Hello and thanks for downloading the more or less podcast.

With the program that looks at the numbers in the news, life and on the streets, and I'm Lizzie

McNeil.

Loyal listener, Amberes Chappurria, got in touch to ask about a post he saw on social

media that made some suspicious-looking claims about the safety of cars driven by humans versus cars

that drive by themselves. The Post stated that Tesla's cars are 10 times safer than human

driven cars, and Waymo self-driving taxis are five times safer. Now, we've checked, and these

claims do come from reports published by the companies themselves.

Now, I've been driving for a while.

I've come across plenty of really, really bad human drivers, but I also know self-driving cars aren't perfect either.

I mean, even the Batmobile crashed into Superman in that one film.

Anyway, back to Ambrish's question.

Is the difference in safety between self-driving cars and human-operated cars really that high?

You hear the stories about how human drivers are terrible, they get drunk, they don't pay attention, they get distracted.

That's Mark McCarthy, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute Center for Technology Innovation.

And then you think you've got this automatic machine that doesn't get drunk, it doesn't get distracted,

it doesn't get confused, but it's a mistaken logic.

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