Will insurance become redundant as things get safer?

There are two different versions of this. One says that driverless cars will destroy the vehicle insurance industry. The other says that ‘when they find a cure for cancer’ people will live to 100 and so ‘won’t need insurance because there will be very few deaths’.

Rubbish.

Insurance is as prone to disruption as any other business. I myself have been working hard to introduce new, sometimes disruptive, technology to the sector. I say that only to remind you that I am no ‘head-in-the-sand’ luddite. I do not look at the future, screw up my eyes, stick my fingers in my ears, and shout ‘can’t see can’t hear’.
I am confident that insurance will not disappear with the doubling, say, of lifetimes because it has happened already.

Around 1800 the UK and the Netherlands were the richest countries in the world and life expectancy at birth was close to just 40 years. Today it is close to around 80 years. Death amongst those aged between 20 and 40 has become so rare as to have effectively ended. Have life insurance sales collapsed? No, they have not. So other factors must be in action.