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from the how-long-could-they-last-in-Boston? dept.
A little while back, I saw the following tweet:
I can print mostly. My wifi works often. The Xbox usually recognises me. Siri sometimes works. But my self driving car will be *perfect*.
The tweet has since been deleted, so I won't name the author, but it's a thought-provoking idea. At first, I agreed with it. I'm a programmer and know full well just how shoddy is 99.9% of the code we all write. The idea that I would put my life in the hands of a coder like myself is a bit worrying.
[...] The reality is that self-driving cars don't need to be perfect. They just need to be better than the alternative: human-driven cars. And that is a much lower bar, as human beings are remarkably bad at driving.
[...] Self-driving cars don't get tired. They don't get drunk. They don't get distracted by friends or a crying baby. They don't look away from the road to send a text message. They don't speed, tailgate, brake too late, forget to show a blinker, drive too fast in bad weather, run red lights, race other cars at red lights, or miss exits. Self-driving cars aren't going to be perfect, but they will be a hell of a lot better than you and me.
Related: The High-Stakes Race to Rid the World of Human Drivers
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday January 04 2016, @10:09AM
It's not exponential and wasn't really in the past. Human population growth follows something roughly like a logistic curve. We hit the point of maximum growth rate quite a while ago and since then the growth rate has slowed. It's unlikely thag we'll hit 10bn without colonizing other planets.
(Score: 2) by Marco2G on Monday January 04 2016, @12:48PM
I wasn't talking about population size. At all.
(Score: 2) by Marco2G on Monday January 04 2016, @12:56PM
Although I will grant that the word exponential is probably wrong anyway. However, resources are limited and our demand for them is yet growing.