SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2, Insightful) by hedleyroos on Monday January 04 2016, @11:21AM
There will be no discussion, only riots and revolution.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday January 04 2016, @12:44PM
Butlerian Jihad, for fans of the Dune series of books. Not necessarily a bad idea.
Something to consider is rich people like using their power over other people, not other machines. Its a primate thing. So given the choice of a really smokin hot 22 year old woman as an office secretary err admin assistant, or a really effective Siri in their phone, they'll chose dominance over the other primates EVERY time. This is not going to be understood on a tech blog, none the less, it is how the world works. The 22 year old hottie's main (G rated) job function might be to operate Siri for the rich dude.
The future of 1% being super rich and 99% being dirt poor looks a hell of a lot more like an English Manor House from 1900 than like The Jetsons. The financial difference between a rich dude in the passenger seat of a self driving commuter Honda and his neighbor in an antique restored car driven by a chauffeur is huge.
A lot of folks are only willing to consider small individual aspects of the death of the middle class and the return to feudalism, leading to weird outlooks on life.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marco2G on Monday January 04 2016, @01:01PM
There is a difference between being starved by aristocracy or by being looked down upon by oligarchy while being fed, clothed, warm and travelling across the world in your vast amounts of spare time.
There is always going to be a class difference. And there will always be enough ways to play alpha primate without the lesser primates suffering. I'm just aiming for that.
Frankly, I'm a pretty proud person. However, if someone decided to pay me a salary that allows me the same or better comfort I have now but only working two days a week, I WILL scrub their toilets, bow before them, kiss their boots and say thank you. I literally have no problems with that.
Being the one granting a primate freedom binds that primate as surely as the whip.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday January 04 2016, @02:25PM
That sounds appealing, but human nature doesn't change and history indicates that's an extremely unlikely outcome.
What would help is a social structure that automagically eliminates sociopath / psychopaths from the hierarchy rather than rewarding and promoting them. Humanity hasn't figured that out yet, at least in historical times. Some authoritarian tribal structures seem to do that by being very small, but they get run over by bigger societies, although some of that is just "noble savage" idealism.
Monarchy seemed better at it than democracy... there's a fixation on comparing young healthy democracies with dying monarchies which proves nothing. That brings up the point that all history and civilizations are cyclical but nobody wants to admit that in the downslope, leading to industrial scale suffering and death. Open source style "fail fast and often" probably would help.