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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @01:04PM
As others have mentioned, the machines you are talking about still have humans pressing the buttons (even if only the big red one). Even auto-pilots have real pilots on watch at all times. And unlike the "driver still needs to be able to take over" idea for self driving cars, they have A) several seconds longer to do so, due to traffic separation, and B) two of them, so that they won't both be reading the newspaper at the same time.
The ones that don't have people pressing the buttons tend to have big fences with locking gates that ensure that the whole thing will shut down if anyone tries to enter the working area.
That's not going to work with self-driving cars.