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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: 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.