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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: 2) by VLM on Monday January 04 2016, @03:18PM
The problem with the linked story is its trying to use a programmers rational experience to debate a religious idea.
People don't think their way into a religious belief, there's no way they're going to think their way out, but even worse, thinking having nothing to with how they got there, they're not going to suddenly start thinking for no particular reason.
I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with religious ideas. They just have their own way of being worked out, and rational reasoned discussion of real world experiences (like the linked article) is not it. Convert at the point of a sword, badger your family members, LTR with someone in a group, experience trauma or awe, drugs may be false or real enlightenment or more likely somewhere on the spectrum, death of a significant family member, etc. Cold rational debate (like the article) usually is not an effective method of religious conversion.
I guess I can't use a cruddy SN car analogy, this being about cars, but I can use a cruddy creationism analogy in that once creationism is identified as a religious issue, its a waste of time to debate it from a "scientific rational" perspective like you'd use when debating isotope half life measurements or astronomical observations.
The linked article might accidentally BE right (or wrong) but its definitely DOIN it wrong. You don't convince anyone by walking into church while waving a scientific paper around.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 05 2016, @08:59PM
No one is arguing that they'll be perfect. No one is arguing that they'll appear without considerable effort. While some self-driving car advocates are already pining for the days when there are no more human drivers, that's not the same as villainizing human drivers. No one is arguing that we have to sacrifice the occasional wheeled crate of orphans to the self-driving gods.