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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 Grishnakh on Monday January 04 2016, @09:11PM
Sounds like you're the religious nut here, since you called out "atheist / agnostic types", and your writing betrays this type of thinking, since you don't believe in evidence nor do you have any ability to reason. The article itself makes the position that self-driving cars don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than the average human driver. That's the whole topic we're discussing here, yet you seem to not understand this very basic concept. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise: your kind doesn't understand the basic concepts behind evolution or geological time scales either, even though most schoolkids can.
•Sure everything else humans make is a POS, but this will be immaculate holy conception code that is free of all faults, bugless, perfect.
a prophet of the future will write that code for us and it'll be bugless being heard directly from the mouth of god.
Avionics systems, engine ECUs, ABS controllers, etc. all work extremely reliably and in a fault-free manner. We've been running engines with ECUs now for decades, and have had ABS brakes for decades, and haven't had any real problems. I guess I shouldn't expect you to understand this either since your kind doesn't understand evidence or empirical reasoning.
The rest of your post is insane drivel so I won't even bother to respond to it.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 05 2016, @01:40PM
Sorry for insulting your self driving car religion. Nothing personal was intended of course.
fault-free manner
Ah now there's the problem, ECUs are not bug free and are involved in recalls and do have crazy failure modes yet they are moronically simple, basically read a bunch of sensors to determine how much gas to squirt down the intake at this instant. This is trivial to design on a whiteboard or a bench with some EEs and chemists and controls engineers, none of the science is unknown, very little of the engineering is unknown. Yet they still screw it up, this insanely simple process...
Now the problem with driving is before we implement a solution we can't even define "good driving" or "fault free driving" and people end up in court where even with massive data gathering and extensive monday morning quarterbacking they sometimes STILL can't define it. Unlike the laws of themodynamics that govern an engine ECU, the driving laws are under continuous revision because nobody knows whats truly "right" or "correct".
Humans can't even define the goal or endpoint of "good driving" yet via the miracle of immaculate conception or AI or technobabble or neural networks we'll magically be handed tablets/ipads with faultless driving code. Which is ridiculous.
See a religion is primarily a way of behaving, and the self-driving car fundamentalists act just like (fill in the blank) religion members when their faith is challenged. And you being a devout believer, I'm not pissed off at you for having to act like a true believer when I pointed out and made fun a bit of certain aspects of the self driving car religion. But you have to admit, even as a believer, some of their behavior and claims are kinda funny in appearance to a non-believer such as myself.
Oh and the bit about atheist types getting pissed off is they (we, more or less) often take great pride in not believing or being open minded, and if you point out they're devout believers in the self driving car religion, they fly off into a none the less fundamentalist rage because their type does not believe... even when observationally, they do.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday January 05 2016, @04:32PM
I don't agree with GP because calling something religious or scientific is a matter of scope, so if all religions do X and X is not a statement about a deity, X is still not religious.
I don't agree with you either because you still talk about inconceivable concepts like "believing in evidence" instead of "believing that the absence of (unattainable, mind you) evidence hints strongly enough at the absence of god", which is a rationalization. While "refusing to believe" would be perfectly acceptable instead.
Last OT question for proper light shining religious men and dirty infidels still squabbling about evolution: from a POV outside time and space is there any difference between "creating something with property X" and "ending up with something having property X"?
In time you can say "i want outcome Y so I have to make it happen", outside time you say "i want Y, so the totality of completely random/free chosen events will point to Y if I arrange so."
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 05 2016, @05:39PM
I'm not addressing the presence or absence of a god, my whole point is about evidence-based thinking, which religious people do not exhibit. It's very simple: if there's evidence to support an assertion, then I'll give more weight to that assertion than to one which has no supporting evidence. Religious people don't do this: they believe something with no evidence other than personal testimony, which ends up being nothing more than "I believe X because all these other people believe X", which eventually goes back to some ancient orally-passed stories about something that may or may not have happened, and probably didn't happen in the way people claim. There's an exercise many people do in early grade school where the teacher whispers a secret into one kid's ear, then he whispers it in the next kid's ear, and so on until they get to the last kid, and he blurts it out, and it's nothing like the original secret, so any kind of oral story is really quite worthless because humans simply can't reliably transmit information that way, even among a small number of people in the same room, let alone among generations of people geographically dispersed and speaking different languages.
Worse, religious people frequently believe in nonsensical things in complete opposition to available evidence. Creationism is a prime example of this one. We have countless fossils of lifeforms going back millions of years, and plenty of other evidence of geological processes, and even human life going back quite far, yet religious people deny all this and say the earth is 6500 years old and all this evidence was "planted there by Satan to fool us". In short, religious people do not mentally live in the real world, they live in their own fantasy world.
So, if I have one religious nut telling me that "self-driving cars can't possibly work", and on the other hand I have several million miles of Google vehicles driving themselves around autonomously with no major incidents (and a few minor ones all caused by humans), who am I going to believe?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday January 05 2016, @08:33PM
If Z is evidence from god there is no way for anybody to tell Z comes from god vs Z comes from a sufficiently powerful non-god implementing unknown tech or mind manipulation. Unknown tech is always possible because there is no way to say "i discovered everything discoverable" from the inside of a system.
So, the idea of god can only be object of belief or disbelief.
You were not addressing the existence of god but you were still say "they believe something with no evidence other than personal testimony" as if it were a bad thing. In the case of "meta" things (transcendent) it's the only plausible position.
For all things that are not meta, instead, evidence is potentially possible and it is either shown or not, still no need for the verb "believe".
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 05 2016, @09:47PM
If Z is evidence from god there is no way for anybody to tell Z comes from god vs Z comes from a sufficiently powerful non-god implementing unknown tech or mind manipulation.
Honestly, at that point, does it matter? Anything with tech that advanced is effectively a god, per Asimov's quote ("any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic").
Also, it's really beside my point, because no one's presented any actual evidence Z anyway. If there really were some evidence Z (like some guy magically appearing and performing miracles while TV crews film it, and then touring around the world to show more and more people in person), *then* this would be a good debate. At this point, we don't even have that, we just have ancient stories which have less veracity than a fantasy novel. For all we know, they were made up by people who were high on hallucinogens, then twisted around even more through oral storytelling, before finally being written down centuries later. How do you think all those crazy Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Norse myths came about? Some druggie had a vision about a river with a boatman, someone retells the story and the boatman becomes skeletal, someone else adds that he demands payment, someone else adds that the underworld is on the other side, someone else adds an island in the middle with a snake-haired woman....
You were not addressing the existence of god but you were still say "they believe something with no evidence other than personal testimony" as if it were a bad thing. In the case of "meta" things (transcendent) it's the only plausible position.
No, it's not. You can simply refuse to believe fantastical things unless presented with better evidence that some delusional half-wit spewing nonsense, or worse, some guy demanding you pay him 10% of your income so that God will love you more and he can buy a private jet.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday January 08 2016, @02:10AM
Actually, evidence Z has been presented lots of times, from the first smart guy predicting eclipses and pioneering priesthood telling people what to do to make the sun reappear, to today, with the 'you are god, unlock your power through spiritual practices' implying spiritual is always divine.
Honestly, at that point, does it matter?
you bet it does, an infinitely powerful non god is still not able to escape reality, so in the end he's not any smarter than you for what concerns ultimate meanings. It's like a simulated living organism that gained root on the system where the simulation runs. No way to get outside it.
we just have ancient stories which have less veracity than a fantasy novel. For all we know, they were made up by people who were high on hallucinogens, then twisted around even more through oral storytelling, before finally being written down centuries later. How do you think all those crazy Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Norse myths came about? Some druggie had a vision about a river with a boatman, someone retells the story and the boatman becomes skeletal, someone else adds that he demands payment, someone else adds that the underworld is on the other side, someone else adds an island in the middle with a snake-haired woman....
You should document yourself about this, because you simply translated the modern idea of written story to the oral tradition. It's a bit like looking at an old painting that describes an event and proclaim "look how those people are all lined up, look at that stuff lying there, there is no way any of it happened obviously", while the painter in fact inserted more meaning that a photographer could have, so the event is real, fictional or altered? who knows, what is certain is that you can't tell from the lack of photorealism.
No, it's not. You can simply refuse to believe fantastical things unless presented with better evidence
My whole point is that you become fallacious when you add the "unless..." clause.
For impossible to verify event X, you can believe it didn't happen, but when you say "i won't believe it until you show me the smell of purple" it's my duty to inform that your requirement makes no sense, even if some religions considers that "believing the works" is a good backup strategy (see john 14).
As for the "god is real and needs money", I did not imply you have to believe so why should I suggest a particular model.
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