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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 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.