Autonomous vehicles

[Spongebob]

I wonder if the AV programmers have encoded Asimov's three laws of robotics into their systems?

[Spongebob]

Not the point. Cars have accidents all the time, even with all the best closed course testing. But what I am talking about is avoiding things like the Ford Pinto. Or did you forget that? Automation in cars for now, should be relegated to closed environment. One certainly cannot blame a business for everything the user does with your product. But ultimately it is still up to the maker to do everything they can to insure safety and not use the public as lab rats.

This is a valid point and it should be noted that there are quite a lot of recalls these days due to design problems with vehicles.  I don't remember ever having a recall until around 2005, since then every single car I've owned has had multiple recalls, some of them very serious.  I'm not sure if this is a quality control issue or just a business issue with trying to get new models out too quickly.  We certainly don't want AV technology that's not thoroughly tested, but then look at our phones and computers and think about how many updates they require to "fix" problems.  It doesn't inspire confidence.

[Angrboda]

The question often comes up as a hypothetical. Suppose we added small computers to monkey's brains so that we could communicate and turn them into automated soldiers to fight in wars. When and how would we make the call to determine that they could be trusted to make correct decisions about when to use their weapons in the real world. Ultimately one has to compare them to humans in terms of reliability. Humans fail that test, too, so as long as the rate of failure is reasonable, and not a lot higher than that in humans, objections based upon failure seem to be employing a double standard. The other thing is that we'll never really know what they're going to ultimately do until we release them into the real world. Simulations can't predict the real world. We can manage the risk by incremental implementation, starting out small, and scaling up based on results, but there is no substitute for real world tests. An occasional death given the promise of the technology seems a small price to pay, IMO.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

^Yup. It’s difficult to think of a technological advance where the advantages - either direct or serendipitous - haven’t outweighed the toll on human life.

Boru

[Spongebob]

^Yup. It’s difficult to think of a technological advance where the advantages - either direct or serendipitous - haven’t outweighed the toll on human life.

Boru

I think this is true, but we seem to be slow to learn from past mistakes.  New technologies emerge all the time and we have plenty of experience with this causing unintended side effects, yet we have a pretty bad track record of remembering this the next time some new technology emerges.  Its typically not until the new technology has been out there for a while that the problems become evident and solutions are devised.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

^Yup. It’s difficult to think of a technological advance where the advantages - either direct or serendipitous - haven’t outweighed the toll on human life.

Boru

I think this is true, but we seem to be slow to learn from past mistakes.  New technologies emerge all the time and we have plenty of experience with this causing unintended side effects, yet we have a pretty bad track record of remembering this the next time some new technology emerges.  Its typically not until the new technology has been out there for a while that the problems become evident and solutions are devised.

Naturally, it isn’t possible to foresee all possible outcomes of a new technology. I’m not sure there’s any way around this (until technology gets off its collective arse and invents the ChronoScope).

Boru

[Fake Messiah]

If one of the major problems with cars is that they create smog and other pollution, as well as clog the roads with their sheer number and that everything would be much better if everyone drove on public transport, then maybe public transportation should be free. Maybe then people would use public transportation and save everything and everyone.

But what would AI cars solve? Maybe they would solve a lot of problems in the US and Canada. You see, in the US and Canada there are these things called "stroads" which are a mix of street and road built so that cars can go fast, but they can not go fast because the road is passing by houses where cars come in from the driveways, cars coming from perpendicular roads, traffic lights, which results in frequent car accidents, jams, and overall small traffic. But if the cars were intelligent and could communicate between themselves, then maybe that could be avoided by them making deals of who does what when, so that there wouldn't even be a need for traffic lights.

Anyway, here's more about this stroad problem

[Spongebob]

That's very interesting. As usual, the USA is behind other countries. These "stroads" describe most of the horrible roadways in the US. Walking anywhere is a nightmare. I've seen a few isolated areas where progress has been made but it's not common, at least not in the south.