2 ms·

> You say autonomous cars are "poised" to save many lives I said no such thing, you are putting words in my mouth. What I said is that the baseline for traffi

• YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  >> I said no such thing, you are putting words in my mouth. I was replying to someone else and you jumped in. You can hold the accusations of putting stuff in places, thank you. >> What I said is that the baseline for traffic deaths is quite high, and if (or when) autonomous cars are even a little better than humans, then less lives will be lost. And I said that autonomous cars being better than humans is just a hypothetical. I'll add that we have no evidence that it's the case. Computers are better at humans at tasks that require fast and accurate retrieval, or computation, but they'll not just magically become better than humans at driving. Somebody has to program them to do that. So who is going to do that? Do you know how to do that? Do you know anyone who knows how to do that? The theory is that we'll put enough (real or virtual) cars in enough training situations that they'll learn to drive on their own, but that approach has serious limitations, not least the fact that in the real world there may be an infinite number of situations that a learner will never encounter during training. In any case, with any other cognitive task that we train computers to carry out they end up making completely ridiculous mistakes, which in the case of driving will cost lives. Until we have a way to develop systems that understand their surroundings, autonomous cars being better drivers than humans is just a dangerous fantasy.