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>We can’t cut corners just because we want to rush a life-saving product to market. But there's a huge difference between a self-driving car and a novel drug.
by madmax96 10y ago
>We can’t cut corners just because we want to rush a life-saving product to market.
But there's a huge difference between a self-driving car and a novel drug. These cars are using statistical learning mechanisms -- it is impossible to prove that the car will always function correctly.
>Yes, it could be that autonomous cars will save many more lives than they take. But “the ends justify the means” is a dangerous approach in ethics, capable of justifying any evil as long as the math worked out.
I mean, yeah, "the ends justify the means" is a dangerous approach. This is a strawman: allowing less than perfect algorithms to transport us a little less than safely (though safer than currently) is not an instance of "the ends justify the means." It's an instance of pragmatic rationality in response to a very real and very common danger.
>If torturing innocent people or infringing on other rights can deliver some greater good, we would (or should) be deeply troubled by the choice.
The author is using an analogy between torture or general rights-violations as an argument against driverless technology! How does this seem reasonable?
There's one question I have for the author: what and who's rights are being violated by driverless technology that are not already being violated by human driving?
- uola 10y agoComputer software can also be updated, yet almost everything is broken. Rushing self-driving cars is not pragmatic, it's keeping the lack of safety culture that driving already has. Whatever lives you save in the short run is likely to be lost many times over on the margin of the standard we expect from self-driving cars. Pragmatic safety would be things like speed and distance enforcement. That's how self-driving is really going to save lives, by not making those one in hundred thousand decisions that kill people. Which you could have today if it wasn't for that watching movies with autopilot is so much cooler than being saved from yourself.
- branchan 10y agoCan you elaborate on 'everything is broken'?
- uola 10y agoThere's a supreme mismatch between the state of software (and infrastructure) and how we use it today. If nothing else people should be concerned about this because it makes the Internet de facto not open, since most people can't afford the resources (like security) to run many service. You would think that sending something to a machine on the Internet would imply that it would actually reach the recipient and that no one else is listening. Not only is that not true, it was essentially never intended to be true. We work very hard to try and make it so, but will probably never reach a point were it will be equal to what it could have been if that was the intention from the beginning. https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1 https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1 http://swiftonsecurity.tumblr.com/post/98675308034/a-story-about-jessica http://swiftonsecurity.tumblr.com/post/98675308034/a-story-a...