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Look at how the word was formed. It came from Automatic - "(of a device or process) working by itself with little or no direct human control" and Pilot - "a per
by blackguardx 10y ago
Look at how the word was formed. It came from Automatic - "(of a device or process) working by itself with little or no direct human control" and Pilot - "a person who operates the flying controls of an aircraft"
In the 50s or 60s or whenever they were first introduced, it was incredibly novel to have some portion of aircraft control handled by a machine. To go from partial machine control to fully machine control seems like a natural evolution and I think the name speaks for that evolution.
I think it is fair that most consumers think that "autopilot" implies fully autonomous driving. No one calls cruise control an autopilot when in fact it is a crude form of one.
- mikeash 10y ago"Little or no direct human control" is pretty far from "zero human supervision" so the etymological argument doesn't really do it for me. Lots of cars have "automatic transmissions" but nobody gets upset when it fails to shift into reverse on its own based on contextual clues.
- electic 10y agoA big part of this is movies. When they show auto-pilot in the movies, people get up and just leave. There are countless times I have seen this play out in the movies and people think cars with the same name should behave the same way.
- mikeash 10y agoDo you have an example? The only one that comes to mind is Airplane! where the whole thing is played for laughs. I'm not questioning it, I'm just unfamiliar.
- etendue 10y agoDemolition Man, I Robot, or Minority Report
- mikeash 10y agoIt disturbs me that all the examples so far are science fiction. If people are inferring real-world capabilities from SF movies then we're totally screwed!
- etendue 10y agoI don't see why my examples should in any way "disturb you". Science fiction frequently is an inspiration for products and ideas that are made real, examples are legion. I judiciously selected I Robot and Minority Report because Audi and Lexus, respectively, had product placement for future design concepts.
- mikeash 10y agoIf these movies are in fact the reason why people overestimate the capabilities of Tesla's system, then that means people's inability to distinguish science fiction from reality is getting people actually killed. That's pretty disturbing! Note, I'm not saying it's wrong, just awful.
- etendue 10y agoI am not trying to imply that people are having difficulty distinguishing fiction from reality. I am noting that real auto companies have deliberately placed product concepts in media to prime people's expectations of what future products will look like and what they will be able to do. Independently, there are also proper level 4 systems under active development getting plenty of popular press coverage. I also note that the very public face of Tesla frequently makes very public and (in my opinion, overly optimistic) declarations of their product's capabilities both present and future, for example (Jan 2016), "The Model S is 'probably better than humans at this point in highway driving' according to Musk." [0] It doesn't strike me to be all that far of a leap for an average person to conclude that the future has arrived. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/11/elon-musk-tesla-cars-no-driver-model-s https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/11/elon-musk...
- 10y ago
- electic 10y agoCaptain America - Civil War
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- blackguardx 10y agoDon't you think the people who coined the term autopilot envisioned an eventual future when it was fully autonomous or "fully automatic?" It seems your major sticking point is about the state of the art of autopilots in other fields.
- mikeash 10y agoI'm pretty doubtful that when Lawrence Sperry connected a gyroscope to a hydraulic control system in 1912 that he envisioned a future where the plane handled all aspects of flight. Ironically, Mr. Sperry apparently trusted his own device too much, as he crashed a plane after accidentally disengaging the autopilot in the midst of becoming possibly the first person to have sex while airborne. My sticking point is the state of the art of all autopilots in all fields. Fully autonomous systems are very new and still highly experimental (most drones still have human pilots, just remote, for example) and so I don't get how this popular conception that "autopilot = fully autonomous" happened. It's as if everyone thought that "boat" meant something with wheels that can drive on land.