10 ms·

Relying on error-prone, distracted, slow humans to guide massive killing machines is playing Russian roulette. AI driving will no doubt be eventually better tha

Relying on error-prone, distracted, slow humans to guide massive killing machines is playing Russian roulette. AI driving will no doubt be eventually better than the best human driver within a decade, in nearly all instances.

unclebucknasty 10y ago
The glorification of tech/denigration of humans juxtaposition is getting old fast. This attitude may seem benign, but it's insidious, carries a hint of elitism, and spills over into labor, class, and other aspects of human life. Why can't we appreciate tech advances without devaluing people?
- avar 10y ago
  Because certain types of technical advancement requires an element of devaluing people. "Calculator" used to be a job performed exclusively by humans. Moving to mechanical & digital calculators didn't only require gains in efficiency, but also a recognition that this was a job humans were simply worse at than machines, so it was irresponsible to task a human with it. Similarly self-driving cars can't simply be a nice thing to have, eventually we have to have the discussion that it's irresponsible to have human driven vehicles on the road.
  - unclebucknasty 10y ago
    Promoting the tech and respecting people are not mutually exclusive. I'm not arguing that we should endanger people and my comment is not about this one instance. It's about a general attitude of devaluing people. Where do you think that road leads? When Uber vehicles were found to have run red lights a couple of weeks ago, Uber's response was that these were human operated and served as an example of why they must rid the roads of error-prone human drivers as quickly as possible. This, as if humans were a scourge that must be eliminated. There is a strange rising anger with people for being human. And, once we've ridded the roads, labor force, economy, etc. of all the pesky humans, then what? Who owns the tech? Who has the power? Will they be as benevolent as the machines we've learned to worship? What is the value of a human life by then? Quote whatever stats you like, but normalizing this attitude of fallible, dispensible humans is dangerous in many ways.
    - avar 10y ago
      What do you even mean by "devaluing"? Of course a more error prone, dangerous and expensive driver has less value. Is pointing this out somehow wrong? I think not pointing it out devalues human life. The road of getting rid of fallible humans from boring automatable jobs leads to Utopia, and I reject your notion that this is somehow inherently different from e.g automation in agriculture or computing
      - unclebucknasty 10y ago
        >What do you even mean by "devaluing"? I've been clear about my meaning. Can't simplify it any further. >Because certain types of technical advancement requires an element of devaluing people That's your quote. What did you mean? >Of course a more error prone, dangerous and expensive driver has less value. There's a difference between preferring tech to do the driving and saying the human has "less value". You don't see that? In any case, a hostile regard for human fallibility that approaches promotion of the dispensability of humans isn't a good thing.
        swasheck 10y ago
        A nice sci-fi trope is that the unpredictability of humanity, and when/how it will "fail" when something better would "succeed", results in the preservation of humanity itself. It's nice to consider in the wake of the elitism.
        unclebucknasty 10y ago
        Well, I think there's something to the notion that there is value in humanity, in spite of--or perhaps even because of--its flaws and non-binary approach to the Universe. And, of course, there's the whole "I Robot" deal, wherein the robot elects to save the life of the adult vs. the child based purely on a sterile odds-of-survival calculation. That's not really what I had in mind with my comments here, but it is an interesting point. And maybe it is another reason to consider prudence as we rush headlong into a world increasingly reliant upon technology.
  - disposablezero 10y ago
    People tend to hate on anything which threatens their job/identity, even if it rationalizes not addressing preventable causes of million of injuries and deaths. That is the definition of a SJW.
    - unclebucknasty 10y ago
      That's actually not the definition of SJW. You may want to look up the history of the term and consider what your eagerness to bash people over the head with it says about you.
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
  The numbers support disposablezero. Humans deserve this devaluation.
  - unclebucknasty 10y ago
    No, we don't. We can promote the value of the tech without the denigration.
- brainfire 10y ago
  This is something that kills tens of thousands of people per year in the US alone- already greatly reduced by technological advances, and still falling. Excuse me if I don't shed a tear for the feelings that might be hurt among human drivers who consistently and measurably overestimate their abilities.
  - unclebucknasty 10y ago
    >Excuse me if I don't shed a tear for the feelings that might be hurt among human drivers who consistently and measurably overestimate their abilities. Indeed. If only we could find them all and kill them before they strike again.
    - aidenn0 10y ago
      Or, you know, replace them with machines that are safer.
      - unclebucknasty 10y ago
        My point was in how we frame these things--the human relationship to technology. Specifically, it's about how we can raise the important point that humans can be made safer by technology, without it being a value statement about the human race.
        aidenn0 10y ago
        I don't know how one can relate how good humans are at a task with how good a state-of-the-art machine is at a task without making some sort of value statement about the human race. Either way there is a huge difference between "I'm fine with hurting people's feelings" and "I'm fine with killing people"
        unclebucknasty 10y ago
        >there is a huge difference between "I'm fine with hurting people's feelings" and "I'm fine with killing people Those aren't the choices.
- Nadya 10y ago
  Every death in my family that I'm capable of remembering was auto-related and the driver was at fault. All of them were easily preventable if the driver was not distracted or wasn't straight up breaking the law. That is 6 family members I would still have if not for complete human incompetence. The romanticism of "human control" is not an idea I am willing to support. Humans are terrible at most things they do. We get tired. We get distracted. We become complacent. We bend the rules. We forget steps in the safety protocol. We make incorrect decisions. If there are only 99 ways to do something wrong a human will invent the 100th way of doing it wrong. If mechanical failures and software errors can be proven to be a safer risk than human error - then humans should be exchanged for robots. Jobs and hobbies be damned if there are lives at stake.
  - unclebucknasty 10y ago
    I don't advocate that we needlessly endanger lives; just that we don't devalue those same humans we claim to want to save.
    - fixermark 10y ago
      To avoid this devaluation, I think we'll need to find other ways in which people are to be valued than "driving acumen." But that should be pretty straightforward; there's a lot of things people can do that aren't "drive a car."
      - unclebucknasty 10y ago
        As I stated previously, it's not about this one thing.
- aidenn0 10y ago
  Human drivers have been denegrated for over 100 years now; from 1909: http://cf.collectorsweekly.com/uploads/2014/03/puck-number-2.jpg http://cf.collectorsweekly.com/uploads/2014/03/puck-number-2...
- fixermark 10y ago
  In general, probably yes. I'm a lot less inclined to take that attitude in a space where there were 35,000 deaths due to vehicular accident and the most common causes of accidents are distracted driving, drunk driving, speeding, and reckless driving. That's basically "humans," "humans," "humans," and "humans;" I suppose we could spin that by pointing out all the millions of miles per year people drive successfully without killing themselves or each other, but that doesn't change the fact that removing humans from the equation should push the death numbers down further. Driving is at that special saddle-point of attention-thirsty and tedious that people can be good at, but not perfect; the models of how attention wanes in a tedious environment are pretty solid. It's precisely the sort of thing we should be trying to automate if we want to drive the fatality rate below the current 11 per 100,000 population number in the US.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Humans weren't built to drive. We can't support our attention during an entire trip, we can't deal with several variables at the same time, and we have all those emotional heuristics that are completely counterproductive when driving. That's stating the obvious, not devaluing people.
- disposablezero 10y ago
  Joking? People can't fly an f-16 or most rockets, but computers can. People get drunk and plow into traffic in the other direction, run over a crowd of people because they're nuts. That's the truth, get used to it.
  - unclebucknasty 10y ago
    People also create computers. In any case, your argument would be extremely effective--if my argument was that people are infallible.
    - disposablezero 10y ago
      Who cares? SJW identity politics is not an argument, it's a trolling opinion.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - unclebucknasty 10y ago
        Taking the time to read comments, then still more time to reply that you don't care. No irony there.

unclebucknasty 10y ago

The glorification of tech/denigration of humans juxtaposition is getting old fast. This attitude may seem benign, but it's insidious, carries a hint of elitism, and spills over into labor, class, and other aspects of human life. Why can't we appreciate tech advances without devaluing people?

avar 10y ago
Because certain types of technical advancement requires an element of devaluing people. "Calculator" used to be a job performed exclusively by humans. Moving to mechanical & digital calculators didn't only require gains in efficiency, but also a recognition that this was a job humans were simply worse at than machines, so it was irresponsible to task a human with it. Similarly self-driving cars can't simply be a nice thing to have, eventually we have to have the discussion that it's irresponsible to have human driven vehicles on the road.
- unclebucknasty 10y ago
  Promoting the tech and respecting people are not mutually exclusive. I'm not arguing that we should endanger people and my comment is not about this one instance. It's about a general attitude of devaluing people. Where do you think that road leads? When Uber vehicles were found to have run red lights a couple of weeks ago, Uber's response was that these were human operated and served as an example of why they must rid the roads of error-prone human drivers as quickly as possible. This, as if humans were a scourge that must be eliminated. There is a strange rising anger with people for being human. And, once we've ridded the roads, labor force, economy, etc. of all the pesky humans, then what? Who owns the tech? Who has the power? Will they be as benevolent as the machines we've learned to worship? What is the value of a human life by then? Quote whatever stats you like, but normalizing this attitude of fallible, dispensible humans is dangerous in many ways.
  - avar 10y ago
    What do you even mean by "devaluing"? Of course a more error prone, dangerous and expensive driver has less value. Is pointing this out somehow wrong? I think not pointing it out devalues human life. The road of getting rid of fallible humans from boring automatable jobs leads to Utopia, and I reject your notion that this is somehow inherently different from e.g automation in agriculture or computing
    - unclebucknasty 10y ago
      >What do you even mean by "devaluing"? I've been clear about my meaning. Can't simplify it any further. >Because certain types of technical advancement requires an element of devaluing people That's your quote. What did you mean? >Of course a more error prone, dangerous and expensive driver has less value. There's a difference between preferring tech to do the driving and saying the human has "less value". You don't see that? In any case, a hostile regard for human fallibility that approaches promotion of the dispensability of humans isn't a good thing.
      - swasheck 10y ago
        A nice sci-fi trope is that the unpredictability of humanity, and when/how it will "fail" when something better would "succeed", results in the preservation of humanity itself. It's nice to consider in the wake of the elitism.
        unclebucknasty 10y ago
        Well, I think there's something to the notion that there is value in humanity, in spite of--or perhaps even because of--its flaws and non-binary approach to the Universe. And, of course, there's the whole "I Robot" deal, wherein the robot elects to save the life of the adult vs. the child based purely on a sterile odds-of-survival calculation. That's not really what I had in mind with my comments here, but it is an interesting point. And maybe it is another reason to consider prudence as we rush headlong into a world increasingly reliant upon technology.
- disposablezero 10y ago
  People tend to hate on anything which threatens their job/identity, even if it rationalizes not addressing preventable causes of million of injuries and deaths. That is the definition of a SJW.
  - unclebucknasty 10y ago
    That's actually not the definition of SJW. You may want to look up the history of the term and consider what your eagerness to bash people over the head with it says about you.
Sir_Cmpwn 10y ago
The numbers support disposablezero. Humans deserve this devaluation.
- unclebucknasty 10y ago
  No, we don't. We can promote the value of the tech without the denigration.
brainfire 10y ago
This is something that kills tens of thousands of people per year in the US alone- already greatly reduced by technological advances, and still falling. Excuse me if I don't shed a tear for the feelings that might be hurt among human drivers who consistently and measurably overestimate their abilities.
- unclebucknasty 10y ago
  >Excuse me if I don't shed a tear for the feelings that might be hurt among human drivers who consistently and measurably overestimate their abilities. Indeed. If only we could find them all and kill them before they strike again.
  - aidenn0 10y ago
    Or, you know, replace them with machines that are safer.
    - unclebucknasty 10y ago
      My point was in how we frame these things--the human relationship to technology. Specifically, it's about how we can raise the important point that humans can be made safer by technology, without it being a value statement about the human race.
      - aidenn0 10y ago
        I don't know how one can relate how good humans are at a task with how good a state-of-the-art machine is at a task without making some sort of value statement about the human race. Either way there is a huge difference between "I'm fine with hurting people's feelings" and "I'm fine with killing people"
        unclebucknasty 10y ago
        >there is a huge difference between "I'm fine with hurting people's feelings" and "I'm fine with killing people Those aren't the choices.
Nadya 10y ago
Every death in my family that I'm capable of remembering was auto-related and the driver was at fault. All of them were easily preventable if the driver was not distracted or wasn't straight up breaking the law. That is 6 family members I would still have if not for complete human incompetence. The romanticism of "human control" is not an idea I am willing to support. Humans are terrible at most things they do. We get tired. We get distracted. We become complacent. We bend the rules. We forget steps in the safety protocol. We make incorrect decisions. If there are only 99 ways to do something wrong a human will invent the 100th way of doing it wrong. If mechanical failures and software errors can be proven to be a safer risk than human error - then humans should be exchanged for robots. Jobs and hobbies be damned if there are lives at stake.
- unclebucknasty 10y ago
  I don't advocate that we needlessly endanger lives; just that we don't devalue those same humans we claim to want to save.
  - fixermark 10y ago
    To avoid this devaluation, I think we'll need to find other ways in which people are to be valued than "driving acumen." But that should be pretty straightforward; there's a lot of things people can do that aren't "drive a car."
    - unclebucknasty 10y ago
      As I stated previously, it's not about this one thing.
aidenn0 10y ago
Human drivers have been denegrated for over 100 years now; from 1909: http://cf.collectorsweekly.com/uploads/2014/03/puck-number-2.jpg http://cf.collectorsweekly.com/uploads/2014/03/puck-number-2...
fixermark 10y ago
In general, probably yes. I'm a lot less inclined to take that attitude in a space where there were 35,000 deaths due to vehicular accident and the most common causes of accidents are distracted driving, drunk driving, speeding, and reckless driving. That's basically "humans," "humans," "humans," and "humans;" I suppose we could spin that by pointing out all the millions of miles per year people drive successfully without killing themselves or each other, but that doesn't change the fact that removing humans from the equation should push the death numbers down further. Driving is at that special saddle-point of attention-thirsty and tedious that people can be good at, but not perfect; the models of how attention wanes in a tedious environment are pretty solid. It's precisely the sort of thing we should be trying to automate if we want to drive the fatality rate below the current 11 per 100,000 population number in the US.
marcosdumay 10y ago
Humans weren't built to drive. We can't support our attention during an entire trip, we can't deal with several variables at the same time, and we have all those emotional heuristics that are completely counterproductive when driving. That's stating the obvious, not devaluing people.
disposablezero 10y ago
Joking? People can't fly an f-16 or most rockets, but computers can. People get drunk and plow into traffic in the other direction, run over a crowd of people because they're nuts. That's the truth, get used to it.
- unclebucknasty 10y ago
  People also create computers. In any case, your argument would be extremely effective--if my argument was that people are infallible.
  - disposablezero 10y ago
    Who cares? SJW identity politics is not an argument, it's a trolling opinion.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - unclebucknasty 10y ago
      Taking the time to read comments, then still more time to reply that you don't care. No irony there.