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I was wondering that too. I think they're the designated scapegoat. If anything goes wrong, they get the blame. Pretty smart. It sidesteps some of the moral q

I was wondering that too. I think they're the designated scapegoat. If anything goes wrong, they get the blame. Pretty smart. It sidesteps some of the moral questions by punting.

tehlike 9y ago
Or maybe it is to get people more familiar with the tech, and more "used to" it.
taneq 9y ago
Exactly. We have this weird cultural fixation on having "someone" to blame. What's weird is that if it's a human that made the mistake, that's somehow OK. We give humans a free pass. "To err is human", after all. Shit happens. But if an algorithm screws up and kills someone, that's unacceptable. We start imagining ways that a human would not have failed in the same scenario. We decry "killer robots" and "cold unfeeling machines". Even if that algorithm has already saved 99 lives from being lost to stupid, tired, drunk, inattentive humans, that 100th life is somehow more important.
fstuff 9y ago
I think that's already the play book. Remember when their self driving car ran 6 red lights in sf asnd they said: >Uber spokesperson Chelsea Kohler said the car was being operated by its human driver at the time and had no passengers aboard https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2016/12/ubers-self-driving-car-ran-red-light-san-francisco/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2016/12/ubers-sel... Then it came this came out later >Friday reported that traffic violations by the company’s self-driving cars were caused by problems with the cars’ mapping programs, and not, as the company had previously claimed, by human error. After video of one of the violations surfaced in December, the company not only blamed and suspended the human monitoring the system, but doubled down. The supposedly human-caused red-light violation, they said, “is why we believe so much in making the roads safer by building self-driving Ubers.” And while running red lights was the most egregious problem with the cars, they were also unable to safely navigate bike lanes. https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2017/02/26/uber-self-driving-car-red-lights https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2017/02/2...

I was wondering that too. I think they're the designated scapegoat. If anything goes wrong, they get the blame. Pretty smart. It sidesteps some of the moral questions by punting.

tehlike 9y ago

Or maybe it is to get people more familiar with the tech, and more "used to" it.

taneq 9y ago

Exactly. We have this weird cultural fixation on having "someone" to blame. What's weird is that if it's a human that made the mistake, that's somehow OK. We give humans a free pass. "To err is human", after all. Shit happens. But if an algorithm screws up and kills someone, that's unacceptable. We start imagining ways that a human would not have failed in the same scenario. We decry "killer robots" and "cold unfeeling machines". Even if that algorithm has already saved 99 lives from being lost to stupid, tired, drunk, inattentive humans, that 100th life is somehow more important.

fstuff 9y ago

I think that's already the play book. Remember when their self driving car ran 6 red lights in sf asnd they said: >Uber spokesperson Chelsea Kohler said the car was being operated by its human driver at the time and had no passengers aboard https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2016/12/ubers-self-driving-car-ran-red-light-san-francisco/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2016/12/ubers-sel... Then it came this came out later >Friday reported that traffic violations by the company’s self-driving cars were caused by problems with the cars’ mapping programs, and not, as the company had previously claimed, by human error. After video of one of the violations surfaced in December, the company not only blamed and suspended the human monitoring the system, but doubled down. The supposedly human-caused red-light violation, they said, “is why we believe so much in making the roads safer by building self-driving Ubers.” And while running red lights was the most egregious problem with the cars, they were also unable to safely navigate bike lanes. https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2017/02/26/uber-self-driving-car-red-lights https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2017/02/2...