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> The pedanty here is insane. One person's pedant is another person's clear conscience. There's massive disagreement in the self-driving debate as to the exte
by femto 9y ago
> The pedanty here is insane.
One person's pedant is another person's clear conscience. There's massive disagreement in the self-driving debate as to the extent to which we are dealing with safety critical systems. As you can no doubt tell, I'm firmly on the safety critical side.
I've a fair bit of experience with designing and shipping critical infrastructure for emergency services. One has to ship, but in my experience the majority of people don't have the necessary eye for detail to make a safe system. This is why we have process: to allow fallible people to ship safe systems (and to avoid delusion in the minority who do have an eye for detail). The self-driving field is still developing their processes, so they have to be conservative with their shipping.
Many of those arguing for self-driving are under estimating the safety of a typical human driver. The bar that a self-driving system has to meet is very high. If conditions are easy for a self-driving car then they are probably easy and safe for a human as well.
Accidents are skewed towards a subset of poor conditions involving speed, alcohol and fatigue. Is it fair to replace a safe driver that avoids speed, alcohol and fatigue with a system that whilst safer than average is still less safe than the specific circumstance?
Maybe an interim use of self-driving technology is to have the person driving, and the self-driving system in a co-driver/critique mode acting as an "unsafe driving detector"?
- LoSboccacc 9y agoome can just look at the state of autonomous robots in industrial plants. they do a handful of functions, they have limited reach and they have predictable patterns and yet when you add humans to the mix all kind of dangerous conditions arise to the point most robots sharing space with humans need to be caged this is our current state of the art with automation and safety and yet we allow companies to slap a radar and a pretend safety driver and hurl a ton of metal down the pubblic roads autonomous vehicle will undoubtedly at some point be safer than human, but shortcutting known limitations like radars vs dodging static objects because 'drivers are the backup' is lunacy and the recent deaths are just a symptom of people never having worked in safety system design playing fast and loose with human lifes, and the companies which enable that should be made an example of by courts. some years ago serious automaker did their analisys and come up with the concept of designing the anticollision system first and use those as a backup to autonomous driving technology, that somehow has been lost in the race for profitability.
- CaptainZapp 9y ago"this is our current state of the art with automation and safety and yet we allow companies to slap a radar and a pretend safety driver and hurl a ton of metal down the pubblic roads" This is what bugs me most: Who on earth ever thought it's a good idea to allow a company like Uber with their history of corner cutting and shady business to test such dangerous technology on public roads? The mind boggles.