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> 1. Ethical. One thing is that you do a stupid thing and die. Another is that a technology fails in trivial circumstances that in theory are avoidable. A docto

> 1. Ethical. One thing is that you do a stupid thing and die. Another is that a technology fails in trivial circumstances that in theory are avoidable. A doctor can make also errors, but a medical device is required to be very safe and reliable in what it does. I'm not sure I follow you here. Are you saying that because humans are known to be falible, but technology can be made nigh-infalible, that technology should be held to a higher ethical standard? Those two statements don't connect for me. I suppose that's partly because I am an automation engineer, and I deal a lot with inspecting operator-assembled and machine-assembled parts. If the machine builds parts that also pass the requirements, it's good. It's nice if it's faster or more consistent, and sure we can build machines that produce parts with unnecessarily tight tolerances, but not meeting those possibilities doesn't feel like an ethical failing to me.

antirez 9y ago
> Are you saying that because humans are known to be falible, but technology can be made nigh-infalible, that technology should be held to a higher ethical standard? Yes, not infallible, but I believe that to take our lives in the hands of machines, the technology must be at least on par with the best drivers. To be better than average, but for instance to be more fallible than a good driver, is IMHO still not a good standard to be ethically ok to sell self driving cars, even if you have 5% less death per year compared to everybody driving while, like, writing text messages in their phones. If instead the machine will be even a bit better than an high standard driver, driving with care, at that point it makes sense because you are not going to care about the distribution of deaths based on the behaviors.
gkya 9y ago
If a survey is conducted in almost any part of the world, I'd guess that most people (including me) would prefer to be hit by a human rather than an autonomous car. I'm not sure why this is, but having someone to blame and the fact that being a victim of an emotionless lifeless machine is subjectively way more horrifying than being a victim of a person are some that I can think of.

antirez 9y ago

> Are you saying that because humans are known to be falible, but technology can be made nigh-infalible, that technology should be held to a higher ethical standard? Yes, not infallible, but I believe that to take our lives in the hands of machines, the technology must be at least on par with the best drivers. To be better than average, but for instance to be more fallible than a good driver, is IMHO still not a good standard to be ethically ok to sell self driving cars, even if you have 5% less death per year compared to everybody driving while, like, writing text messages in their phones. If instead the machine will be even a bit better than an high standard driver, driving with care, at that point it makes sense because you are not going to care about the distribution of deaths based on the behaviors.

gkya 9y ago

If a survey is conducted in almost any part of the world, I'd guess that most people (including me) would prefer to be hit by a human rather than an autonomous car. I'm not sure why this is, but having someone to blame and the fact that being a victim of an emotionless lifeless machine is subjectively way more horrifying than being a victim of a person are some that I can think of.