4 ms·

> A lot of people are going to die A lot of people already die everyday in car accidents. The only difference will be that we have no one we can blame if the v

by LeonM 8y ago

> A lot of people are going to die A lot of people already die everyday in car accidents. The only difference will be that we have no one we can blame if the vehicle in question does not have a driver.

wil421 8y ago
I do not need an algorithm or even to think when I’m in a dangerous situation. My mind will react and I will assess the situation afterwards. Millions of years of experience has trained life. I can see the same traits in my dogs.
- dantheman 8y ago
  And that's how people die. Like slamming the brakes when on ice and losing all traction. Yeah, it's like dogs digging on paved roads -- your millions of years of experience don't apply to when the technology changes.
  - wil421 8y ago
    Or they die because Uber’s algorithm notices a bike 6 seconds before impact, unnoticed it, and finally doesn’t understand what it is.
    - ImSkeptical 8y ago
      I hope Uber is not the leader in driverless cars. I believe accidents and fatalities per vehicle mile traveled are the most relevant statistics. If driverless cars can outperform humans on those metrics then they will be a great boon even if they roll over the odd cyclist or get in weird crashes.
    - mentat 8y ago
      They had automatic braking turned off on purpose. Blame the humans.
- icelancer 8y ago
  >> Millions of years of experience has trained life Yeah, we've had cars and fast moving transportation for about that long.
  - mmt 8y ago
    Although I agree that the comment to which you're replying deserves a bit of dismissiveness, I can't help but think that your response is overly colored by the "speed kills" rhetoric we often hear. I'm pretty sure, though, that the autonomous vehicle collisions that have made the news lately haven't been at "highway" speed and that that's true of most fatalities (possibly because most vehicle miles traveled are in dense cities?). Now, that isn't to say that we've ever had 45mph or even 25mph heavy objects constantly moving around us in our evolutonary past, either, but the occasional fast predator wasn't unheard-of and a particularly fast one survives today. Moreover, the typical difference in speed between (unpredictable) objects in traffic is much closer to human walking or running speeds. We get into trouble when there's simply too many of them or the difference in speed gets too high.
- tlb 8y ago
  It's an interesting fact that dogs can't learn to drive cars. Neither can non-human primates (low-speed circus acts don't count: I mean safe city and highway driving). Driving requires several seconds of look-ahead, which animals can't learn to do, and some skill analogous to tool use.
  - mmt 8y ago
    I would argue that just means we've particularly customized the driving UX [1] to humans, not that other species lack some fundamental capacity for it. It has saddened me that we've traditionally started from a position of human exceptionalism when studying other animals and, to a large extent, still do so today, despite discoveries such as tool manufacture by the New Caledonian crow and dolphin whistles following Zipf's law. I can only imagine how shocked (shocked!) we would be by cephalopod capabilities compared to humans if we were to, say, genetically modify them to live as long as a macaw. All that said, my point is that I don't think there's anything particularly special in human evolution to suggest that we would have more skill at lookahead. One might even speculate that we would have less than an animal that has to chase at relatively high speed in order to survive, such as a cheetah or wolf [2]. As for tool use, I do admit that, though we're not unique in that regard, it's probably still safe to say it's rare enough to be remarkable. Perhaps if we hadn't been running around for so long assuming our uniqueness, someone might have tried teaching a corvid or octopus to drive by now. [1] including such things as engineering trade-offs in areas like suspension where one might sacrifice pure performance (and therefore, arguably, control and subsequently safety) for comfort [2] which are, of course, not domestic dogs. Thousands of years of human breeding may well have removed any evolutionary advantage related to driving.

by LeonM 8y ago

wil421 8y ago

I do not need an algorithm or even to think when I’m in a dangerous situation. My mind will react and I will assess the situation afterwards. Millions of years of experience has trained life. I can see the same traits in my dogs.

dantheman 8y ago
And that's how people die. Like slamming the brakes when on ice and losing all traction. Yeah, it's like dogs digging on paved roads -- your millions of years of experience don't apply to when the technology changes.
- wil421 8y ago
  Or they die because Uber’s algorithm notices a bike 6 seconds before impact, unnoticed it, and finally doesn’t understand what it is.
  - ImSkeptical 8y ago
    I hope Uber is not the leader in driverless cars. I believe accidents and fatalities per vehicle mile traveled are the most relevant statistics. If driverless cars can outperform humans on those metrics then they will be a great boon even if they roll over the odd cyclist or get in weird crashes.
  - mentat 8y ago
    They had automatic braking turned off on purpose. Blame the humans.
icelancer 8y ago
>> Millions of years of experience has trained life Yeah, we've had cars and fast moving transportation for about that long.
- mmt 8y ago
  Although I agree that the comment to which you're replying deserves a bit of dismissiveness, I can't help but think that your response is overly colored by the "speed kills" rhetoric we often hear. I'm pretty sure, though, that the autonomous vehicle collisions that have made the news lately haven't been at "highway" speed and that that's true of most fatalities (possibly because most vehicle miles traveled are in dense cities?). Now, that isn't to say that we've ever had 45mph or even 25mph heavy objects constantly moving around us in our evolutonary past, either, but the occasional fast predator wasn't unheard-of and a particularly fast one survives today. Moreover, the typical difference in speed between (unpredictable) objects in traffic is much closer to human walking or running speeds. We get into trouble when there's simply too many of them or the difference in speed gets too high.
tlb 8y ago
It's an interesting fact that dogs can't learn to drive cars. Neither can non-human primates (low-speed circus acts don't count: I mean safe city and highway driving). Driving requires several seconds of look-ahead, which animals can't learn to do, and some skill analogous to tool use.
- mmt 8y ago
  I would argue that just means we've particularly customized the driving UX [1] to humans, not that other species lack some fundamental capacity for it. It has saddened me that we've traditionally started from a position of human exceptionalism when studying other animals and, to a large extent, still do so today, despite discoveries such as tool manufacture by the New Caledonian crow and dolphin whistles following Zipf's law. I can only imagine how shocked (shocked!) we would be by cephalopod capabilities compared to humans if we were to, say, genetically modify them to live as long as a macaw. All that said, my point is that I don't think there's anything particularly special in human evolution to suggest that we would have more skill at lookahead. One might even speculate that we would have less than an animal that has to chase at relatively high speed in order to survive, such as a cheetah or wolf [2]. As for tool use, I do admit that, though we're not unique in that regard, it's probably still safe to say it's rare enough to be remarkable. Perhaps if we hadn't been running around for so long assuming our uniqueness, someone might have tried teaching a corvid or octopus to drive by now. [1] including such things as engineering trade-offs in areas like suspension where one might sacrifice pure performance (and therefore, arguably, control and subsequently safety) for comfort [2] which are, of course, not domestic dogs. Thousands of years of human breeding may well have removed any evolutionary advantage related to driving.