40 ms·

Personally, I will never let a machine take over controlling a automobile I'm in. Never. They may be good enough some decades from now, but they are not now an

by oblib 7y ago

Personally, I will never let a machine take over controlling a automobile I'm in. Never. They may be good enough some decades from now, but they are not now and we are a long, long way from getting to the point where they are. This has been proven too many times already to trust my life in a machine doing highway speeds, and I trust them even less on streets and roads. For the record, I've never caused an accident in my 46 years of driving. The only accident I've been in was with a dumbass who turned left in front of me at an intersection I'd already entered and I was able to minimize the impact by slowing down before they did that and steering into the least damaging hit for me because I was watching the driver's eyes and body and could see they were thinking about it and then decided to do it. No self driving car can do that now and it will be a very long time before they can.

toasterlovin 7y ago
You are a machine. Except you don't have 360 degree sensors or lidar.
- sorokod 7y ago
  But they do have free will and agency.
  - revscat 7y ago
    Not really. If you’re stuck in rush hour traffic, your “free will” is limited by your immediate surroundings, specifically the cars around you. Sure, you could abandon your car and walk or something, but that’s not likely a rational choice. Given that “free will” is limited, and doubly so when operating a vehicle, that’s not very much of a rebuttal.
    - sorokod 7y ago
      Limited or not, it is different from having none at all. Obviously it is up to the individual to quantify the loss.
      - toasterlovin 7y ago
        FWIW, there is zero evidence that anything like the common conception of free will exists. It is basically a folk explanation for a decision matrix that has hundreds or thousands of inputs that are mostly opaque to the tools currently at our disposal. There is no reason to believe that there will be anything left which we can label "free will" once we are able to measure and quantify all of these inputs and the system operating on them.
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    Your "free will" is at least mostly an illusion achieved by altering your sense of time. Hooked up to machines to record microsecond by microsecond we can then watch things happen in order on the playback and see the trick done. First the human does something, then their brain assesses what was done and it constructs a story explanation for what was done. The human comes to believe that they did what they did on purpose for a reason - an exercise of free will, as established in the story, even though we can see that isn't the order in which it happened. If you're sure you would know about this distortion I've got bad news. Your vision already depends on a similar trick that's been known for decades. Your eyes can't see anywhere near well enough to achieve what you think you can see. Instead a mechanism refreshes the details periodically while not giving you access, your image of the world is a composite assembled from a recent-ish focal image and guesses about what everything else probably still looks like. You feel like it's a live video feed, but it isn't, and it never has been your whole life. Maybe this trick is only happening a lot of the time for small decisions, and we do have some mysterious free will, exactly the way we think we do but it's just much less often relevant than you intuit. But maybe the fact is that trick is all that was ever happening, we're not special except that we've deluded ourselves and that is sort of special in its own way.
    - invalidusernam3 7y ago
      Really interesting. Do you have any links you could share where I could read more about these ideas (both the freewill one and the vision one)
      - tialaramex 7y ago
        Transsaccadic memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transsaccadic_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transsaccadic_memory is the name for the phenomenon I described for vision. It's uncontroversial that what we think we see is synthesised because saccades are definitely a thing, you can watch other people's eyes move while they report not changing where they're looking - but exactly how that synthesis works is not something for which you'll find widespread agreement. The experiment where you watch yourself looking at one eye then another in the mirror is a trivial one to do at home on your own though if you just want that sharp "Oh!" moment as a quick pay off. Why don't your eyes seem to move! The underpinning idea in the free will thing is Wegner's idea, he's done various experiments about this e.g.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10424155 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10424155
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    FWIW, I would probably count that as a reason to prefer autonomous cars, not as a reason to prefer human drivers. People are pretty bad decision makers. I would much rather have life or death decisions made by a team of engineers using data from thousands of actual incidents to inform their thinking.
    - sorokod 7y ago
      You must be looking forward Ai driven legal system and having your life partner determined by an ML gizmo.
      - toasterlovin 7y ago
        There are a bunch of ways in which those are not comparable examples. Most drivers are amateurs; lawyers and judges are not. Choosing a life partner is not a life or death matter (for the most part). Nor does it affect people aside from yourself.
  - xutopia 7y ago
    Driving has nothing to do with free will and agency. It's not art!
agildehaus 7y ago
No self-driving car will turn left in front of you either. Pendulum swings both ways. The self-driving car could very well have reacted faster than you ever could have, saving your life even in the many crash situations where you wouldn't have had any idea of the other driver's intention.
- jonathankoren 7y ago
  Or a self driving car, would have plowed ahead and never hit the brake. There’s an assumption that self driving will be safer, but it’s not necessary (there’s very little public data with any reasonable detail), and plenty of anecdotes where the car did something very abnormal. Furthermore, you have self-driving backers like Andrew No, publicly moving the goal posts to justify the investments. My point is, in 2019, self driving cars don’t work very well, and there’s little expectation that they will work well in the near to medium future, so it’s silly to sing their praises now.
  - revscat 7y ago
    My car saved my ass. Southern Illinois, destination Niagara. Going through one small town after another. Flat. Boring. Autopilot is on. Highway is 4 lane divided, no service road. Occasional farmers market roads. Driving for a couple of hours, not much to see (and smell) but farmland. Southern Illinois is incredibly boring. Start to pass an 18-wheeler on my right. Not paying 100% attention because... boring. Car starts freaking out, loud warning signals. Engages the brakes, hard. Some old lady had pulled out to cross the highway, so that she was halfway in my lane. Couldn’t see her because of 18-wheeler. She couldn’t see me for the same reason. Stupid. Car saw her before I did, took appropriate measures. I would have been in a nasty wreck if if I hadn’t had it. She probably would have died, because I would have hit her driver’s side. Would have been nasty regardless. So three cheers for autopilot from this driver. Saved the day. More. Please.
    - ummonk 7y ago
      What the hell was the 18 wheeler doing in the left lane? Note that you didn’t need autopilot here, just collision avoidance system.

by oblib 7y ago

toasterlovin 7y ago

You are a machine. Except you don't have 360 degree sensors or lidar.

sorokod 7y ago
But they do have free will and agency.
- revscat 7y ago
  Not really. If you’re stuck in rush hour traffic, your “free will” is limited by your immediate surroundings, specifically the cars around you. Sure, you could abandon your car and walk or something, but that’s not likely a rational choice. Given that “free will” is limited, and doubly so when operating a vehicle, that’s not very much of a rebuttal.
  - sorokod 7y ago
    Limited or not, it is different from having none at all. Obviously it is up to the individual to quantify the loss.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      FWIW, there is zero evidence that anything like the common conception of free will exists. It is basically a folk explanation for a decision matrix that has hundreds or thousands of inputs that are mostly opaque to the tools currently at our disposal. There is no reason to believe that there will be anything left which we can label "free will" once we are able to measure and quantify all of these inputs and the system operating on them.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  Your "free will" is at least mostly an illusion achieved by altering your sense of time. Hooked up to machines to record microsecond by microsecond we can then watch things happen in order on the playback and see the trick done. First the human does something, then their brain assesses what was done and it constructs a story explanation for what was done. The human comes to believe that they did what they did on purpose for a reason - an exercise of free will, as established in the story, even though we can see that isn't the order in which it happened. If you're sure you would know about this distortion I've got bad news. Your vision already depends on a similar trick that's been known for decades. Your eyes can't see anywhere near well enough to achieve what you think you can see. Instead a mechanism refreshes the details periodically while not giving you access, your image of the world is a composite assembled from a recent-ish focal image and guesses about what everything else probably still looks like. You feel like it's a live video feed, but it isn't, and it never has been your whole life. Maybe this trick is only happening a lot of the time for small decisions, and we do have some mysterious free will, exactly the way we think we do but it's just much less often relevant than you intuit. But maybe the fact is that trick is all that was ever happening, we're not special except that we've deluded ourselves and that is sort of special in its own way.
  - invalidusernam3 7y ago
    Really interesting. Do you have any links you could share where I could read more about these ideas (both the freewill one and the vision one)
    - tialaramex 7y ago
      Transsaccadic memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transsaccadic_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transsaccadic_memory is the name for the phenomenon I described for vision. It's uncontroversial that what we think we see is synthesised because saccades are definitely a thing, you can watch other people's eyes move while they report not changing where they're looking - but exactly how that synthesis works is not something for which you'll find widespread agreement. The experiment where you watch yourself looking at one eye then another in the mirror is a trivial one to do at home on your own though if you just want that sharp "Oh!" moment as a quick pay off. Why don't your eyes seem to move! The underpinning idea in the free will thing is Wegner's idea, he's done various experiments about this e.g.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10424155 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10424155
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  FWIW, I would probably count that as a reason to prefer autonomous cars, not as a reason to prefer human drivers. People are pretty bad decision makers. I would much rather have life or death decisions made by a team of engineers using data from thousands of actual incidents to inform their thinking.
  - sorokod 7y ago
    You must be looking forward Ai driven legal system and having your life partner determined by an ML gizmo.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      There are a bunch of ways in which those are not comparable examples. Most drivers are amateurs; lawyers and judges are not. Choosing a life partner is not a life or death matter (for the most part). Nor does it affect people aside from yourself.
- xutopia 7y ago
  Driving has nothing to do with free will and agency. It's not art!

agildehaus 7y ago

No self-driving car will turn left in front of you either. Pendulum swings both ways. The self-driving car could very well have reacted faster than you ever could have, saving your life even in the many crash situations where you wouldn't have had any idea of the other driver's intention.

jonathankoren 7y ago
Or a self driving car, would have plowed ahead and never hit the brake. There’s an assumption that self driving will be safer, but it’s not necessary (there’s very little public data with any reasonable detail), and plenty of anecdotes where the car did something very abnormal. Furthermore, you have self-driving backers like Andrew No, publicly moving the goal posts to justify the investments. My point is, in 2019, self driving cars don’t work very well, and there’s little expectation that they will work well in the near to medium future, so it’s silly to sing their praises now.
- revscat 7y ago
  My car saved my ass. Southern Illinois, destination Niagara. Going through one small town after another. Flat. Boring. Autopilot is on. Highway is 4 lane divided, no service road. Occasional farmers market roads. Driving for a couple of hours, not much to see (and smell) but farmland. Southern Illinois is incredibly boring. Start to pass an 18-wheeler on my right. Not paying 100% attention because... boring. Car starts freaking out, loud warning signals. Engages the brakes, hard. Some old lady had pulled out to cross the highway, so that she was halfway in my lane. Couldn’t see her because of 18-wheeler. She couldn’t see me for the same reason. Stupid. Car saw her before I did, took appropriate measures. I would have been in a nasty wreck if if I hadn’t had it. She probably would have died, because I would have hit her driver’s side. Would have been nasty regardless. So three cheers for autopilot from this driver. Saved the day. More. Please.
  - ummonk 7y ago
    What the hell was the 18 wheeler doing in the left lane? Note that you didn’t need autopilot here, just collision avoidance system.