3 ms·
Decades I can accept, centuries seem a bit too pessimistic. If we really need centuries I would expect technical and not social issues to be the holdup. Automa
by ugh 16y ago
Decades I can accept, centuries seem a bit too pessimistic. If we really need centuries I would expect technical and not social issues to be the holdup.
Automation has slowly been creeping into cars over the last decade or so. Lights and wipers turn on and off automatically, cars brake and belts tighten when danger is detected, systems help you keep the lane and cars can park all by themselves (brake and gas are controlled by the driver, the car steers).
All of this is a far cry from a truly self-driving car but all of this has been implemented without much fuss. All the imaginable horror scenarios did not scare citizens or politicians. I think that’s good sign and I also think that many debates about potential social problems of the introductions of self-driving cars are driven by overly negative stereotypes of political systems.
I also think that it doesn’t really matter all that much if the US doesn’t want to do it. There are more than enough other rich nations out there.
- tgflynn 16y agoI pretty much agree with you. I just think that acceptance of automation in non-life critical situations will come easier and probably first. It's also true that we already depend on many life-critical software systems, in aviation and medical devices notably. In a rational world all that one would need to show is that statistically a self-driving car is safer than a human driver. That bar is probably not that hard to achieve. I'm just not sure how to predict how the general public will react to automated systems that can and will kill people in rare circumstances and whose correctness can at best only be defined in probabilistic terms.