2 ms·

> what it has is the reflection of priorities in the company that made it I think it might even be more like Platonic shadows on a firelit cave wall of the pri

> what it has is the reflection of priorities in the company that made it I think it might even be more like Platonic shadows on a firelit cave wall of the priorities of the company that made it. At the current level that self-driving is at, the cars' control software is only able to perceive and respond to situations that its programmers anticipated and specifically coded for. That could be heuristics and rules in the hard-coded bits, but, also, even the most sophisticated deep neural net out there isn't even particularly capable of perceiving, let alone understanding, things that weren't coded into its training set. Meaning that, even if the company's intention was that the car should not plow into a pedestrian holding an enormous cellophane-wrapped Edible Arrangements™ fruit basket, that intention doesn't have any bearing on the vehicle's behavior if the software instead classified that object as a plastic bag blowing in the wind.

wpietri 7y ago
Great points. And I'd add that the other implementation issue here is the human system any company's intentions get filtered through. So the interests modeled are not the entire corporation, but C-suite intentions passed through executive intentions, manager intentions, and then worker intentions. E.g., it might be in the long-term interest of the company to not run over pedestrians. If nothing else, the PR cost is very high. But when an exec wants to be first in the field to demonstrate personal success, then hitting a made-up date becomes the priority. Which implicitly puts "not kill people" lower. Middle managers don't want to get blamed, so they'll favor a more complex, muddled organization structure. Per Conway's law, that means muddled code. So instead of the car's software reflecting "don't run over pedestrians" as a key goal, its true priorities are things like "gives a good demo", "was delivered 'on time'", and "reflects an architecture clever enough to get that architect promoted that quarter". It's not impossible that good software comes out of this system, but the deck is certainly stacked against it.

wpietri 7y ago

Great points. And I'd add that the other implementation issue here is the human system any company's intentions get filtered through. So the interests modeled are not the entire corporation, but C-suite intentions passed through executive intentions, manager intentions, and then worker intentions. E.g., it might be in the long-term interest of the company to not run over pedestrians. If nothing else, the PR cost is very high. But when an exec wants to be first in the field to demonstrate personal success, then hitting a made-up date becomes the priority. Which implicitly puts "not kill people" lower. Middle managers don't want to get blamed, so they'll favor a more complex, muddled organization structure. Per Conway's law, that means muddled code. So instead of the car's software reflecting "don't run over pedestrians" as a key goal, its true priorities are things like "gives a good demo", "was delivered 'on time'", and "reflects an architecture clever enough to get that architect promoted that quarter". It's not impossible that good software comes out of this system, but the deck is certainly stacked against it.