5 ms·

That's absolutely not true. What if you are drowsy or distracted and the autopilot brakes for you an avoids an accident? Keep in mind every car out there is cu

That's absolutely not true. What if you are drowsy or distracted and the autopilot brakes for you an avoids an accident? Keep in mind every car out there is currently built with a feature where you can accelerate to a lethal speed, then press a small button, and the car continues to travel at that lethal speed until the car runs out of gas, hits a brick wall, or the driver consciously disengages it. We call it cruise control. If all we are doing is adding automatic braking and lane following to cruise control, I don't see how it can be anything other than better.

knodi123 12y ago
> I don't see how it can be anything other than better. Because in the real world, people won't exercise exactly the same level of situational awareness, such that the autopilot only adds a safety mechanism. In the real world, it will replace a certain amount of driver attention. And the question is, is it always superior to human attention? It's probably net superior, but I bet it will cause a couple of high profile accidents that a careful human could have avoided, and then people (or the government) will be scared of it.
- weaksauce 12y ago
  After reading about the abysmal coding standards of Toyota in the court case regarding the deaths of those people in the unintended accelreration cases I am leery. Having worked with embedded systems before, I know how hard they are to get right. I just wish that all these companies would realize that it's better (for the greater good) to opensource this instead of try to get it right all on their own. Look at how much better the web has come since there have been a few major open source web browser projects.
- Bjartr 12y ago
  > And the question is, is it always superior to human attention? The more valuable question is this: Does it perform better than humans in the most frequently occurring situations that lead to incidents, are those situations a large enough fraction of all incidents such that the number of overall incidents drop significantly, and will that drop be greater than the increase in frequency of less predictable situations. If the above turns out to be the case, then there will be fewer accidents despite less aware drivers.

knodi123 12y ago

> I don't see how it can be anything other than better. Because in the real world, people won't exercise exactly the same level of situational awareness, such that the autopilot only adds a safety mechanism. In the real world, it will replace a certain amount of driver attention. And the question is, is it always superior to human attention? It's probably net superior, but I bet it will cause a couple of high profile accidents that a careful human could have avoided, and then people (or the government) will be scared of it.

weaksauce 12y ago
After reading about the abysmal coding standards of Toyota in the court case regarding the deaths of those people in the unintended accelreration cases I am leery. Having worked with embedded systems before, I know how hard they are to get right. I just wish that all these companies would realize that it's better (for the greater good) to opensource this instead of try to get it right all on their own. Look at how much better the web has come since there have been a few major open source web browser projects.
Bjartr 12y ago
> And the question is, is it always superior to human attention? The more valuable question is this: Does it perform better than humans in the most frequently occurring situations that lead to incidents, are those situations a large enough fraction of all incidents such that the number of overall incidents drop significantly, and will that drop be greater than the increase in frequency of less predictable situations. If the above turns out to be the case, then there will be fewer accidents despite less aware drivers.