Car misses exit and causes two large trucks to flip over, driver doesn't care

He was driving the truck.

That carries some baggage, too.

The idea that robocars will serve as a transport alternative for the elderly and disabled who cannot drive or drive safely must be abandoned.

And bear in mind that we have experience now with trains and aircraft which are automated to the point where the operator serves pretty much as a monitor. That role is not enough to keep a human alert - inattention and drowsiness takes over.

Given the choice I would desire in descending order.

1 - a robocar in which I can read a book or take a nap
2 - a conventional car in which I can listen to music while being the driver in command
10^100 - a robocar in which I have to constantly monitor the road unrolling in front of me, for hours on end during which nothing requiring my action ever happens.

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Because shaming is exactly like dragging someone into the street and hanging them. Hysterical miscomparisons much?

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I once saw the aftermath of an accident which was roughly the opposite of this. A driver on a US route realized too late they were in an exit only ramp onto an access-controlled freeway. They swerved left anyway, across two shoulders and into the right lane of the US Route… and directly under the trailer of a semi taking the US route on into town.

The hard swerve left wedged the small car completely under the trailer, compacting it downwards. When I passed by, an unknown amount of time later, the emergency responders were still trying to extract the occupants of the car.

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Well, here’s the thing. If you pay even a little bit of attention to the topic, you can see that this is the case. The software and algorithms will never be good enough for actually doing that, despite what the snake oil salesmen say. Really, the best we can hope for is the sort of improvements we have been getting in doing things like parallel parking, shying away from hitting pedestrians, staying in the lane on the motorway, things like that.

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Or corporations can be responsible for their actions- just like other people.

That’s their game here - to socialize their risk - and simultaneously lower safety standards and production costs.

If that’s the end game - we shouldn’t play.

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If we tell corporations “Your robocars must perform perfectly, or you will be massively punished” then robocars will not be built.

I prefer to call missing the turn as ‘taking the scenic route’.

I miss exits and turns ALL the time, especially when I’m trying to find an address in an unfamiliar part of town. What do I do about it? Oh, I just take the next exit and back-track or go around the block. I can do that, because I left the house early, anticipating something going not exactly according to plan. My reward for the detours is finding weird little neighborhoods or stores that I would have never know about: “That store has a huge sign in the window that says, ‘Durians’. I wonder what those are?”

I found out what Durians are.

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I think you are right. So I will be keeping my own hands on the wheel.

That’s a BB rite of passage. There should be a badge for “First hysterical miscomparison”

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Straw man- I never said they needed to be perfect.

I said they need to be legally responsible for their products and maintain the vehicle safety standards that their competitors are required to.

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If you don’t require perfection, then there has to be a standard of risk. A point at which we say “only when the AI screws up beyond this point then we hold the programmer responsible”

How would you set that point. Because if you do not, or if you leave it up to a thousand different juries in a thousand different jurisdictions, then perfection is not a straw man.

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We don’t hold the programmer responsible- they’re merely an instrument of the corporation.

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Nitpicking. You know what I meant. How would you establish an acceptable level of risk for AI vehicles?

They have to follow the same legal requirements of all other manufacturers in the legal system. No special treatment.

If they’re not able to - they’re saying that their product isn’t ready for the market.

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And that will almost certainly result in no vehicles being put on the market. I’m not beating the drums for special laws for robocar manufacturers, as it’s really not a problem for me if that comes to pass.

No offense, but this sounds like exactly the kind of a confident-but-wrong prediction about technological development that people will point at and laugh five or ten or twenty years from now. :slight_smile:

If auto manufacturers said they can’t put any cars on the road unless we got special treatment in the courts - we’d laugh them out of the room.

If you start your argument by saying they can’t meet current standards- you’re saying they’re not ready for the market. Cost of doing business.

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seem to remember a hollywood movie with a hundred car pile-up until you see the cause

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Too many years of waiting for fusion reactors, true AI and so on have taught me that it will take longer than you expect, and you can’t skip the in between steps. Which is what the snake oil salesmen are selling us.