re: #121 Anymouse 🌹

As I commented on Unshaken Defiance’s article in the right hand column of LGF Link which argues we should be ashamed of bashing self-driving cars over one death, there are two problems with that:

How many self-driving cars in Arizona versus total cars?
Google has already had a number of accidents with self-driving cars.

I will not be ashamed of looking sideways at technology that is not yet ready (the cars are sold on the idea that these things won’t happen). See also Facebook.

And the woman who was killed in Arizona could have been detected if that test had been done on a track (without using a real person). She died so Uber could make a profit, nothing more.

I am opposed to using the public highways as a test-bed.

Generally it’s a bad idea to make decisions based on an N of 1. I’d also point out that autonomous vehicles are extensively tested on tracks, but that testing only goes so far, and they’re trying to build vehicles that will be used in the real world, not on test tracks.

But I’d observe that my experience with robotics has been that mostly, they fall short of what you expect, because they humans they’re supposed to replace do a whole lot more in the course of whatever task is being automated than they realize.