News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars by jcranmer on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @01:42AM (#15078813)
And engineers who can recognize every possible failure and make the car react to them.

There are two things where human beings far outpace AI in competence. The first is the ability to recognize when inputs just simply don't make sense and thus the intended algorithm is going to return garbage results. A related, but important issue (particularly if you talk about networking cars together) is being able to recognize malicious inputs.

The second issue is that humans are good at higher-order planning. An example as it relates to driving is what we do when we can't tell the state of the traffic light (direct sunlight, say). Humans naturally look for ways to indirectly infer the state: the status of the traffic light in the cross direction, the current disposition of cars around the intersection.

Autonomous cars will only be better at handling these situations if the engineers are aware that these situations need to be handled and take measures to make the cars aware of them. And history suggests that is sufficiently unlikely to happen to make me fearful of the future.

Re:Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars by 6d6b73 on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @06:45AM (#15080263)
You're giving us humans superhuman abilities. How many people are prepared for tire blowout? Have you ever had your wife calling you asking what is this red light on the instrument panel? Heck I myself questioned myself when ABS light turned on in a middle of my trip.. Should I continue? Pull over? Will my breaks work? When the autonomous vehicle gets that signal it will most likely play it on a safe side, pull over and call service, all automatically. Me? I just kept driving...

And yes, we can deduct light color from other clues, but we can also go through a red light because we were preoccupied with our cellphones. AV will on the other hand have access to multiple cameras, looking at the light from multiple angles, possibly with some polarizing filters that will make this non-issue.