Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour

Re:Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco fo... by gambiting on Saturday April 18, 2020 @07:24PM (#22911987)

For the same reason why when a human pilot makes a mistake it's a mistake, but when an autopilot malfunctions every single plane of that type is grounded until the issue can be found and fixed. Machines cannot be just as good as humans, they have to close to perfect when human life is involved.

As another example, imagine if you had a radiotherapy machine, when operated manually it randomly kills 1/10000 patients, but when operated by AI it randomly kills 1/100000 patients. Yet I'm 100% certain even though it's a 10x improvement over a human operator it still wouldn't be allowed on the market.

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Re:Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco fo... by chrisseaton on Saturday April 18, 2020 @07:27PM (#22912007)

> even though it's a 10x improvement over a human operator it still wouldn't be allowed on the market

Hmm I don't agree I think people would go for that.

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Re:Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco fo... by gambiting on Saturday April 18, 2020 @07:32PM (#22912035)

Then look up Therac-25, because that's roughly what happened

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Re:Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco fo... by chrisseaton on Saturday April 18, 2020 @07:35PM (#22912057)

> Therac-25

That wasn't AI - it was a concurrency error, wasn't it?

You shouldn't discard technology because sometimes it's wrong. It can be better overall.

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Re:Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco fo... by gambiting on Saturday April 18, 2020 @07:48PM (#22912120)

Why would it matter if it was AI or not? 99.9% of the public won't care if an "AI" killed their mum in a car accident or if it was a badly written for loop somewhere. Literally irrelevant. If a computer makes an error people will want blood(as in - they will sue the company to absolute death, just because a human would make the same mistake or worse is irrelevant).

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Re:Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco fo... by chrisseaton on Saturday April 18, 2020 @08:08PM (#22912225)

> Why would it matter if it was AI or not?

I think people's idea of what a computer should be doing has changed a lot since then, due to the common knowledge of AI applications.

Perhaps we're close to the situation where when a person makes a mistake they're asked 'why weren't you using the computer?' I've seen this happen myself.

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Re:Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco fo... by wutbrodo on Sunday April 19, 2020 @02:37AM (#22914032)

Your original comment asserted that a machine _shouldn't_ be allowed on the market until its performance is significantly superhuman, but your responses in this thread just repeat the assertion. What's the actual rationale for claiming that we should leave a net benefit on the table (eg if human-level driving performance improves transit efficiency)?

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