[LINK] Cars, again

[David]

On Wed, 15 Nov 2017 13:39:49 Jim Birch wrote:

> Improvement doesn't require perfection.  It only requires replacing things with something better.  If we were all expert, sober, emotionally stable, continuously attentive drivers that would raise the bar for automated vehicles, but clearly we aren't.

The question is "better than what?".

I proposed the benchmark criterion "the same reliability as an expert human driver who is not tired, under the affluence of inchohol or other substances, and generally in good form".

When autonomous vehicles can meet that benchmark I'll happily go anywhere in one.  However we're clearly a very long way from that point when in only May last year a "driver" was killed because his Tesla didn't detect a truck turning in front of the car in broad daylight.  And this wasn't an experimental model, it was bought in a car showroom.

However autonomous vehicles can potentially be very useful in specialised situations, such as the bus mentioned earlier which travels only along a predefined route at relatively low speed, and I'd expect to see such vehicles in normal use very soon.


> An AI system that drives a car doesn't have to be able to do everything a human does, it just has to drive a car.

But it must do so as well as a human with some defined level of driving competence, given the places in which it's designed to operate.


> This is a complex task, but guess what? Computer systems can already drive cars, and they can do it well.

Not when they T-bone trucks and kill the driver!


> What for me is the clincher is they get better at it every year.  Why would you presume there is a ceiling to AI improvement, especially one at a level close to current capability?

I'm not proposing any limit, I'm suggesting they have a very, very long way to go.  And we might get clues from the nominal computing capacity of just a few cubic millimetres of human brain.

David L.