[LINK] Cars, again

[Karl Auer]

On Wed, 2017-11-15 at 14:32 +1100, David wrote:
> > 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!

Humans do the same thing - hundreds or thousands of times worldwide
every day and most are ordinary drivers. Not drunk or mad, though no
doubt some are.

It looks to me as if autonomous vehicles are now at about the same
level as human drivers in general. Probably better, because there are
large classes of mistake that they do not make - such as using mobile
phones, driving while fatigued, getting distracted by the kids, driving
drunk... I know you set the bar to exclude those, but that's just
excluding reality.

In the "game" that is partly autonomous traffic, not all questions have
clear answers, and demanding that autonomous vehicles supply them and
never ever fail is pointless and unrealistic. A magic bullet that drops
fatalities and injuries to zero would be nice, but I'll take a
statistically significant improvement.

Wonder how it would have played out if that truck had been autonomous
too. Or if the two vehicles had been able to communicate.

> 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.

Which has very little to do with anything, see above. A $10 computer
these days can reliably beat the vast majority of normal people at
chess. And they build in pauses in those games because otherwise the
speed of defeat would be too demoralising.

Regards, K.

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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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