If your wife or child was mowed down by a normal car, would you be more supportive of autonomous ones?
If your wife or child wasn’t mowed down because the car was autonomous rather than manual (or vice-versa), would you even notice?
Yet, which of human or AI drivers get banned by 2040 depends on convincing people like you — assuming I am inferring correctly that your question is rhetorical and the answer is “no, obviously”.
I don't know if that will be enough to make the difference, but I can certainly see how it could be.
You're still making a prediction about the future. Some predictions are safer than others: I predict I will see the sun rise tomorrow. Some predictions have little rational basis in reality: I predict you will agree with me. Your prediction about automomous cars being safer than human drivers? That falls somewhere in the middle.
From my perspective, all computer vision systems are abysmal crap and spend orders of magnitude more power to accomplish results many orders of magnitude less impressive than the human brain is capable of. The human brain uses something like 10-20 watts, how much CV/ML can you do with 10-20 watts? Not much at all. There is clearly a huge disconnect between our current approach to solving the problem technologically and how the evolutionary wetware solves the problem. That gap may be bridged sometime in the future, but I'm not holding my breath. I think the problem is being approached from the wrong direction, like trying to drive a screw with a hammer. Maybe we'll still get the job done, but I do not consider that a foregone conclusion.
I just hope that, if the time comes, the decision is based on comparative improvement, instead of hysterics about whether self driving cars will ever kill anyone ever.
* A car can spare 100x that many watts.
* Why would we even want cars to calculate the way humans do? It's a very clearly flawed method.
> Why would we even want cars to calculate the way humans do?
The fact of the matter is that humans are orders of magnitude better at object recognition than computers. You may believe that will change in the near future, but that's not yet been demonstrated.
Don’t get me wrong, I am aware that current generation AI is fundamentally worse than a human brain, because if it was already as good as a human then the fact Tesla’s AI has done more miles than the average person has had heartbeats would make it essentially perfect. It isn’t perfect, so I know the AI is flawed.
But my question is, does it seem to you that this approach cannot ever become the equal of the best human (if that best human had 360 degree vision, sonar, and radar, and their nerve impulse conduction speed was way faster), and if not, why not?
Yeah, its an interesting dichotomy. I've been to funerals for people mowed down by "normal" cars. I know the stats. I'm more supportive of autonomous cars.
I also know that if the situation were reversed and the people closest to me were affected by autonomous vehicle accidents I might have an strong emotional reaction in the other direction.
The human mind just isn't rational when it comes to these things. It will take real leadership and risk taking on the part of manufacturers to get past this impasse.