Comment by pak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pak | Hacker News Reader

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Cars can currently drive themselves in certain limited environments tracks at specially designated competitions. How long do you think it will be before the country has the physical and legal infrastructure to support general-purpose automated cars?

Two thought experiments: 1) Do you think the general public would support the use of self-driving cars on public streets as they operate today, even after seeing the DARPA results? 2) Do you think the general public would support the use of computers to diagnose cancer without involving human doctors anytime within the next 50 years?

Remember that when [specialized worker X] says their job can't be done by [new technology Y], they aren't just referring to the technology being unable to fulfill the task. There is a whole economic, political and sociological matrix on top of the job market that prevents technology from displacing workers, and certain regulated industries are more sheltered than others. The hospital is probably one of the most insulated working environments for technological advances (just take a poke at any of their EMR systems to see what I mean.)

Google's self driving car[1] has logged almost 200,000 miles on real roads. It has a better record than the average driver. A judge in California has deemed that Google is allowed to test on the road as long as they are responsible for the damages. Nevada has already passed laws saying that self driving cars are legal. So in answer to your question, we already have the physical and legal infrastructure to support general-purpose automated cars, and we have the technological capacity.

This shouldn't be a question of the general public supporting it, it should be a statistical question: Are our silicon counterparts better equipped to do the job? If so, then we should have them do it. The day when computers can diagnose cancer better than human's is not far off, and we should welcome it as an indicator of more precise identification rather than shun it out of fear.

[1] http://news.discovery.com/autos/how-google-self-driving-car-...

So in answer to your question, we already have the physical and legal infrastructure to support general-purpose automated cars, and we have the technological capacity.

That is such a stretch from the four sentences before it. You are discussing 1) a prototype vehicle that is not available to consumers and requires supervision by a cadre of engineers and 2) a recent law in just one of the least populous states of the country. How about a few choice details from that article you cited:

"... with only occasional human intervention."

"Before sending the self-driving car on a road test, Google engineers [have to] drive along the route one or more times to gather data about the environment."

"...there are many challenges ahead, including improving the reliability of the cars and addressing daunting legal and liability issues."

You must have read it with unrestrained optimism. I also applaud your idealistic notion that statistics matter more than public opinion, but the country isn't run by scientists and mathematicians (that's actually a good thing in certain respects). The reality is the general public does have to support changes that affect society, like laws and the development of physical and legal infrastructure, and there are many ways of formulating reasonable policy arguments with or without statistics.

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