Comment by mibbitier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mibbitier | Hacker News Reader

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1. Can you imagine Top Gear proclaiming driverless cars as the way to get status? No. They'll be ridiculed by anyone who knows anything about cars (Same way people who drive an automatic are ridiculed). Imagine "Drag and drop programming is the future of software development!!!"

2. Not convinced anyone really gets stressed driving, and not convinced that "not being in control of the car" would make anyone less stressed. Personally, when someone else is driving the car, I'm always more stressed not less. If I knew it was being driven by some software, my stress level would hit the roof. Everything I own that has "software", crashes every now and then. I don't really want my car to have more software than it needs.

3. Software bugs are plentiful in any system. Simple mechanics, and humans will always trump software for things like this. Surely if this stuff was so easy to automate, we'd have software flying planes already (Which seems a substantially easier problem).

4. Considering that we still can't make automatic cars that change gear at the right point, I'm skeptical.

1. Agreed that its hard to imagine Top Gear writing that way. For example, for Mercedes they write: "Packed with every conceivable gadget, the S-class is traditionally a place where new technology is debuted – and because this is Merc’s flagship it usually works faultlessly." Car and Driver writes: "Mercedes also claims its new sedan is its safest yet. S-classes equipped with optional Distronic Plus cruise control go beyond the standard car's safety features with a short-range radar system that "looks" at an area closer to the front of the vehicle than the long-range radar used by the cruise control."

2. Regarding stress and strain while driving - here is a research paper that might convince you: http://www.ectri.org/YRS07/Papiers/Session-9/Schiessl.pdf

3. Experience with diverse embedded software systems, from medical electronics to military jets, has demonstrated that software can be indeed engineered, and verified, to be more safe than simple mechanical and purely human controlled systems.

4. In fact current automatic transmissions are now more fuel efficient than manual transmissions: http://green.autoblog.com/2010/08/18/greenlings-why-do-autom...

3. Why does everyone sigh when they find a "software" on off switch compared to a hardware one? Because the software one invariably doesn't work, or doesn't work immediately.

4. I'm sure it's possible to make an automatic transmission better for fuel consumption, that's an easy problem. But make an automatic transmission that knows what you as a driver want (I'm betting that's rarely "fuel efficiency") - that's the holy grail, which certainly hasn't been achieved yet.

Concerning your 3rd point, there are some specific tasks in which Machine Learning algorithms beat humans by a significant margin (fraud detection, biomedical pattern matching, to name a few). Considering the recent engineering prowesses that incorporated ML, I think it's safe to assume that in a near future more tasks will be taken over by better-performing-than-humans software (for very specific tasks IMO).

I disagree about the status comment, automatic cars are certainly not looked down upon by the luxury market. You are confusing luxury and performance cars. The owners of many BMWs, Mercedes, Maybachs, etc. want a smooth ride with a swank interior and prefer an automatic ride.

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