Cass

I feel like AI would outperform the heck out of us in that situation, because solving it correctly involves a) high situational awareness, which we suck at because we get distracted, and b) making split-second calculations, which we suck at because we panic and our reflexes aren't that fast. I mean, this is a simple situation, when it comes down to it:

Something runs out into the road.

- Can you swerve and avoid hitting it without hitting anything else or driving off the road? If yes, do. If no:

- Can you hit the brakes without endangering anyone behind you? (Humans tend to have trouble with this decision, because half the time we forget to watch the rear view mirror and now there's no time to check. An AI would ALWAYS know what was behind it.) If yes, do. If not:

Are you more worried about endangering the thing before you or the thing behind you? If it's an animal, hit the animal. If the thing in front of you is a squishy human and the thing behind you is a car protected by all the engineering that protects cars in crashes these days, hit the brakes.

That's all there is to it, 99 % of the time. Sure, this is a situation where AI might make the wrong decision in 1 % of cases, but it's also a situation where humans are wrong much more than that.

<em>How do you deal with a lack of markers on the road?</em>

This one is actually probably most easily solved by just putting markers on all roads. Sure, that would require driving down all roads in a specially-engineered expensive vehicle with a dedicated crew, so you think it sounds like unaffordable insanity until you realize google has already done it once, for the googlemaps mapping project. Just do it again, this time in a car made for spray-painting markers instead of mapping stuff.

Apart from that, the overwhelming majority of problems on the road can be solved by yielding even when you're technically in the right and just slowing the heck down, if necessary to walking speed and below. There will still be problems that only a human being can solve, but there's going to be a human being in the car, so worst case, pull over and ask them. If your human is drunk or underage, pull over, wait for the next passing car, watch how their human solves it, and do what they did. In the rare case where there's no other car likely to pass any time soon and the human in the car is incapacitated - possibly some sort of remote solution would work, where a human in some kind of remote driving center can take control of your car for a minute if necessary?

There'll still be high-speed situations where the AI will fuck and kill someone, but I do think people would come to accept self-driving AI even if it occasionally fucks up and kills people, because it'll be world-changingly convenient. And so far we've accepted a LOT of occasionally-deadly shit if it's sufficiently convenient. (Trains. planes. Nuclear reactors. Every single one of those things had waves of protests and people going "It will never work, and when it fails, people will die! Not worth it!"

And occasionally they failed, and people died, but we still keep using them.

- Make it a selling point for the higher tiers of accounts. "If you choose the Serious Business plan, all your questions will be answered by our lead engineer. (Your Serious Business is too important to trust to a call center.)"

If you want to keep the selling point of competent and personal support for all customers:

All questions are answered directly by our highly-trained customer support reps, Anna and Thomas [Picture of Anna and Thomas smiling winningly and looking nothing like That Anonymous Incompetent Dick I Get Every Time I Call The Phone Company.] In the rare cases where they can't solve your problem, they'll immediately refer you to our lead engineer."

I'm reasonably sure we don't have fluid impermeable gowns AT ALL, and while we do have face shields in an operating room somewhere, I wouldn't want to have to find one in a hurry.

(That said, I'm reasonably sure that our actual inofficially-official Ebola plan is "Shut Door behind patient. Yell at people on Ebola hotline until they agree to come and take the patient away to a hospital more prepared to deal with this.")

And speaking as one of the people whose vision defect can't be corrected by glasses, but only by uncomfortable contact lenses, there'd be immense value to me in a computer I can use without lenses - especially since reading on a screen is basically the only thing I need the damn things for while I'm at home. For someone whose work is mostly computer-based, you might be able to get away with taking your lenses out for the entire day and only wear them for the drive to work and back.

On the other hand, we could go quite a long way towards fixing the perfectly good planet we already live on with technologies we already have. Hell, I suspect we could get 90 % of the way there with a century of strict population control and putting the same effort into reducing pollution and emissions we currently put into developing more profitable technologies. We're mostly not dumping our waste in the oceans and the atmosphere because we have no other choice, but because it's cheap and convenient and because humanity as a whole has other priorities than the preservation of the planet.

Coincidentally at the same time, I had to have my cat put to sleep. The vet came to my house, he received a single injection, and then he peacefully fell asleep in my arms without so much as a twitch. The entire process took not five minutes altogether. I know which way of dying I'd prefer, if it was my terminally ill body at stake.

And this is exactly the sort of crazy nonsense that happens when you give medical information to laypeople without explaining it properly. Warfarin doesn't cause strokes, or if it does, it does so as a crazy and crazy unlikely side-effect in a vanishingly small number of patients. The common, dangerous, life-threatening side effect of Warfarin, the one you need to be worried about with a Warfarin sensitivity, is bleeding. Of course, Warfarin, when administed in a careful, low dosage to people with the sensitivity, may fail to prevent a stroke, but Warfarin almost certainly did not give the previous commenter's grandma a stroke, and it's driving me slightly crazy that this thread is causing people to think that it's some sort of common side effect.

I can easily see a layperson reading that, and thinking "warfarin sensitivity"? As in "food sensitivity", meaning "this is something that isn't good for me, and I should avoid it?" Wait, isn't that the stuff that gave my grandmother a stroke? Holy shit, they killed my grandmother by giving her too much of a medicine that she's sensitive to!"

All warfarin sensitivity actually means, though, as far as I understand it, is that you're likely to need a lower dose than the average patient. If your grandmother had a stroke, it's unlikely that she was overdosed, though - in fact, it's quite likely that she received too low a dose.

If someone has a stroke under warfarin treatment, there are two likely causes: Either their warfarin dose was too low, or they had an artery-to-artery embolic stroke instead of the cardioembolic stroke the warfarin was supposed to prevent. (There are of course other, more rare cases of stroke, but those are the two big ones.)

Do you see how there's a huge potential for misunderstandings here? I'm not saying you suffered this particular misunderstanding, or that laypeople should be stopped from getting this information. I'm just saying, if you're going to put something like that out there and claim it's a diagnostic tool, it needs to be accurate and it needs to be explained, and that's where the FDA needs to come in.

It's not a perfect city, of course, but I'd highly recommend it to any foreigner who's willing to put up with the prices.

He released the executable at the end of the series, and I'm still sad that, as a non-programmer, I couldn't get it to run on my computer. I would have loved to have a chance to explore the world. Some of his screencaps are mindblowing.

[ETA: Since it's not immediately obvious how to get there from the rest of the articles on Project Frontier, here's the link to the source code: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=15808]

There'd be lots of value in being able to revive people who died a long time ago, if only for their value as contemporary witnesses. Hell, a few years ago the scientific community went pretty crazy for some frozen dude we found in Austria, and that one was thoroughly dead. [1]

We already don't have anyone left who remembers the First World War. In a few years, we'll lose the last Holocaust survivor. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to preserve some of that first-hand experience? And come on, how cool would it be to be able to unfreeze an Ancient Egyptian, or a bunch of people from the Middle Ages?

I agree that the future probably won't have a use for a whole horde of our living dead, but I can see there being quite a bit of interest in reviving a few hundred or thousand people - and once you've gone to all the trouble to develop the technology, maybe it'll be cheap enough to go to the trouble of unfreezing everyone else.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi

As far as public opinion goes, this is a complete non-issue, and I strongly suspect that if public opinion turned so far as to make it an issue, the US would withdraw their troops before entering into a war with a powerful western nation that would almost inevitably turn into another world war. This is really not what I'd call an occupation.

On the other hand, how much would your pharmacist be willing to pay to save his highly paid staff the four hours they spend on the phone every month reminding customers that the prescription they've ordered has been in for a week now? Find a way to solve problems for businesses, not consumers.

I suspect automated collection calls are illegal, or otherwise already exist, but if they're not and they don't, that sounds like a way to make absolute piles of cash from collection agencies (in a slightly ethically dodgy way).

Yeah, that's a really easy mistake to make. Happened to me too, last year. "Zuchini seeds ten plants for ten cents? I'm going to save SO MUCH MONEY!" I thought. Then I realized: A box big enough to grow a single zucchini plant in: €7. Yep, big planters are crazy expensive. Enough soil to grow a healthy zucchini plant: €5. Yep, you do need the entire bag if you want actual fruits instead of a pretty but useless flower.

Time to drive to the garden market, buy planters, plant them, and water the plants: Maybe two hours altogether.

So now you're at €12,10 for, IDK, maybe a dozen zucchini over the season. Not really a steal, but hey, organic food! Still worth it, right?

Then my zucchini got bugs and died. €12,10 and two hours of effort wasted.

"Yep, that happens when you grow vegetables inside. Should have put them on the balcony", my gardener friends said, nodding wisely. Know many poor people with nice big south-facing balconies?

I've in the past also failed miserably at sunflowers, and let's not even talk about the slow miserable death of my tragic attempt at salad. Now, I keep trying to grow food because I have the time and money to waste, and a shed to store all those big planters in during the winter. But if I were trying to cheaply feed my family, this sure as hell isn't a hobby I could afford.

Now, obviously we do want the hospital to be profitable enough that they don't start firing us, but there's certainly no immediate benefit along the lines of "Well, I don't this guy to get an infection, but I'd make an extra $ 1000 if he did," which I agree would certainly provide skewed incentives. The only thing that happens when my patients get complications is I get to pull more unpaid overtime.

There's not a lot of running down halls in screaming in real ERs, but there's also no time to, for example, send someone to go home and get the ID the patient forgot in their panic and hurry, to prove they're not blacklisted "no medical treatment" somewhere.

That said, the privacy implications are horrifying.

(I know I could use automatic scrolling for the same purpose, but I don't like it when the text is constantly moving.)