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Comment by pmichaud | Hacker News Reader

We're going to see more and more of these articles popping up as cars become more automated.

To me it doesn't matter what the rate of failure is on automated systems, as long as the rate is below human failure rate. In that case, we win. It also doesn't matter whether humans can recover given a failure, again given that the failure rate is already below the average human failure rate.

The problem is that humans are really hung up on the illusion of control. We know that in a car that drives it self that we're not in control and the prospect of that machine killing us without our intervention scares us. What we're not so sharp on is that by taking control we are [hypothetically] increasing the chances of our injury or death, and in a field of all manual or all auto cars, manual control doesn't even favor skilled drivers since the real danger for above average skilled/careful drivers is the /other/ drivers on the road.

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It's the Dunning-Kruger effect: Sure, if this machine's failure rate is below the human average, it'll be safer for average humans. But I'm better off in control, because I'm a far better than average driver--aren't you, and almost everyone you know?

Not everyone...I'd say about half the people I know are above average drivers :)

I get your point, but incidentally, I am not a good driver, in fact. I am a careful driver, but I'm not particularly skilled.

I don't think this is more than just superficially true for driving.

As another commentor pointed out, there are (at least) two causes of "better," one being more skilled/practiced and the other being more careful.

Presented with such a dichotomy, I doubt the average person would grossly over-estimate his own skill, though he might over-estimate his own carefulness. Anyone find any studies on this?

I've also, in casual conversations, used the proxy of "loving" driving. Very few people love to drive, unconditionally. For those that don't, eliminating any mechanical aspect of operating the vehicle is potentially appealling, since the whole experience is a degree of necessary evil.

Another proxy I used is transmission preference in "stop and go" traffic, though this is just a specific case of the mechanical part of driving a car.

It seems to me that this is really a testing failure which, ironically, could be avoided by automating testing. An automated testing procedure could have ensured that every possible combination of inputs and failures was tried out.

Not really. As Dijistra said: "Testing only proves existence of errors, not their absense."

Sure, but in this case, the testing failed to detect an error which more rigorous testing would have detected. Like I said- automated testing, trying every possible combination, would have detected the failure discussed in the article.

And how many possible combination were there to try? Even then this would cover just one class of errors.

Automated tests are great (I use them all the time). But not all situations can be covered in a test - specially when there is concurrency involved.

True, but what else can you do? Modern aircraft are too complex to fly without automation... I'm not a CS-educated programmer- are there systems for programming in a way that can somehow be proven to work for all situations? What paradigm do they use for programming at NASA?

That becomes impractical when your input space is more than a couple dozen bits, and completely impossible by the time you reach several dozen.

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