I never understood how the public decided that "autopilot" means a fully autonomous system. I grudgingly admit that some people think this way, but how did it happen?
In the 50s or 60s or whenever they were first introduced, it was incredibly novel to have some portion of aircraft control handled by a machine. To go from partial machine control to fully machine control seems like a natural evolution and I think the name speaks for that evolution.
I think it is fair that most consumers think that "autopilot" implies fully autonomous driving. No one calls cruise control an autopilot when in fact it is a crude form of one.
Lots of cars have "automatic transmissions" but nobody gets upset when it fails to shift into reverse on its own based on contextual clues.
(Besides, the alternative is for the layman to infer capabilities from marketing material, which is even more outlandishly fictional)
Oh, and if you want an exhaustive list of when something appears in media, TVtropes will always deliver: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/discussion.php?id=6zj22p5kr47sfh2...
I judiciously selected I Robot and Minority Report because Audi and Lexus, respectively, had product placement for future design concepts.
I am noting that real auto companies have deliberately placed product concepts in media to prime people's expectations of what future products will look like and what they will be able to do. Independently, there are also proper level 4 systems under active development getting plenty of popular press coverage.
I also note that the very public face of Tesla frequently makes very public and (in my opinion, overly optimistic) declarations of their product's capabilities both present and future, for example (Jan 2016), "The Model S is 'probably better than humans at this point in highway driving' according to Musk." [0]
It doesn't strike me to be all that far of a leap for an average person to conclude that the future has arrived.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/11/elon-musk...
automatic login / logout / lock
automatic debit of monthly bills
automatic reply to calls / emails
automatic plant watering
Will happily flood the house if something goes wrong.
> automatic login
Frequently requires manually reentering credentials.
> automatic debit of monthly bills
Will happily send your life savings to the power company if they typo a couple of extra zeroes on your bill.
> automatic reply to emails
Notorious for massive screwups when people enable them without adequate controls, especially when multiple people on the same mailing list do it at the same time.
All of these examples seem to reinforce the idea that "automatic" does not mean "requires no human supervision."
You're exactly the kind of fanboy I accused you of being, btw. Proper rules of engagement on HN be damned: you're wasting everyone's time with goalpost-moving and dis-ingenuousness.
If you feel your time is being wasted, perhaps you may wish to consider making the choice to spend it otherwise. Were it I who felt that way, I might still hesitate to generalize from myself to everyone, no matter how justified I might imagine myself to be in so doing.
It's easier to pick up on the hostility of a sharp barbed comment than the one in a smarmy, disingenuous one, that only insults by implication, but it's still there.
Asking where people get such impressions, then mocking the first few responses citing sci-fi with a "that's a bigger problem!", then getting some current day ones, and proceeding to very weakly deflect them with excuses that don't stand up to scrutiny, doesn't seem like someone interested in understanding a situation.
It seems like someone trying to preach their opinion, while disguising it as a learning process, taking advantage of this forum's predilection for politeness.
Am I not allowed to express my reactions to new ideas now? Or is "that's disturbing" somehow considered to be an indication of dismissal or disagreement?
I don't find these current day examples to be at all compelling. You think my response consists of excuses that don't stand up to scrutiny, I think they point out how automation has traditionally never been fully autonomous. The "they're getting it from sci-fi movies" is a lot more convincing, just horrifying.
Actually, you said "It disturbs me that all the examples so far are science fiction." which (a bit out of context and ignoring the principle of charity) could be interpreted as a cursory dismissal along the lines of, "these examples are too ridiculous to consider further".
Even with the principle of charity, I find "they're getting it from sci-fi movies" to be an unfair summary of my point, but perhaps I'm doing a poor job making my case clearly.
Thinking on it, would it be fair to expect any example of an autopilot function on a car to be from a type other than science fiction or fantasy?
You probably can't find it on a car without getting into SF, but an excessively sophisticated autopilot on an airplane could probably fit into an otherwise non-SF movie. Like the example of Airplane! but played seriously. I just assumed that's the sort of thing people were talking about with the idea coming from entertainment, since "obviously" technology in an SF movie is going to be unrealistic.
There certainly are some similar misconceptions generated by movies not usually considered to fall into the category of SF. For example, I'd wager a lot of people think spy satellites really can read a license plate from orbit, or that silenced guns just make a soft "pew" sound.
It isn't supposed to flood the house. It is designed to be automatic. Meaning no supervision. Tesla's Autopilot isn't designed this way yet carries the name.
Let's keep going.
> Will happily send your life savings to the power company if they typo a couple of extra zeroes on your bill.
This has nothing to do with automatic payment being poorly designed. It is designed to pay the balance without your intervention...hence automatic.
> Notorious for massive screwups when people enable them without adequate controls, especially when multiple people on the same mailing list do it at the same time.
Depends on how it is implemented. There are usually more knobs to this feature and it is designed to have you program it. Based on programming, settings, etc, it will do whatever you set it to without you having to be there...hence automatic reply.
Your bill and the automatic bill pay system are two different concerns here.
It works fine when the situation is good, and it can fail when it encounters troublesome situations in the real world. Since it operates in the real world, it needs some monitoring.
It seems your major sticking point is about the state of the art of autopilots in other fields.
Ironically, Mr. Sperry apparently trusted his own device too much, as he crashed a plane after accidentally disengaging the autopilot in the midst of becoming possibly the first person to have sex while airborne.
My sticking point is the state of the art of all autopilots in all fields. Fully autonomous systems are very new and still highly experimental (most drones still have human pilots, just remote, for example) and so I don't get how this popular conception that "autopilot = fully autonomous" happened. It's as if everyone thought that "boat" meant something with wheels that can drive on land.
In a world where you're constantly bombarded with press releases about self driving cars and how theyre just around the corner, its not exactly unexpected to think that an autopilot system will pilot your car automatically, especially when tesla is so heavily associated with silicon valley.
It may have a real use in planes or boats but approximately noone is familiar with that.
People invoke factoids about how autopilot for airplane pilots works (they have training!) as if it was common knowledge.
Let's be clear here: Very few people know anything about airplane cockpits. When people read "autopilot" they think "automatic pilot" ie: the thing drives itself, similar to "auto login" login you in without a click. Marketing knows this, we all know this, let's not pretend it was an innocent mistake.
Also, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/autopilot
"a device that steers a ship, aircraft, or spacecraft in place of a person"
In place of. Not under the constant supervision of.
On a ship, for example, the helmsman is steering, but the officer of the deck is in charge.
Because automatic is opposed to manual, which requires human intervention, people assume that automatic requires no intervention (of any kind whatsoever).
From there they expect an autopilot to pilot automatically with no human intervention.
You're absolutely correct in distinguishing supervision from other forms of intervention, but it's easy to see how people can merge both concepts.
Edit: To further clarify, people assume "automatic" implies "you don't need to do anything." Supervising is doing something. So it conflicts with people's idea of "automatic."
So, again, how did you get this idea?
Because, as JonnieCache pointed out, the colloquial definition of Auto Pilot is more informed by entertainment than by the aerospace industry.
What's more baffling is why anyone would assume that the average person knows what "auto pilot" means in an aerospace setting. I mean, why in the world would that be common knowledge? In fact, I've seen enough bone-headed assertions about collision avoidance capabilities of modern aircraft that I'm pretty certain even people who think they know what auto pilot means, actually don't.
FWIW you can test this by finding people outside of the tech echo chamber who don't know what a Tesla is and asking them to describe the capabilities of a car with an Auto Pilot.
I accept that people think it means it's autonomous. Stop repeating that as if it were new to me. What I want to know is why people think that. "Because everybody thinks that, if you'd bother to ask them" is not an answer to that question.
Perhaps also it is not one which is accurate. I'm not really familiar with a lot of entertainment that includes this trope, which is not necessarily a surprise; what is a surprise is that TV Tropes, which is generally very detailed on such matters, doesn't seem to have anything covering it, either. That certainly suffices to inspire some doubt in my mind as to whether "oh, it's just entertainment" is an accurate answer, or a just-so story.
So when people engage their car autopilot, they allow themselves to be on autopilot, literally and figuratively.
Re-read the first sentence of my post.
Perhaps you could answer my question: why would you assume someone with no knowledge of the aerospace industry would understand what the term auto pilot means in that context?
Why would anyone assume the TCAS specification has a greater effect on public perception than the latest comic book movie?
I'm not going to answer your question because you're trying to make me defend a position I'm not taking here.
Did you mean manual transmissions?
Why is it so surprising that people think the prefix "auto-" means automatic or autonomous.
And it's surprising because "autopilot" has been a real-world technology for about a century and that real-world technology almost never allows pilots to leave the plane unsupervised.