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Comment by blackguardx | Hacker News Reader

Look at how the word was formed. It came from Automatic - "(of a device or process) working by itself with little or no direct human control" and Pilot - "a person who operates the flying controls of an aircraft"

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.

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"Little or no direct human control" is pretty far from "zero human supervision" so the etymological argument doesn't really do it for me.

Lots of cars have "automatic transmissions" but nobody gets upset when it fails to shift into reverse on its own based on contextual clues.

A big part of this is movies. When they show auto-pilot in the movies, people get up and just leave. There are countless times I have seen this play out in the movies and people think cars with the same name should behave the same way.

Do you have an example? The only one that comes to mind is Airplane! where the whole thing is played for laughs. I'm not questioning it, I'm just unfamiliar.

Demolition Man, I Robot, or Minority Report

It disturbs me that all the examples so far are science fiction. If people are inferring real-world capabilities from SF movies then we're totally screwed!

I don't see why my examples should in any way "disturb you". Science fiction frequently is an inspiration for products and ideas that are made real, examples are legion.

I judiciously selected I Robot and Minority Report because Audi and Lexus, respectively, had product placement for future design concepts.

If these movies are in fact the reason why people overestimate the capabilities of Tesla's system, then that means people's inability to distinguish science fiction from reality is getting people actually killed. That's pretty disturbing! Note, I'm not saying it's wrong, just awful.

I am not trying to imply that people are having difficulty distinguishing fiction from reality.

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...

Other way round: real-world capabilities are built out to meet the SF expectations. Star Trek communicators -> mobile phones. Star Trek computer -> Alexa/Siri et al.

(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...

automatic washing machine

automatic login / logout / lock

automatic debit of monthly bills

automatic reply to calls / emails

automatic plant watering

> automatic washing machine

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."

> Will happily flood the house if something goes wrong.

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.

I'm not saying automatic bill pay is poorly designed, I'm saying it requires supervision to make sure it doesn't do anything stupid. We don't expect "autopay" to be foolproof, we expect it to handle the mundane stuff.

It is designed to be foolproof. It alerts you when banking details fail. It alerts when it makes a payment. The system also sends you a bill email before it even makes a payment a few weeks before in case you want to dispute charges. The system however is to pay bills, and when configured correctly, it does it without you having to intervene at all. Not sure why automatic bill pay requires humans to get involved.

Your bill and the automatic bill pay system are two different concerns here.

If it was designed to be foolproof, they wouldn't bother sending you emails before they make payments.

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.

The day Tesla's helper requires as much supervision as my washing machine or bank or email client, maybe they can claim naivete. Today, it's a cavalier and underhanded marketing tactic.

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.

That's a little harsh, both in general and specifically here. I've observed 'mikeash to be relatively level-headed in his comments here, even against the general baseline of HN's usually quite high level of quality; while he does make occasional excursions into unreasonability, so do we all, and I think it's worth making allowances for such things in the cause of a process which, in my experience, generally results in a stronger understanding of an issue all around.

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.

No, I quite like discussion forums. Learned a lot from them. I just like when the discussions are charitable and productive, and when people argue in good spirit.

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.

What exactly is wrong with saying "that's a bigger problem" when sci-fi examples are posted? I didn't say they were wrong, I just recoiled in horror at the idea.

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.

> Or is "that's disturbing" somehow considered to be an indication of dismissal or disagreement?

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?

I see what you mean, sorry to have been unclear. I think you see what I intended now.

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.

> If people are inferring real-world capabilities from SF movies then we're totally screwed!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect

Captain America - Civil War

Don't you think the people who coined the term autopilot envisioned an eventual future when it was fully autonomous or "fully automatic?"

It seems your major sticking point is about the state of the art of autopilots in other fields.

I'm pretty doubtful that when Lawrence Sperry connected a gyroscope to a hydraulic control system in 1912 that he envisioned a future where the plane handled all aspects of flight.

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.

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