You want to trust an 80k lbs semi in driving rain and sleet on a frozen mountain pass?
There are tons of conditions that even the best autonomous systems are no where near ready for.
It’s going to be a while.
There are tons of conditions that even the best autonomous systems are no where near ready for.
It’s going to be a while.
Because when the autonomous systems are trained on how to handle adverse conditions, its the sum of the knowledge of all machines that build how to handle these conditions. Whereas each human has to learn it individually. And given how bad people drive even with rainstorms, I'd put the money on the computers.
And frankly, we can also discuss if "driving in rain/sleet on frozen mountain pass" is even a good idea. Because computers can also provide data like "Estimated chance of wreck is X%", and decisions can be made using that.
Tl;Dr. One machine learns and can share with all nearly instantaneously. 1 human learns and that's it.
In the long term, yes, definitely. And I am looking forward to the day.
But it is going to be a while, and it is going to be a while longer until all the politicians and insurance companies are convinced of that, too.
An "auto" will have less incidence of wrecks and drive provably safer. And the "auto" will also record everything as proof, so if there is a wreck involved, it's a simple "download and review the footage". Guilt is now easy to prove as well as trivial to exonerate.
And all of those things will bring the cost of insurance down for the insurance companies. And many of them will then lower their rates appropriately given very high standard of proof they provide.
After all, insurance is heavily based in the sciences and mathematics. If they weren't, insurance companies wouldn't last very long at all.
Now, I have no clue on how to get politicians to understand science. I'm not sure if that's even possible, as science can easily go against an ideology - and thusly their political stance.
To be honest, once autonomous driving systems become so good they are provably and reliably better than humans, insurance companies will probably charge a premium for the privilege of driving your car yourself.
I am just not sure when autopilots will become that good. OTOH, I did not expect to see self-driving cars arrive during my lifetime, and now it looks very strongly like I will. ;-)
> Now, I have no clue on how to get politicians to understand science.
Given the kind of political influence car manufactures have (at least here in Germany), I think that will not be too much of a problem once the demand is there.
So you're saying you trust code written by humans way more than humans? That doesn't make any sense.
Do you trust more your calculator when you have to perform simple operations like sums , multiplication or square root , or you trust your self with a paper and pen more?
The calculator is a board with written code by humans. Then please, do you think Space X does all their calculations by hand or base on computer simulations using well known and tested algorithms
I trust the calculator sure, but I try to always understand enough about the problem at hand to know when the numbers don't make sense - bad data, keying error, edge case, numeric overflow, wrong units, yadda yadda. Punching numbers in and blindly writing down what you get out is a recipe for disaster. When I did engineering it wasn't unusual for people to do the same calculations on an HP and a TI just to make sure - and bugs in calculators weren't unheard of.
base on computer simulations using well known and tested algorithms
SpaceX same as everyone else who actually does this, combines simulations and actual experiments. Noone flies anything built off simulations alone, and I can't see that happening for a looooong time. And even then, things still sometimes go wrong. Computers are not a magic silver bullet, they are just a tool like a spanner or a hammer.