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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

My grandfather was fond of telling me about drunks who'd get into their buggy and trust their horse to take them home. I don't think we're too far away from being able to do that with self-driving cars as long as you have the presence of mind to say Google - Home. Society has to decide whether that is a good thing or not.

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A friend of mine does that regularly — as early as three months ago. She even asked about where to have capes made because it gets cold if you don’t wake up when you are in front of the barn. Her relationship with her horse is a little closer than you’d expect though: she writes poems to him. The horse tells her when it’s time to go home.

Suddenly I really hope Bob Zemeckis reads HN.

I’d imaging getting hit by a buggy carried a significantly lower risk of fatality. Not to mention a horse is a better computer than a Tesla. But I agree with your conclusion of course.

Not to mention there was significantly less buggy traffic than there’s car traffic today.

I think maybe that should be a goal for "strong AI" - not human intelligence, just the intelligence of a semi-smart animal.

well, that's still almost as complicated as human intelligence. the only main part that's missing is language. and to be fair, although human natural languages are really tricky, you could easily build communicative, natural-like languages that computers can handle (similar in appearance to simplified english). in any case, if you are solving learning, which is needed for a semi-smart animal intelligence, you probably wouldn't be far away from solving language. we are very semi-smart ourselves

My grandma died (long before I was born) after she fell and an ox pulled a cart over her. I wouldn't rely on a horse to stop for a small obstacle like a human.

So depressed to realize that the past few generations have been the only time in history we haven’t had autonomous vehicles.

To be honest, all horses pooped in the street (which led to epidemics of infectious diseases) and many horses freaked out and trampled passers-by, which lead them to more road death then we have now. I’m no fan of the automobile by a wide margin, but it was an uncontestable overall improvement over carriages.

Horses have pretty good collision avoidance, but even they have a false positive problem; they're easily spooked by flapping plastic bags and other unexpected movement in their visual field.

If sometime in the future self driving cars reach the point that they are better drivers than the average human driver then it will be better if the non drunks too let their cars do the driving.

As far as I know, it is legal to ride a horse drunk (as long as the horse is sober) in some places. Montana has even put a horse picking up a drunk from a bar in one of the adverts against drink driving. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnYtY9wfvvc

Do you know if it's legal for a sober person to ride a drunk horse? And how do horses even get drunk??

>And how do horses even get drunk??

You know those extra thick milkshakes you get in burger franchises? Try not to buy them from the cheaper places.

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