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Comment by listenallyall | Hacker News Reader

Level 5 means no human intervention, under any circumstance. Ice, snow, night, fog, unmarked roads, tunnels, mega-urban, isolated rural, parking lots/structures, etc, etc. I think he's correct. It's hard to think of any technology that works without human intervention whatsoever, no matter the conditions.

We've had autopilot for decades, we're certainly not flying planes without pilots. Or even getting them from runway to gate without humans. Nor is anyone claiming that pilot-less planes are coming soon.

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Most humans can't drive safely in all conditions without outside human intervention.

Planes are different in that there is a large ratio of passengers to "drivers". There isn't the same economic incentive to eliminate pilots when the cost of flying a plane is still going to be quite a few dollars a minute.

The thing is, there are some conditions where people probably just shouldn't be driving. Like we shouldn't be driving in a heavy snow storm, at least not for most trips where you can just wait it out. Planes will wait out storms, even with human pilots. I don't see a problem with "level 4.9" cars that occasionally say "I'm going to wait out the storm" or that will avoid certain routes (such as "crazy mixing bowl" intersections where you can instead just take a side street)

There will always be a facility to manually override the decisions of the autopilot. It’s likely to be a legal requirement so that in an emergency the vehicles can be directed to do things they normally wouldn’t (like drive on the wrong side of the road). But you don’t need a steering wheel to do that.

I imagine there’ll also be manual modes to get the car into trucks and ships, or even just out of the factory.

How much do pilots actually pilot vs how much do they just assume responsibility? I.e. I as a passenger feel much safer knowing that there's someone actually responsible to prevent me from dying (because if the plane crashes, the pilot dies with me), not just some C_O suits pushing PR through legal trying to gaslight the public and avoid any culpability (cough Boeing cough).

That's exactly the point, even if pilots use autopilot most of the time (level 4 autonomy).

Guess when they take control? When something bad is happening (and there are literally a million things that can go wrong and the autopilot could not fix, ever).

Guess why MCAS did not result in more crashes (the system has been known to malfunction a couple of times before the crashes)? Righty because there were pilots that could manually control the plane well enough to land safely.

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