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Comment by ip26 | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but think "ready to intervene" would require an even higher level of alertness than just driving the car yourself, as you have to always be prepared for it to do something completely unexpected on a dime- and to notice without the feedback you normally get through the wheel, pedals, etc...

Even worse, if you are taking an action the autopilot should have taken but didn't, you are axiomatically already late no mater how fast you react.

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It reminds me of an article I read about Air France flight 447 (I think it was this: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...). The crux of the article is that when you can automate away a problem 99% of the time, you're much more likely to have trouble when the now-rare problem actually crops up.

It is a flying problem known as "The Children of Magenta"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs

I'm expecting legislation is eventually going to mandate the driver be alert and able to take control of the vehicle at any time, but this feature is just inviting reckless behavior (1).

1. https://abc7.com/5488646/

It really doesn't though. I wish people who were commenting on this were able to try AP for an extended period of time, enough to get used to it.

It makes the driving experience 10x better at least. It's weird to describe but you can almost "feel" the AP working. I've only had to intervene a couple times but when I did you can instantly tell when you need to, and it's quite easy to do. It's almost like you're a supervisor who is overlooking everything rather than micro managing every little adjustment to the steering wheel.

"you have to always be prepared for it to do something completely unexpected on a dime"

This is inherently absurd, even if you remove the last three words. You could write an essay, or a book, on why this is an example of a class of impossible problems. Or, inverting it, it's practically the generic framework of all catastrophes.

You are being downvoted because your reply is basically an unnecessarily long "nuh-uh!" - a dismissal without any counterargument. Wrapping that in a string of fancy words does not change the fact that you are not providing any argument at all.

As far as I can tell, the previous commenter was in agreement with the sentence he quoted, going so far as to say that the “on a dime” stipulation isn’t even necessary to consider the idea that we “must always be prepared for it to do something unexpected” an absurd reality

Hm, after reading and re-reading the post half a dozen times, I realized it can indeed be interpreted that way. Now I'm confused. :)

I agree with the sentence quoted, and wanted to amplify it by noting that when something unexpected happens, even if it happens rather slowly, it can be impossible to deal with it. Because when you see that your assumptions were at least partially wrong, you likely start to question all, or most, of your assumptions about everything. Which can paralyze you for an extended amount of time or lead to just thrashing around.

Yup, looks like I misunderstood your use of "this" at the beginning - I thought you were referring to the post you were replying to. My bad.

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