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Comment by joshribakoff | Hacker News Reader

In case you’re living under a rock, it already happened. Are they perfect and driving everywhere in every city? No… but here in SF it is not unusual to see cars with no one in them, they’re driving all over the city, at all times, in parking lots, through school zones, etc

Also you’re trying to discredit a well credentialed individual (who worked in automotive safety regulation) based upon age/gender and other irrelevant factors. I feel the need to call that out as toxic.

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The rollout beyond sf has been … slow. Which begs the question, how autonomous are autonomous vehicles? Is this a technology or an economics problem, or both?

There have been self driving vehicles in well constrained areas since the 90s or even earlier. They have been capable of complex route navigation, obstacle avoidance and responding to a variety of conditions. The technology hasn't really matured an order of magnitude past the automated vehicles that have been moving things around in factories for decades. The technology improvement has come in computing power and sensor tech where now it's just cheaper and easier to include this in more vehicles. There need to be major leaps before this can really become widespread. I would say at best we are at the Commodore 64 era of self driving cars. I think it's going to take even longer to get to the iphone era considering the result of failure could be death.

I don't think the poster is trying to discredit her based on age, just contextualizing her comment about it not happening in her lifetime by estimating what period that's likely to refer to.

The comment about her appeal to authority on the basis of being a fighter pilot is also more a counterpoint to crediting her additionally on that basis above any non-expert, since that skillset isn't actually particularly related to autonomous driving.

shrug, I'm older than her, so the age thing doesn't resonate with me

I appreciate her credentials, but I don't see why her statements are somehow unassailable

and I stick by my point that her history as a fighter pilot has no bearing

not sure where your "gender" point comes from? other than using the pronoun, I made no claims based on gender

I agree with the fact that "experts" are quite often wrong and it's too easy to be derailed by appeal to authority.

On the other hand she has a point. As long as the tech won't be 99.99xxxx safe, it will introduce moral hazard (she calls it "risk-homeostasis" but I don't think that kind of neologism is particularly expressive).

At a meta-level, coining some new term could make someone raise an eyebrow. Perhaps she just didn't know about it.

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