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Never thought about this before but we already have biometric scanners on our phones we rely on and work quite well, why couldn’t it work for guns?

You’ve never had your fingerprint scanner fail because your hand is dirty?

Or you didn’t press it in the right spot?

Or the battery was dead?

If I’m out in the wild and in a situation where a bear is coming my way (actual situation that requires carrying a gun in certain locations) I do not want a fingerprint scanner deciding if I can or cannot use the gun. This is the kind of idea that only makes sense to people who have no familiarity with the real world use cases.

I will admit i am arm chair designing something i have not considered deeply but all your edge cases sound like solvable problems to me and if they aren’t just not a situation to use this particular solution for. E.g biometrics on phones, open the phone for a configurable set amount of time and have fallbacks when biometrics fail (the pin) and emergency overrides for critical functionality like 911 calls. I was not proposing this be rolled out to all guns tomorrow by law but i am equally skeptical it is an intractable problem given some real world design thinking. Or constrain the problem to home defense weapons but not rugged backcountry hunting.

They exist. For example, https://smartgun.com/technology and digging into the specs ... https://smartgun.com/tech-specs

    Facial recognition: 3D Infrared
    Fingerprint: Capacitive

I had a fingerprint scanner on an old phone and it would fail if there was a tiny amount of dirt or liquid on my finger or on the scanner. It's not big deal to have it fail on a phone, it's just a few seconds of inconvenience putting in a passcode instead. On a firearm, that's a critical safety defect. When it comes to safe storage, there are plenty of better options like a safe, a cable/trigger lock, or for carrying, a retention holster (standard for law enforcement).

If the biometric scanner stops you from shooting a target that someone else other than you determined?

> The imagined ideal of a smart gun that perfectly identifies the user, works every time, never makes mistakes, always has a fully charged battery ready to go, and never suffers from unpredictably problems sounds great to a lot of people.

People acccept that regular old dumb guns may jam, run out of ammo, and require regular maintenance. Why are smart ones the only ones expected to be perfect?

> “Sorry, you cannot fire this gun right now because the server is down”.

Has anyone ever proposed a smart gun that requires an internet connection to shoot?

> Or how about when the criminals discover that they can avoid being shot by dressing up in police uniforms, fooling all of the smart guns?

People already do this.

> People acccept that regular old dumb guns may jam, run out of ammo, and require regular maintenance. Why are smart ones the only ones expected to be perfect?

This is stated as if smart guns are being held to a different, unachievable standard. In fact, they have all the same limitations you've already pointed out (on top of whatever software is in the way), and are held to the exact same standard as "dumb" guns: when I, the owner, pull the trigger, I expect it to fire.

Users like products that behave as they expect.

> when I, the owner, pull the trigger, I expect it to fire

You’ve never had a misfire or a jam? Ever?

Any smart technology is an added failure rate in addition to those failure modes.

Arguing that something might fail and therefore any additional changes that can introduce failure modes are therefore okay is the absolute worst claim to hear from any engineer. You can’t possibly be trying to make this argument in good faith.

A misfire or a jam are just as possible on a "smart" gun. Again, this is not a unique standard being applied unfairly.

Gun owners already treat reliability as a major factor in purchasing decisions. Whether that reliability is hardware or software is moot, as long as the thing goes "bang" when expected.

It's not hard to see the parallels to LLMs and other software, although ostensibly with much lower stakes.

> Gun owners already treat reliability as a major factor in purchasing decisions.

But zero smart guns are on the market. How are they evaluating this? A crystal ball?

Why do we not consider “doesn’t shoot me, the owner” as a reliability plus?

There are (or were, anyway) smart guns on the market. It's just that nobody wants to buy them.

As far as your comparison with misfires and jams, well... for one thing, your average firearm today has MRBF (mean rounds before failure) in the thousands. Fingerprint readers on my devices, though, fail several times every day. The other thing is that most mechanical failures are well-understood and there are simple procedures to work around them; drilling how to clear various failures properly and quickly is a big part of general firearms training, the goal being to be able to do it pretty much automatically if it happens. But how do you clear a failure of electronics?

> But zero smart guns are on the market. How are they evaluating this? A crystal ball?

It doesn't take a crystal ball to presume that a device designed to prevent a product from working might prevent the product from working in a situation you didn't expect.

> Why do we not consider “doesn’t shoot me, the owner” as a reliability plus?

Taking this question in good faith: You can consider it a plus if you like when shopping for a product, and that's entirely fair. Despite your clear stated preference, it's not relevant (or is a negative) to reliability in the context of "goes bang when I intentionally booger hook the bang switch".

I'm not trying to get into the weeds on guns and gun technology. I generally believe in buying products that behave as I expect them to and don't think they know better than me. It's why I have a linux laptop and an android cell phone, and why I'm getting uneasy about the latter.

Sure; api.anthropic.com is not a mechanical device.

> Or how about when the criminals discover that they can avoid being shot by dressing up in police uniforms. . .

Sadly, we’re already past this point in the US.

> Or how about when the criminals discover that they can avoid being shot by dressing up in police uniforms, fooling all of the smart guns?

Dressing up in police uniforms is illegal in some jurisdictions (like Germany).

And you might say 'Oh, but criminals won't be deterred by legality or lack thereof.' Remember: the point is to make crime more expensive, so this would be yet another element on which you could get someone behind bars. Either as a separate offense, if you can't make anything else stick or as aggravating circumstances.

> A very similar story is the idea of a drink driving detector in every vehicle. It sounds good when you imagine it being perfect. It doesn’t sound so good when you realize that even a 99.99% false positive avoidance means your own car is almost guaranteed lock you out of driving it some day by mistake during its lifetime, potentially when you need to drive it for work, an appointment, or even an emergency due to a false positive.

So? Might still be a good trade-off overall, especially if that car is cheaper to own than one without the restriction.

Cars fail sometimes, so your life can't depend on 100% uptime of your car anyway.

> Cars fail sometimes, so your life can't depend on 100% uptime of your car anyway.

Try using this argument in any engineering context and observe how quickly you become untrusted for any decision making.

Arguing that something doesn’t have 100% reliability and therefore something that makes it less reliable is okay is not real logic that real people use in the real world.

> Try using this argument in any engineering context and observe how quickly you become untrusted for any decision making.

We famously talk about the 'numbers of 9s' of uptime at eg Google. Nothing is 100%.

> Arguing that something doesn’t have 100% reliability and therefore something that makes it less reliable is okay is not real logic that real people use in the real world.

That wasn't my argument at all. What makes you think so?

I'm saying that going for 100% reliability is a fool's errand.

So if the device adds a 1/1,000,000 failure mode, that might be perfectly acceptable.

Especially if it eg halves your insurance payments.

You could also imagine that the devices have an override button, but the button would come with certain consequences.