[Angrybird 12]

Originally Posted by DGthe3

You trust your ability to drive. Do you automatically trust everyone elses in any and every situation? Should everyone else automatically trust you? You already implicitly trust that the engineers who designed the car in the first place have made it safe and reliable for you to operate. If you didn't, you wouldn't get behind the wheel. So why assume that they are incapable of designing a car that can safely & reliably drive itself? If you simply like driving yourself, thats fine. I enjoy driving too and I don't like the idea of being driven around in a car for that specific reason.



Most people are perfectly capable drivers most of the time. But have a tough day at work, unwind at the bar with a couple beers (only a couple, so you're not drunk) before heading home, and then get into an accident because your mind was preoccupied with how your wife is going to be bitching (again) that you're late for dinner. For any individual person, that particular scenario is pretty unlikely. Across hundreds of millions of drivers, with similar situations, accidents like that play out multiple times per day. It goes away with a self driving car because the car doesn't think about work or home life. It doesn't get influenced by alcohol or a lack of sleep. None of that. It drives the same way no matter what you did or what you're thinking that day.


And yes, you can program a car to react to drive around an obstacle. You can program it to react to a flag man too. You can program a car to react to a traffic cop blowing a whistle and waving his hands if you want. You can program a car to react to the differing styles of traffic cops in different countries. Its a question of what combination of sensors do you use & how complicated your code is. For a human, our driving sensors consist primarily of 2 eyes (of varying acuity) located a couple inches away from each other, plus 2 ears (of varying sensitivity) that can occasionally warn you about something you can't see. Thats it. And the algorithms used to convert those inputs into the operation of a vehicle are unique to every single driver & vary from day to day.

After working in control systems for 32 years and knowing the possibility of failure of electronics automated computer controls my main concern is not having any way to take manual control in case of a systems malfunction wether due to programming or equipment malfunction. We were never allowed to design any control system without a manual backup. In fact I can’t imagine the government allowing it either.