It's not so much that full autonomy is impossible. We "fire and forget" many type of systems with no possibility of human intervention--at least not in a timely manner. What you can't do is start an automated process, comforting yourself that an inattentive human can always take over in a split-second if the automation messes up.
> What you can't do is start an automated process, comforting yourself that an inattentive human can always take over in a split-second if the automation messes up.
I think that depends quite a bit on how much is automated. Traditional cruise control is an automation, and I'm sure there have been accidents that resulted from it, but generally it automates so little that you really can't become inattentive (unless you fall asleep). Variable cruise control has more automation, and I would guess the percentage of automation related accidents it played a part in compared to traditional cruise control is higher due to people trusting the system when it is misbehaving. Tesla's autopilot is much farther along this spectrum.
> We "fire and forget" many type of systems with no possibility of human intervention--at least not in a timely manner
Practically speaking, I agree with what you're saying. For autonomous systems as we think of them today, humans can set them and walk away.
Philosophically, if I throw a ball into space, is its continued movement autonomous? Kicking off a computer program is just a complex ball. We don't have true randomness in computers.
> What you can't do is start an automated process, comforting yourself that an inattentive human can always take over in a split-second if the automation messes up.
I 100% agree with this. I think that's a fundamental flaw in Tesla's current plan to achieve autonomous vehicles. It's also a huge liability risk, for which they are not insured, to be dishing out 15,000 systems like this every month. At least the other consumer-available self-driving car systems require hands on the wheel. Tesla doesn't even seem to do that.
Computers are deterministic. Maybe you can convince yourself that something in the outside world isn't, and generate numbers based off of that, like radioactive decay. Even that may be deterministic. I think it's a question for quantum-mechanics or philosophers.
Anyway, practically speaking, we tend to be happy with random numbers that other people would have a really difficult time copying.
I suppose you could declare that true randomness doesn't exist, but that doesn't make computers special...
Anyway, most of the transistors in a chip are barely kept in a range where they're deterministic. Just push some out of that range, and you get randomness that's as true as anything else.
