Other comments addressed the self-driving car part, but I somehow can't get over the part where the author's experience at NORAD is used to explain why we have humans in the loop.
According to Wikipedia [1], US-operated drones have killed 910-2,200 civilians, of which 283-454 were children. This all happened with multiple humans in the loop. Those humans decided occasionally killing children is a perfectly acceptable cost of doing business.
Which is, when you think about it, not too far from how human-driven cars and the car infrastructure operates. We just decided some people are going to die and that's an acceptable cost of business. At least, in case of cars, the population that benefits from having cars are (more or less) the same population that's killed by them.
But don't tell me it's superior because there's an (incompetent, sometimes sleepy, sometimes drunk) human in the loop. That's just lame "At least there's always someone we can blame!" BS.
Of course it’s superior because humans are in the loop!
Listen to yourself. What is your argument here? Because humans sometimes make choices you find abhorrent, therefore it is better for humans to make machines that behave abhorrently instead? This is like saying killing someone is more moral when you hire a hitman to do it for you.
How is it lame to say there should always be someone to blame? How is that BS? You are making an point that seems to have no logical connection to your premise.
It seems to me that moral decisions, whether made to your personal standard or not, must morally remain in the hands of humans. Otherwise, we are saying to ourselves that morality improves when people turn away from reality, ignore facts, embed themselves in fantasy.
It’s perfectly reasonable to decide that a certain level of danger is acceptable in return for some personal or societal benefit. In a just and reasonable society, we must have mechanisms for revisiting and adjusting that calculus, and we must create mechanisms that incentivize responsible behavior. What frightens me about self-driving cars is that instead of a car accident being a dispute between people, it’s now a dispute among corporations. Accountability is diffused and nullified. And to adjust that system requires glacially slow congressional action.
I don’t mind that premature death can happen. My sister died in a car crash in 1985. One thing that made it tolerable is that we knew how it happened and why it happened. The people involved were people who had put themselves at risk in knowable, reasonable ways. My sister wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. It was the middle of a snow storm. The other driver had misjudged the curve. Head on collision. Tragic, but acceptable.
With self-driving cars, your safety is fully in the thrall of inscrutable and unknowable factors, controlled by people who are not themselves at any risk. THAT should offend you.
Please don't cross into personal attack or swipes, and please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. You can make your substantive points without any of that.
What if requiring meat in the loop necessarily means more human suffering? Maybe you're not offended as long as there's someone to blame, but I'm offended at the unnecessary additional human suffering.
"Cost of business" is an extremely biaised expression. First there is no real "cost" associated with it.
Also its makes it sound like a liability on the compagnies when its a lot more accurate to call "risk that consumers consciously decide to take for the sake of their transportation", which will never be 0 as in any activité / sport in life. And no one wants to ban car (or orther adrénaline sport) because they are so useful or provide a service.
If anything there are bilions poured into car security ..
> US-operated drones have killed 910-2,200 civilians, of which 283-454 were children. This all happened with multiple humans in the loop. Those humans decided occasionally killing children is a perfectly acceptable cost of doing business.
That's correct, but it doesn't refute the point of the article, which is that having humans in the loop to make life or death decisions is better than punting those decisions to a computer. Suppose the US had fielded autonomous drones that required no human intervention to release lethal weapons. Would you prefer that to what actually happened?
(And no, saying that you'd prefer that the US not operate the drones at all is not an answer for this discussion, because the analogy to that would be not allowing driving at all. And that's obviously a non-starter.)
> We just decided some people are going to die and that's an acceptable cost of business.
Again, while this is true, it doesn't refute the point of the article, which is that the cost is less with humans in the loop. Would you prefer that automated Teslas running over pedestrians in crosswalks were the new normal, and we just wrote that off as a "cost of doing business"?
According to Wikipedia [1], US-operated drones have killed 910-2,200 civilians, of which 283-454 were children. This all happened with multiple humans in the loop. Those humans decided occasionally killing children is a perfectly acceptable cost of doing business.
Which is, when you think about it, not too far from how human-driven cars and the car infrastructure operates. We just decided some people are going to die and that's an acceptable cost of business. At least, in case of cars, the population that benefits from having cars are (more or less) the same population that's killed by them.
But don't tell me it's superior because there's an (incompetent, sometimes sleepy, sometimes drunk) human in the loop. That's just lame "At least there's always someone we can blame!" BS.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._...