It’s not apologeia. It’s illustrating the foundational limits of the technology. And it’s why I’m skeptical of most machine learning systems. You’re right that it’s a statistical model. But what people miss is that these models are black boxes. That is the crucial distinction between programming and training that I’m trying to get at. Imagine being handed a 10 million x 10 million matrix of real numbers and being told, “here change this so it always stops at crosswalks.” It isn’t just some line of code that can be edited.

The distinction between training and programming is absolutely critical here. You cannot hand waive away that distinction. These models are trained like we train animals. They aren’t taught through hard coded rules.

And that is a fundamental limit of the technology. We don’t know how to program a computer how to drive a car. Instead we only know how to make a computer mimic human driving behavior. And that means the computer can ultimately never peform better than an attentive sober human with some increases reaction time and visibility. But if there is any common errors that humans frequently make, then it will be duplicated in the machine.