Image transcript:

White background meme with the text “People want to build a massive connected network of driverless cars to ‘solve’ traffic. Doesn’t that sound a bit like giving SkyNet control of all the nukes?”

There are illustrative images of the proposed “network of driverless cars” as well as a menacing image of a terminator robot and an image from a news report about a deadly crash caused by a self-driving Uber.

  • @dustyDataEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    It wouldn’t. Have you seen those massive drone light displays? they lose drones during the shows. Nothing indicates that machine learning would fare better. Because reality is way more complex than a computer can simulate. I mean, even in an entirely humanless car network, a single misplaced traffic cone could send the whole system into shutdown. No system is failproof.

    • @FMT99English
      6•1 year ago

      I don’t know about that, it’s all about tolerances. Losing a drone from a cloud is probably considered an acceptable loss.

      How many trains crash every year (leaving out poor maintenance for the moment)? Those systems are highly complex and almost fully automated. AI’s not even really needed.

      • @dustyDataEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Exactly, in a swarm system, losing a drone is fine. A car fully automated network, as CGP suggest, is a swarm system. If they are cars with people inside of it, it isn’t acceptable to lose units, we can’t accept even a single autonomous car randomly losing control into a tree. No matter that humans do that. The system has to be better than humans, not equally bad. Train systems are inherently free from this variation.