Valuethinker wrote:
The first thing to note is that autonomous vehicles will be much safer than human guided ones-- most accidents are human error. In the long run (think Robert Heinlein) what will be a crime will be driving *without* your autonomous systems on. I think it's one of Heinlein's novels where the character casually mentions the death penalty for doing that in rush hour in a major urban centre?
We do not live in Heinlein's word (good thing too, I dont want to be eaten by a 10 foot space arachnid), we do not live on a giant city planet of Coruscant or Trantor. The google autonomous car is a long way from having R. Daneel Olivaw at the wheel driving us around.....
Again, I'm going to suggest that you read the Sully Sullenberger interview and consider his viewpoint on this. Current aviation systems assist the pilot, not replace the pilot - and some pilots think the airbus approach is
too restrictive and prefer the Boeing way, since airbus approach can limit the pilots options in situations the designers did not foresee.
I truly believe that blind faith in technology to solve all ills is dangerous. I know many aviation accidents come down to human error - but in many cases that human error was a result of overworked/under trained pilots who misinterpreted the data from the autopilot or didn't know how to react when
the automation failed because they become overly reliant on it.
https://flightsafety.org/asw-article/au ... abilities/
http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/aer ... of-factors
http://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent ... ublication (very interesting findings here - while statistically overall fatalities have gone down with more automation, in incidences where automation fails the odds of fatality are increasing becasue pilots are less equipped to detect and recover due to over reliance)
Which all tie back to the bigger issue of the automation paradox.
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/bewa ... utomation/
The key point - automation is not perfect. It can and will fail or get overwhelmed and when it happens if the human operator cant intervene than we lost our best last line of defense. And putting religious faith in automation is taking away that line of defense.