more and more my distrust of AI in automobiles is supported by such reports
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Agreed! Active safety systems are all well and good if their failure is back to the passive system.
This is a bit like brake checking someone behind you. You become liable for injury, damage or death even though you were rear ended. In this case Nissan is going to end up in court being sued by both drivers.
Hereâs where I think people lose credibility making these kind of ridiculous statements:
Jason Levine, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, said in a statement. âHowever, when it performs erratically and suddenly stops the car for no reason, it endangers both the carâs occupants and any following cars that may crash into the unexpectedly stopped vehicle. Just as dangerous, this defect is causing some owners to manually turn off the braking feature when they start their car, eliminating its potential safety benefits.â
The highlighting is mine. Iâm sorry, but disabling an optional feature to prevent inadvertent activation is not as dangerous as a malfunctioning system that could activate for no reason at any time. This kind of alarmist position makes me take them less seriously than if they just kept to the facts of the caseâŠ
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The mindset that resulted in the grounding of Boeing planes and plagues several automobile manufacturers seems to be inherent in AI developers. More and more just operating my aging desk top seems to be a chore due to the programing that was written to suit the air heads who have let themselves become sucked up in an isolated and insulated world removed from everyday life. I feel sure that most programmers pat themselves on the back for twisting and contorting system operations just to make operation by the average user difficult. Common logic gets trashed in favor of keep the suckers looking for help. I recently spent more than half an hour verifying that the pop up announcing/demanding an update and restart was legit and then following a lengthy step by step process to go through the START menu to open and allow the update. And for all the updates and high technology my currently updated Windows 10 offers WORD as a PAY TO PLAY app when it was incorporated into all previous Windows systems that I owned. All this progress is an expensive way to get less.
Mull this over- I am often baffled by the processes implemented in computer and gaming programs these days. However, my 9 year old son is quite adept at working through those same processes and finds zero difficulty in understanding them. Perhaps it is not so much designed to be confusing for âaverageâ users, just that older people do not have the appropriate mindsetâŠ
Really? Because I can recall when Word was a separate program costing hundreds of dollars, which btw I refused to pay. At some point they started bundling Office with certain versions of Windows and perhaps people have forgotten when it was separate from the OS bundle. FWIW- I am NOT a fan of the licensing model where you essentially lease the software and do not have a resident executable. Yes, I understand you always have the latest version available but I like stable, reliable software. Not constantly changing user interfaces and customers used as beta testers. I also am very much against âcloudâ storage of any document I may produce or data I may input to your program.
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Well are 9 year olds writing the programs @TwinTurbo? Or does Microsoft prefer program writers with arrested development?
I guess that an intelligent 9 year old can quickly become adept at dealing with AI that incorporates all that intrigues kids his age. But will such a child grow up and find it difficult to deal with the world beyond AI?
For a short time I employed a young mechanic who was amazing with a lap top operated through an OBD 2 interface but he was sorely lacking in insight into the mechanical operation of a car. And a shop near me nearly went broke using the most modern digital alignment machine to put cars dead on the marks that couldnât be held in the road because one corner of the rack would sink under the weight of a car but measure perfectly level when empty.
BTW, what is the financial driver in AI/internet these days? More and more it appears that porn and on line gambling/gaming are swallowing up more band width than anything else.
No, youâre just way older than the millenials doing the programming. I see itâs hard for you to come to grips with itâŠ
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That is one of my fears, that technology will progress to the point where I will not be able to use it.
Examples: VCRs, older people thought the TV had to be on to ârecord off the TVâ.
My brother was a programmer in the 70s, does not know how to use the features of his
Phone.
Me, scan a document, I donât know where it goes, cannot find the document.
Iâm gripping as best I can @TwinTurbo. But I see a lot of people under the age of 40 who are often disgusted with the âinside jokeâ of dealing with AI. Of course age is a significant factor.
How old were the pilots of those 2 Boeing planes that went down?
Agreed. Itâs only just as dangerous if the driver is a distracted idiot.
Admittedly this applies to probably 75% of the drivers on my daily commute, but that means 25% of them would be safer for disabling the system. 
@Rod_Knox the mindset that resulted in the 737 max crashes is different from this mindset. The AEB system malfunction is probably an unintentional programming mistake.
The 737 max problem was a was a chain of deliberate decisions. First they decided to make the auto trim capable of overpowering the pilots. Then they decided to make the stall prevention system which uses the auto trim only get input from one single angle-of-attack sensor that commonly gets broken even though thereâs more than one AOA sensor on the plane! And then because the stupid hadnât piled up quite high enough for Boeing, they decided for inexplicable reasons to keep this system secret from the people who were flying the planes.
Combine that with a general lack of good training for the aircrews involved in the crashes (because they should have disconnected auto trim as soon as it started misbehaving whether they knew about the new anti-stall system or not) and you end up with a lot of intentional cost-cutting decisions that killed people.
Both systems were âair hooksâ wishing to be grand lifesaving technology to sell planes and cars and a lot of the technology that we are sold is mostly fluff and sometimes very dangerous fluff.
Not really. The 737 system was a bandaid to get around a bad design compromise. They needed bigger engines for the 737 Max than the normal 737s have, but the 737âs wing is low to the ground, so they had to move the engines in front of the wing to get the necessary ground clearance. That changed the center of gravity as well as allowing the engine cowling to impart unwanted lift, and in some situations could cause a pitch-up and stall.
The new system was designed to detect those situations and rapidly pitch the nose down to avoid a stall. But when the AOA sensor feeds bad data, the system is fooled into thinking that situation is happening when it isnât, with the result that it points the nose at the ground unnecessarily. If it does this during takeoff, when youâre close to the ground, bad things happen.
What Boeing really should have done was to design a new plane that met the specs their customers wanted, but they didnât want to spend the money necessary to do so and decided to instead modify the 737 and then fix the bad physical design in software.
The Nissan system was a mistake. The Boeing system was a series of deliberate unsafe tightwad decisions.
I also donât agree that automatic braking is unnecessary or fluff. Like it or not, a very significant percentage of drivers out there today are busy playing on their smart phones instead of looking through the windshield. That AEB might just save me from getting rear-ended some day. For all I know, it already has â Iâve had several near-misses in rush hour traffic over the past year or so, and the drivers that almost hit me did not appear to even be aware that something almost went wrong.
I used to be firmly in your camp. I didnât want any safety systems. Not even ABS. But drivers have become measurably worse since the first smart phone hit the market, and now? As long as weâre not going to treat smartphone driving the same way as drunk driving (and preferably even harsher) then these systems are absolutely needed. Unless theyâre forced to, those distracted drivers arenât going to stop paying attention to their phones when theyâre supposed to be driving and so we have to figure out some other way to prevent them from running into things.
âAI may be short for âartificial intelligence,â but in many ways, our automated programs can be surprisingly dumb. For example, you can think youâre training a neural net to recognize sheep, but actually itâs just learning what a green grassy hill looks like. Or teaching it the difference between healthy skin and cancerâbut actually just teaching it that tumors always have a ruler next to them. And if you ask a robot to navigate a space without touching the walls, sometimes it just stays still in one place.â
Well if autonomous automobiles are to be developed to allow the owners to become otherwise occupied passengers in their computerized cabs I hope laws require very high insurance to own them and that the vehicles are severely limited in their speed and proximity, relative to speed, to other vehicles.
I can only imagine that road rage will become a much greater problem when the hot rods are continually held back by vehicles that have no concern for what is happening behind them. But why should they?
The same rebellious spirit that 50 years ago gave us Hot Rods is alive and well on the software front.
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Back then the parents didnât understand the joy of those greasy, noisy, souped up wrecks we were driving and missed out so donât turn into your parents!
Back in the '60s, we bought a transistor radio for my Great Aunt. Her mind was still as sharp as a tack, but replacing batteries was a daunting task for her, so she had to ask the guy in the local hardware store to replace her radioâs batteries when they went dead.
Yeah and as a Boomer myself, my OMG moment came when I asked my then college daughter what she was doing in class. Her response was, âNothing exciting, just creating a batch of DNA in the labâ.
Wonât be long before the answer to, âWhat chimp did this to my car!â and they bring out Bonzo the genetically modified Grease Monkey. 
Just gotta keep going with the flow or drown.
More knowledge is necessary to determine if âdeactivation to prevent inadvertent activationâ (assuming one has no choice but to keep driving the car until fixed) is the best course. One must know and compare the probabilities of a serious accident arising from each type of failure - if the automatic braking feature, though imperfect, saves more serious injuries and deaths than it causes, then keeping it turned on until its âfixedâ is the better choice. If the false activations cause more harm than the system saves by preventing collisions then it should be turned off.