Years ago I talked with a software developer who worked at a company making medical devices that monitored and kept patients alive and breathing in hospitals.
He said every new model had to go through 6 months of testing before they would ship it. They even watched every byte of memory to make sure nothing was leaked or corrupted. Their testing was exhaustive because you couldn’t tell a patient you needed to reboot their life support machine.
It’s unfair to use the behavior of our daily computers as a projection for what future auto-guided vehicles will be like.
@ok4450 Subaru’s system is only designed to bring the car to a complete stop at less than 29mph. http://www.subaru.com/engineering/eyesight.html scroll down to the video for pre-collision braking which includes a version of the same scenario you brought up. The driver is still the most important part in avoiding collisions, even with these systems you still should pay attention.
A LOT of relevant work that changed the world, and how we look at it, was fiction. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, for one, and I think the cautionary aspects of that work of fiction are entirely relevant.
I think we would do well to consider the cautionary aspect of turning captaincy-related tasks over to silicon that 2001 argues against.
@meanjoe75fan, I agree we should carefully consider the issues and possible risks before handing control over to automation. However, where we differ is the need to rely on works of fiction to make a point. I think there are plenty of real world examples and plenty of cogent arguments to be made on both sides of this debate without the need to engage in hyperbole by using fantasy to support your point.
Usually, most of you guys can make great arguments without engaging in hyperbole. I respect a good cogent argument, even when I disagree with it. However, I have a hard time respecting arguments based on hyperbole.
I have read 1984, and I can think of many things that haven’t come true. We don’t have giant eye-cameras in our homes and we aren’t kidnapped, thrown into rooms, and reprogrammed using phobia-based tactics.
Do you have government cameras in your home? In the book, there was an eye camera in every room. Have you been kidnapped by the government for “subversive thinking” and reprogrammed?
@cdaquila, I’ve gone out of my way not to engage @wesw, but he keeps breaking the agreement.
I thought that agreeing not to engage each other would mean you wouldn’t post in discussions I started, but that wasn’t to be, so I figured it would be safe to respond to other people’s posts in your discussion if I addressed other people directly.
We each gave our words that we would leave each other alone, and then you posed in my threads. I still honored my word, until today, when it was clear you weren’t honoring your word.
At this point, I’d understand if @cdaquila banned us both from this forum. You never kept your word and I took your bait.
Aw, c’mon, guys. I didn’t want it to get to this stage because I was just reading this morning about the startup selling the aftermarket Audi kits that are supposed to hit the market in 2015 before Google or a major manufacturer gets a self-driver produced. Maybe in another thread. I don’t want to have to close it.
@bloody_knuckles what you say is true but on the space shuttle…there are numerous backup computers that switch seamlessly and that makes the system reliable. In fact…some backup systems have backups. BTW @Whitey … I’ve been a computer technician for over 30 years and there are glitches in computers that let them make mistakes. The fix is to re-boot them. Some processors are more glitch free than others but they all have the potential to go wonky.
@cdaquila … I think it’s time to pull the plug on this discussion since there is a lot of misinformation being bandied about. Pull the plug, flip the switch or push the button on this merry-go-round.
