The complacency and deskilling are a feature, not a bug. The less I have to learn to get from place to place, the more attention I have for other things that can’t be automated (yet).
Attributing to a GPS faillure a woman driving 900 miles to croatia when she intended to drive 38 miles within Belgium is naive. Most likely she put the wrong address in, possibly with the help of autocomplete, possibly not. But crazy, drug-addled, and or senile people have been winding up hundreds of miles from where they thought they were for a long time before there were any GPS satellites in orbit. Actual GPS errors in my experience take you to a street behind your inou tended destination, or direct you to streets that are closed. And these errors fall off quickly as the expert system becomes, well, more expert. The GPS navigation app errors tend to be small, bringing you near where you need to go but then requiring some intelligence to realize how to fix the error the system has made. Meanwhile, I drove two hours out of my way on vacation in Florida, an error I could not have possibly made to that extent if I had had the GPS navigation systems I now use all the time.
Automated cars WILL be blamed for all sorts of problems including deaths. The unwashed innumerates will tell detailed stories about how they went wrong and be unmoved by the overall statistics of a system which will cause FEWER deaths per mile driven than do humans. Some of those deaths will occur in ways that after-the-fact innumerates, and other elements of the infotainment industry known as democracy, will tell wonderful anecdotes about them. There may even be congressional hearings and court cases. The idea that a few deaths that MIGHT have been avoided under the old regime is literally a small price to pay for an overall lower death rate will be too complex a concept to get legs in the infotainment industry.
But in the long run, the nerds will win, and economically useful automation will be broadly adopted. We don’t know how to grow our own food or build our own houses anymore and we’ve gotten over that. We’ll get over this too and the innumerate infotainment industry known as democracy will move on to its next stupidity.
This isn’t a progress vs luddite debate—the fact that the human element of a automation+overseer performs worse than if the human were entirely in charge, is not a general argument against automation (at most, it might be an argument against replacing a human with an automation+overseer model if the gains are expected to be small).
The fact that humans can exercise other skills (pilots apparently do a lot when the autopilot is engaged) does not negate the fact they lose skills when it comes to taking over from the automation.
The autopilot problem seems to arise in the transition phase between the two pilots (the human and the machine). If just the human does the task, he remains sufficiently skilled to handle the emergency situations. Once the automation is powerful enough to handle all but the situations that even a fully-trained human wouldn’t even know how to handle, then the deskilling of the human just allows him to focus on more important tasks.
To take the example of self-driving cars: the first iterations might not know how to deal with, say, a differently-configured zone due to construction or some other hazard (correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t know much about self-driving car AI). So it’s important that the person in the driver’s seat can take over; if the person is blind, or drunk, or has never ever operated a car before, we have a problem. But I can imagine that at some point self-driving cars will handle almost any situation better than a person.
The complacency and deskilling are a feature, not a bug. The less I have to learn to get from place to place, the more attention I have for other things that can’t be automated (yet).
Attributing to a GPS faillure a woman driving 900 miles to croatia when she intended to drive 38 miles within Belgium is naive. Most likely she put the wrong address in, possibly with the help of autocomplete, possibly not. But crazy, drug-addled, and or senile people have been winding up hundreds of miles from where they thought they were for a long time before there were any GPS satellites in orbit. Actual GPS errors in my experience take you to a street behind your inou tended destination, or direct you to streets that are closed. And these errors fall off quickly as the expert system becomes, well, more expert. The GPS navigation app errors tend to be small, bringing you near where you need to go but then requiring some intelligence to realize how to fix the error the system has made. Meanwhile, I drove two hours out of my way on vacation in Florida, an error I could not have possibly made to that extent if I had had the GPS navigation systems I now use all the time.
Automated cars WILL be blamed for all sorts of problems including deaths. The unwashed innumerates will tell detailed stories about how they went wrong and be unmoved by the overall statistics of a system which will cause FEWER deaths per mile driven than do humans. Some of those deaths will occur in ways that after-the-fact innumerates, and other elements of the infotainment industry known as democracy, will tell wonderful anecdotes about them. There may even be congressional hearings and court cases. The idea that a few deaths that MIGHT have been avoided under the old regime is literally a small price to pay for an overall lower death rate will be too complex a concept to get legs in the infotainment industry.
But in the long run, the nerds will win, and economically useful automation will be broadly adopted. We don’t know how to grow our own food or build our own houses anymore and we’ve gotten over that. We’ll get over this too and the innumerate infotainment industry known as democracy will move on to its next stupidity.
This isn’t a progress vs luddite debate—the fact that the human element of a automation+overseer performs worse than if the human were entirely in charge, is not a general argument against automation (at most, it might be an argument against replacing a human with an automation+overseer model if the gains are expected to be small).
The fact that humans can exercise other skills (pilots apparently do a lot when the autopilot is engaged) does not negate the fact they lose skills when it comes to taking over from the automation.
The autopilot problem seems to arise in the transition phase between the two pilots (the human and the machine). If just the human does the task, he remains sufficiently skilled to handle the emergency situations. Once the automation is powerful enough to handle all but the situations that even a fully-trained human wouldn’t even know how to handle, then the deskilling of the human just allows him to focus on more important tasks.
To take the example of self-driving cars: the first iterations might not know how to deal with, say, a differently-configured zone due to construction or some other hazard (correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t know much about self-driving car AI). So it’s important that the person in the driver’s seat can take over; if the person is blind, or drunk, or has never ever operated a car before, we have a problem. But I can imagine that at some point self-driving cars will handle almost any situation better than a person.
And the risky areas are those where the transition period is very long.