Why Self-Driving Cars Should Never Be Fully Autonomous (roboticstrends.com)

An anonymous reader writes: David Mindell, an MIT professor, says self-driving cars should never be fully autonomous. "There's an idea that progress in robotics leads to full autonomy. That may be a valuable idea to guide research but when automated and autonomous systems get into the real world, that's not the direction they head. We need to rethink the notion of progress, not as progress toward full autonomy, but as progress toward trusted, transparent, reliable, safe autonomy that is fully interactive: The car does what I want it to do, and only when I want it to do it." Mindell writes, "Google's utopian autonomy is a more brittle, less functional solution than a rich, human-centered automation."

Comments

Not sure I agree

[ranton]

“The notion of ceding control of something as fundamental to life as driving to a big, opaque corporation - people are not comfortable with that,” -- David Mindell

I'm not sure I agree with that. Sounds similar to someone 150 years ago saying "The notion of ceding control of something as fundamental to life as growing and hunting the food to feed my family to a big, opaque corporation - people are not comfortable with that".

People get comfortable with a great number of things if you make their life significantly better even while asking them to give up a little control.