It's all fun and games until an AI realizes that a great way to increase the throughput of its intersection would be to keep the lights green in both directions at the same time.
Of course, what the AI doesn't (yet) realize is that human drivers don't have the ability to reliably "zipper" through the holes in a perpendicular stream of traffic that is traveling at full speed. Maybe the AI will figure out the problem once it has seen the resulting mayhem, but in the meantime I'd prefer to use the old "dumb" intersections that don't try to be clever.
I don't know about you, but I hand-craft all of my electronics myself from locally-sourced artisanal hardwood and kitchen twist-ties. It's the only way to be sure.
Best tool for the job in the long term is the one you understand, trust and maintainer yourself if need be.
That's a factor only if you realistically will ever have the time, expertise, and willingness to do those things. If you can confidently predict up-front that you will never actually understand, trust, and maintain the software yourself anyway, then open-source-ness is a bit of a non-factor. Of course you might conceivably someday hire a contractor to do those things, or luck out and find someone who is doing them for free anyway, so it's still somewhat relevant -- but usually it's not the deciding factor. The deciding factor is whether or not the software will let you accomplish your goals with the minimum amount of pain, expense, and effort on your part -- and that depends almost entirely on the quality and appropriateness of the software to your task, and only tangentially on the software's closed/open status.
If you believe THAT half-witted explanation, you will fall for anything.
The funny thing is, it's the conspiracy theorists who end up believing the wildest untruths. They're so busy trying to be discern something hidden that they fail to see the obvious.
Sometimes unlikely things happen -- that's why they're called "unlikely" and not "impossible". Not every bad thing is caused by the machinations of the Secret Evil Cabals.
And if [the ATMs] were running Linux, [the hackers] would exploit Linux
That's very true -- the real question is, why should an ATM (or any other security-critical dedicated device) be capable of running any off-the-shelf software at all?
If I was in charge of designing ATMs, I'd ask for an OS that only runs programs that are encrypted and signed with my company's super-secret private key. That way even if someone somehow got their malware loaded onto the box, the OS would be literally incapable of executing the malware's code. (ideally the CPU itself would be customized to use a randomized/proprietary opcode set that is also generated based on the private key, but that might get a bit expensive, so short of that trusting the OS's program loader/verifier not to be exploitable might have to suffice)
You talk about cities charging for congestion like that is a desirable outcome.
I have no position on whether it's desirable or not -- I only remark that it can be done, and if it is seen as necessary to keep people from abusing the roads by turning them into de-facto parking lots, then it probably will be done.
First of all it's going to be a long time before cities are technologically advanced enough to do that
Given that every self-driving car has GPS, a network connection, and software, the technology to do that is available right now. It would just be a matter of passing a law to force the self-driving car manufacturers to implement it. (yes, I know, ill be the end of American freedom and all that. Again, I'm not advocating this, just predicting it)
if that is what autonomous cars are going to bring on then I'll stick with the manual solution.
You can stick to whatever you want, it won't make a difference to what everybody else does.
I keep saying this.. people will have their cars drive around and around. Gas will always be cheaper than parking.
More likely electricity than gas.... and the cars won't just be driving around, car owners will have their cars picking up and delivering people or goods to their destinations. You paid good money for that vehicle, why not have it earn some income for you while you're not using it?
As for the potential congestion -- if that becomes a problem, you can expect cities to start charging a fee for road usage, e.g. 1 cent per minute your car is driving within city limits. That would quickly put an end to people abusing the streets as moving parking lots.
If you know that the cars will avoid you, what's to stop you from crossing the road at any time?
Your desire to avoid getting arrested for jaywalking. If you break the law, there will be plenty of video evidence of your doing so. Every self-driving car will be constantly recording video and sensor data in all directions, and I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually automatically alert the police when someone is behaving improperly.
When the car that is dispatched to you is full of puke or garbage or blood from the last passenger, what will be the mechanism to refuse it and request another?
1. Open smartphone app 2. Click the "report problem with car" button 3. When the dialog appears asking if you'd like them to send a replacement car to you, click "Yes"
Will that be possible without being billed double?
Of course. And since the app knows who rode in the car previously, and has their credit card on file, the owner of the car will be able to charge them for the cleanup (and in severe cases, cancel their membership to the service)
There are already car-sharing services like ZipCar that occasionally have to deal with issues like these; given that they don't have to support anonymous users, holding people accountable for abuse is not a problem.
Over the last couple of decades the airline industry has been going well out of their way to make sure that flying is unpleasant an experience as possible.
Well, no. They've been going well out of their way to make sure that airline tickets are as cheap as possible, because they need to fill up all their seats to avoid losing money, and people buying airline tickets online tend to favor low ticket prices over all other concerns.
In order to reduce ticket prices, they have to cut their costs, and that is where all the unpleasant changes you listed come in.
But they aren't doing it just because they hate you. They're giving the public what the public wants. If the public thought it was worthwhile to pay extra money for a less painful flying experience, they could do so, but they don't, and so here we are.
Let's face it, voters are often not well-informed, competent, or thinking rationally. Direct Democracy would work if they were, but that's simply not how the world works, and that's why we don't see any countries based on Direct Democracy. Given that, there is indeed value in restricting voter's choices to include only viable, non-disastrous options. Would you go to a restaurant that put Hemlock soup on the menu? Would you buy a car with gas, brake, and self-destruct pedals? Would you call it patronizing if a company refused to sell you those things?
And running a scan EVERY HOUR seems overkill, not to throw puns around.
Even if they scanned only once a month, the problem would still be there and could still bite someone. What Windows really needs is a checkbox that says "do not scan during open heart surgery" Or better yet, a handbook for software developers that says "do not write life-safety-critical software to run under Windows".:^P
suppose the subjects thought they were guessing when in fact they had been tricked into selecting the correct answer without realizing their choice had been biased
Their choice had been biased, but only by the fact that a lower-level part of their brain had seen the correct answer on-screen already, but there wasn't enough time for that knowledge to filter up into their consciousness before they made their choice.
So the interesting part here isn't that they chose the correct color, but that they thought they were still guessing randomly when they (or at least some part of their brain) already knew the answer. Their unconscious mind was guiding their decision without their being aware of it.
To me this sounds like a temporal variation on the phenomenon of Blindsight, where people who are nominally blind still unconsciously respond to visual stimuli that they aren't aware of receiving.
The 9/11 failure was not due to a lack of effort or stupid 'ole Bush not listening to intelligence.
That might well be true -- OTOH, anecdotes like Bush dismissing the "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US" briefer with a simple "All right. You've covered your ass, now." don't look too flattering in retrospect. But sure, maybe they did all they could reasonably be expected to do, and just got unlucky.
Nobody believed that Saddam was behind 9/11, but it absolutely was believed (see again, faulty intelligence) that he had chemical weapons and probably nukes. There were a few unreliable sources that the DO put too much credence in. I'm not going to defend the action the invade Iraq because I thought--and think--that it was poorly executed
The idea that the decision to invade Iraq was an "honest mistake" has been pretty well discredited. The Bush Administration (and in particular the Vice President) were deliberately and willfully "Fixing the intelligence and facts around the policy". That is, they knew the conclusion and the policy they wanted, and they were perfectly willing to ignore any inconvenient facts that might contradict it, and even make up facts to support it when necessary. In particular, Dick Cheney kept pressuring the CIA for reports that fit his preferred narrative, until they finally gave him a report that said something close enough to what he wanted it to say. Whether the Executive branch had actually fooled themselves or were "merely" being dishonest to others in service of a preordained policy objective is beside the point -- a competent and serious administration would have remained objective and thoughtful about such a serious matter, and thereby likely would have avoided a catastrophic policy mistake.
That's fine, as long as they don't do it on a public road where they may endanger other people.
You can wish for that all you like, but it's not going to happen in our lifetime. If you think convincing the American public to hand over its firearms would be politically difficult, that's nothing compared to trying to get them to hand over their beloved automobiles.
And in the end it won't matter anyway, since the only people who will ultimately be endangered by lousy manual drivers are the other manual drivers. The autonomous cars will be perfectly capable of avoiding (and, most likely, automatically reporting to the police) even the worst human driver. Driving is much easier when you can make 1000+ tactical decisions a second; it's less like an arcade game and more like playing a rather dull form of chess.
What liability are they risking? If your wife is injured in an Autopilot related accident, what penalty will Tesla be made to bear?
This being America, the penalty will be whatever amount of money the plaintiff's lawyers can convince the jury to award. And, of course, a blizzard of bad publicity and the accompanying drop in sales -- there's nothing the press likes to more than to see a high flying company brought low.
Sounds like a weak attempt at publicity to me.
Sounds like they are pretty confident to me. Otherwise they'd be more cautious.
There appears to be a choice between someone who is conniving and self serving, and someone who is nasty and under handed. Can you tell which is which?
I can tell which candidate is constantly appealing to bigotry and hate, implicitly (and not-so-implicitly) condoning violence and torture, and blaming all of the nation's problems on minorities and foreigners.
I can tell which candidate has actual experience in government, and which one seems to have learned everything he thinks he knows about government from watching "24".
I can tell which candidate has actual considered positions on issues, and which candidate is just making it up as he goes along (because hey, how hard can running a country be?)
I can tell which candidate is willing to engage in reasoned argument, and which one thinks that merely flinging childish personal insults is a sufficient form of debate.
I can tell which candidate is able to withstand criticism and adversity without getting thin-skinned and emotional, and which candidate can't go 30 minutes without responding to each and every criticism individually by lashing out wildly on Twitter.
I can tell which candidate the KKK and other hate groups are getting themselves excited over.
I don't think Hillary's an ideal candidate by any stretch of the imagination, but at least she's in the right ballpark. I'd expect her tenure as President to be much like Obama's, except with less panache, and that's fine with me. The idea of electing Trump to be president, OTOH, is about as appealing as the idea of hiring Twisty the Clown to entertain at my kids' birthday party.
Remember, he's been a celebrity asshole just as long as Hillary has been a politician!
I agree; both candidates have their images pretty well fixed in the popular imagination by now.
So the $64,000 question becomes, what percentage of the voting public wants to have a celebrity asshole representing the USA as President? I'm cautiously optimistic that it's a small percentage.
Even Warren Buffett (Hillary supporter) has said that Trump wouldn't have any negative business consequences for the country.
I remember the argument that the competence of the President doesn't much matter. I gave it a lot more credence back before George W. failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks (he didn't take the threat of terrorism seriously, because the people warning him about it were outgoing Clinton staffers and therefore not to be listened to)... and then after the shit hit the fan, he let his emotions override his judgement and invaded Iraq for no good reason.
Estimated total direct costs of the 9/11 attacks: $100 billion ($2 trillion if you include indirect losses via the stock market), plus 2,996 people dead and 6,000+ injured.
Estimated total costs of the Iraq War: $2 trillion, plus 176,000+ dead and many more injured.
Anyway, the idea that the competence of the President isn't important no longer holds as much water with me as it used to.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all fun and games until an AI realizes that a great way to increase the throughput of its intersection would be to keep the lights green in both directions at the same time.
Of course, what the AI doesn't (yet) realize is that human drivers don't have the ability to reliably "zipper" through the holes in a perpendicular stream of traffic that is traveling at full speed. Maybe the AI will figure out the problem once it has seen the resulting mayhem, but in the meantime I'd prefer to use the old "dumb" intersections that don't try to be clever.
The actual definition of AI is "something that people can do, that computers cannot do, that we would like computers to be able to do".
So playing chess was AI up until 1950, and Siri was AI up until the day Siri shipped. ;)
If The Donald wins, we are safe.
Really? The tech industry sure doesn't see it that way.
As was foretold in scripture.
If you ban common passwords. Then you end up with a new set of common passwords.
Is there any evidence that the above assertion is true?
I don't know about you, but I hand-craft all of my electronics myself from locally-sourced artisanal hardwood and kitchen twist-ties. It's the only way to be sure.
Best tool for the job in the long term is the one you understand, trust and maintainer yourself if need be.
That's a factor only if you realistically will ever have the time, expertise, and willingness to do those things. If you can confidently predict up-front that you will never actually understand, trust, and maintain the software yourself anyway, then open-source-ness is a bit of a non-factor. Of course you might conceivably someday hire a contractor to do those things, or luck out and find someone who is doing them for free anyway, so it's still somewhat relevant -- but usually it's not the deciding factor. The deciding factor is whether or not the software will let you accomplish your goals with the minimum amount of pain, expense, and effort on your part -- and that depends almost entirely on the quality and appropriateness of the software to your task, and only tangentially on the software's closed/open status.
If you believe THAT half-witted explanation, you will fall for anything.
The funny thing is, it's the conspiracy theorists who end up believing the wildest untruths. They're so busy trying to be discern something hidden that they fail to see the obvious.
Sometimes unlikely things happen -- that's why they're called "unlikely" and not "impossible". Not every bad thing is caused by the machinations of the Secret Evil Cabals.
And if [the ATMs] were running Linux, [the hackers] would exploit Linux
That's very true -- the real question is, why should an ATM (or any other security-critical dedicated device) be capable of running any off-the-shelf software at all?
If I was in charge of designing ATMs, I'd ask for an OS that only runs programs that are encrypted and signed with my company's super-secret private key. That way even if someone somehow got their malware loaded onto the box, the OS would be literally incapable of executing the malware's code. (ideally the CPU itself would be customized to use a randomized/proprietary opcode set that is also generated based on the private key, but that might get a bit expensive, so short of that trusting the OS's program loader/verifier not to be exploitable might have to suffice)
A network connection? No one is going to want a car that is connected to anything. I certainly don't.
Someone ought to tell Tesla that. All current Teslas communicate via the cell network, and it doesn't seem to have hurt their sales any.
You talk about cities charging for congestion like that is a desirable outcome.
I have no position on whether it's desirable or not -- I only remark that it can be done, and if it is seen as necessary to keep people from abusing the roads by turning them into de-facto parking lots, then it probably will be done.
First of all it's going to be a long time before cities are technologically advanced enough to do that
Given that every self-driving car has GPS, a network connection, and software, the technology to do that is available right now. It would just be a matter of passing a law to force the self-driving car manufacturers to implement it. (yes, I know, ill be the end of American freedom and all that. Again, I'm not advocating this, just predicting it)
if that is what autonomous cars are going to bring on then I'll stick with the manual solution.
You can stick to whatever you want, it won't make a difference to what everybody else does.
I keep saying this.. people will have their cars drive around and around. Gas will always be cheaper than parking.
More likely electricity than gas.... and the cars won't just be driving around, car owners will have their cars picking up and delivering people or goods to their destinations. You paid good money for that vehicle, why not have it earn some income for you while you're not using it?
As for the potential congestion -- if that becomes a problem, you can expect cities to start charging a fee for road usage, e.g. 1 cent per minute your car is driving within city limits. That would quickly put an end to people abusing the streets as moving parking lots.
If you know that the cars will avoid you, what's to stop you from crossing the road at any time?
Your desire to avoid getting arrested for jaywalking. If you break the law, there will be plenty of video evidence of your doing so. Every self-driving car will be constantly recording video and sensor data in all directions, and I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually automatically alert the police when someone is behaving improperly.
When the car that is dispatched to you is full of puke or garbage or blood from the last passenger, what will be the mechanism to refuse it and request another?
1. Open smartphone app
2. Click the "report problem with car" button
3. When the dialog appears asking if you'd like them to send a replacement car to you, click "Yes"
Will that be possible without being billed double?
Of course. And since the app knows who rode in the car previously, and has their credit card on file, the owner of the car will be able to charge them for the cleanup (and in severe cases, cancel their membership to the service)
There are already car-sharing services like ZipCar that occasionally have to deal with issues like these; given that they don't have to support anonymous users, holding people accountable for abuse is not a problem.
Over the last couple of decades the airline industry has been going well out of their way to make sure that flying is unpleasant an experience as possible.
Well, no. They've been going well out of their way to make sure that airline tickets are as cheap as possible, because they need to fill up all their seats to avoid losing money, and people buying airline tickets online tend to favor low ticket prices over all other concerns.
In order to reduce ticket prices, they have to cut their costs, and that is where all the unpleasant changes you listed come in.
But they aren't doing it just because they hate you. They're giving the public what the public wants. If the public thought it was worthwhile to pay extra money for a less painful flying experience, they could do so, but they don't, and so here we are.
You prove my point: don't you see how incredibly patronizing that is?
Patronizing it may be, but if the shoe fits, wear it.
Fact #1: The Internet voters did, in fact, nominate and then vote for "Boaty McBoatFace".
Fact #2: The Republican primary voters did, in fact, vote to nominate Donald Trump, who just today has suggested he might just go ahead and default on the nation's debt in order to save us money, because he literally thinks that is how government fiscal policy works.
Let's face it, voters are often not well-informed, competent, or thinking rationally. Direct Democracy would work if they were, but that's simply not how the world works, and that's why we don't see any countries based on Direct Democracy. Given that, there is indeed value in restricting voter's choices to include only viable, non-disastrous options. Would you go to a restaurant that put Hemlock soup on the menu? Would you buy a car with gas, brake, and self-destruct pedals? Would you call it patronizing if a company refused to sell you those things?
How about dropping millennials from helicopters?
The millennials have considered your suggestion and responded with a counter-proposal.
And running a scan EVERY HOUR seems overkill, not to throw puns around.
Even if they scanned only once a month, the problem would still be there and could still bite someone. What Windows really needs is a checkbox that says "do not scan during open heart surgery" Or better yet, a handbook for software developers that says "do not write life-safety-critical software to run under Windows". :^P
suppose the subjects thought they were guessing when in fact they had been tricked into selecting the correct answer without realizing their choice had been biased
Their choice had been biased, but only by the fact that a lower-level part of their brain had seen the correct answer on-screen already, but there wasn't enough time for that knowledge to filter up into their consciousness before they made their choice.
So the interesting part here isn't that they chose the correct color, but that they thought they were still guessing randomly when they (or at least some part of their brain) already knew the answer. Their unconscious mind was guiding their decision without their being aware of it.
To me this sounds like a temporal variation on the phenomenon of Blindsight, where people who are nominally blind still unconsciously respond to visual stimuli that they aren't aware of receiving.
The 9/11 failure was not due to a lack of effort or stupid 'ole Bush not listening to intelligence.
That might well be true -- OTOH, anecdotes like Bush dismissing the "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US" briefer with a simple "All right. You've covered your ass, now." don't look too flattering in retrospect. But sure, maybe they did all they could reasonably be expected to do, and just got unlucky.
Nobody believed that Saddam was behind 9/11, but it absolutely was believed (see again, faulty intelligence) that he had chemical weapons and probably nukes. There were a few unreliable sources that the DO put too much credence in. I'm not going to defend the action the invade Iraq because I thought--and think--that it was poorly executed
The idea that the decision to invade Iraq was an "honest mistake" has been pretty well discredited. The Bush Administration (and in particular the Vice President) were deliberately and willfully "Fixing the intelligence and facts around the policy". That is, they knew the conclusion and the policy they wanted, and they were perfectly willing to ignore any inconvenient facts that might contradict it, and even make up facts to support it when necessary. In particular, Dick Cheney kept pressuring the CIA for reports that fit his preferred narrative, until they finally gave him a report that said something close enough to what he wanted it to say. Whether the Executive branch had actually fooled themselves or were "merely" being dishonest to others in service of a preordained policy objective is beside the point -- a competent and serious administration would have remained objective and thoughtful about such a serious matter, and thereby likely would have avoided a catastrophic policy mistake.
That's fine, as long as they don't do it on a public road where they may endanger other people.
You can wish for that all you like, but it's not going to happen in our lifetime. If you think convincing the American public to hand over its firearms would be politically difficult, that's nothing compared to trying to get them to hand over their beloved automobiles.
And in the end it won't matter anyway, since the only people who will ultimately be endangered by lousy manual drivers are the other manual drivers. The autonomous cars will be perfectly capable of avoiding (and, most likely, automatically reporting to the police) even the worst human driver. Driving is much easier when you can make 1000+ tactical decisions a second; it's less like an arcade game and more like playing a rather dull form of chess.
What liability are they risking? If your wife is injured in an Autopilot related accident, what penalty will Tesla be made to bear?
This being America, the penalty will be whatever amount of money the plaintiff's lawyers can convince the jury to award. And, of course, a blizzard of bad publicity and the accompanying drop in sales -- there's nothing the press likes to more than to see a high flying company brought low.
Sounds like a weak attempt at publicity to me.
Sounds like they are pretty confident to me. Otherwise they'd be more cautious.
There appears to be a choice between someone who is conniving and self serving, and someone who is nasty and under handed. Can you tell which is which?
I can tell which candidate is constantly appealing to bigotry and hate, implicitly (and not-so-implicitly) condoning violence and torture, and blaming all of the nation's problems on minorities and foreigners.
I can tell which candidate has actual experience in government, and which one seems to have learned everything he thinks he knows about government from watching "24".
I can tell which candidate has actual considered positions on issues, and which candidate is just making it up as he goes along (because hey, how hard can running a country be?)
I can tell which candidate is willing to engage in reasoned argument, and which one thinks that merely flinging childish personal insults is a sufficient form of debate.
I can tell which candidate is able to withstand criticism and adversity without getting thin-skinned and emotional, and which candidate can't go 30 minutes without responding to each and every criticism individually by lashing out wildly on Twitter.
I can tell which candidate the KKK and other hate groups are getting themselves excited over.
I don't think Hillary's an ideal candidate by any stretch of the imagination, but at least she's in the right ballpark. I'd expect her tenure as President to be much like Obama's, except with less panache, and that's fine with me. The idea of electing Trump to be president, OTOH, is about as appealing as the idea of hiring Twisty the Clown to entertain at my kids' birthday party.
Remember, he's been a celebrity asshole just as long as Hillary has been a politician!
I agree; both candidates have their images pretty well fixed in the popular imagination by now.
So the $64,000 question becomes, what percentage of the voting public wants to have a celebrity asshole representing the USA as President? I'm cautiously optimistic that it's a small percentage.
Even Warren Buffett (Hillary supporter) has said that Trump wouldn't have any negative business consequences for the country.
I remember the argument that the competence of the President doesn't much matter. I gave it a lot more credence back before George W. failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks (he didn't take the threat of terrorism seriously, because the people warning him about it were outgoing Clinton staffers and therefore not to be listened to)... and then after the shit hit the fan, he let his emotions override his judgement and invaded Iraq for no good reason.
Estimated total direct costs of the 9/11 attacks: $100 billion ($2 trillion if you include indirect losses via the stock market), plus 2,996 people dead and 6,000+ injured.
Estimated total costs of the Iraq War: $2 trillion, plus 176,000+ dead and many more injured.
Anyway, the idea that the competence of the President isn't important no longer holds as much water with me as it used to.