People just react, but a computer has a lot more time to decide, and in fact it MUST decide because it can't work on intuition, it must chose every single action. So yes, it is a very real problem. The car will at some point have a choice between 2 things to hit, where not hitting anything isn't an option. It could be programmed to chose a random number between 1 and 2 and hit based on that, but it's more likely you'd program it to chose based on minimizing harm. But harm to whom?
It goes beyond that, because consumers chose the cheaper options, manufacturers stop making the more expensive ones, meaning that even institutional types can't buy them. It's getting much harder to find archival grade storage medium because it's just not cost effective for companies to produce it when very few people buy it.
Beyond that, when developing a new technology, why bother looking at longevity as part of the design specs when nobody will pay for it?
If you want try long lasting storage, you're left looking at older technology, much older. So to say that we'd design something today that's likely to outlive what we designed several decades ago is really just wishful thinking. The thing we designed several decades ago is estimated to last over a billion years, do you really think we'd do better than that today? Sure maybe we could do the same thing for cheaper (though that may not be the case either to be honest) but I doubt we'd do something that has more longevity.
Once again, I fully agree that these will be MUCH safer than current vehicles, and nowhere have I ever stated otherwise.
but that "philosophical debate" isn't just philosophical, it's real. There are currently an estimated 1.25 million annual fatalities involving motor vehicles in the world. Even a system that's a full million times safer (and even the strongest advocates for self driving vehicles have never claimed that) would still involve deaths averaging more than one per year. You can try all you want to explain that that's much safer than now, and it is in every possible way, but if that one person is someone you know, you'll still likely be looking for who to blame. So someone has to decide who is to blame, and how the decisions are made. That someone won't be an engineer, it will be the government, and governments DO "obsess over [...] a rounding error" that's their job.
And once again, why you'll see regulatory bodies being the ones who make these decisions eventually, not the manufacturers or the consumers. It will be taken out of their hands.
You do realize that those claims (although 100% false advertising) don't even apply to the vehicle in question because it didn't have that hardware on it right? The hardware you're talking about, and the claims you're pointing to are for hardware released AFTER the car you're talking about was sold.
This is like blaming your Ford Model T for the cruise control not working because modern Fords include it.
Translation: Development is done, it's already here but due to the red tape we can't say it is.
no, translation: "the hardware on our latest cars is done, but the software isn't, and still requires quite a bit of work, and we still aren't selling you a self driving car yet, so you still need to drive for yourself until we eventually release the self driving feature." Not to mention that Tesla are, as usual, lying outright in their claim that those cars will ever be self driving with that hardware.
But that's a completely different story, and not related to the idiot who took his car and drove it in to the side of a semi-truck (reportedly while watching a movie while he should have been driving)
The OP seemed to think that because technology had come so far since the first records were made that we'd have a better way now. My point was that technology surrounding data longevity has not really progressed since that time. If anything, modern storage methods have much worse longevity than the older forms.
You just can't get much better longevity than "stuff etched deeply on a strong surface" This is why we can still read stone tablets from centuries ago, but can't recover data from some CDs that are only 20 years old
Nowhere did I ever claim that vehicles wouldn't coordinate, nor that any of these wouldn't minimize crashes, injuries and death. Nor did I say that it would be simple, or that other injuries wouldn't be a factor as well. But at some point it comes down to that trolley problem, or an us vs them decision. Even your prioritization put "us" after "them", but based on what? and based on how many "us" and how many "them"?
If anything you've made my point for me. You made an assumption about who would be protected over who, and chose "us" over "them" and completely ignored numbers of people as well. These are not simple decisions, and the decision that the auto maker would make (minimize their own liability) may not be the same as the end customer would make (maximize their own safety), which may not be the same as what's in the best interest of society (minimize harm to everyone).
At some point regulatory agencies WILL mandate these sorts of decisions.
But you go back to the concept of the record "decaying". Based on what mechanism? What will cause decay that is not any form of particle? (being that you insisted it won't hit any particles)
I didn't say that the content providers were better. They're even worse, but I suspect that if the large cable companies pushed hard enough they'd have some clout too, they just aren't willing to push because they don't really get it either.
Except that for this to work right the manufacturers have to take the liability for the vehicle's actions as they're the ones doing the programming. Which means the manufacturer is going to do the math. 1 occupant or 3 pedestrians, the lawsuit for the 1 occupant will probably cost them less money, so they'd rather save the 3 pedestrians.
This isn't a simple choice, and is not likely to be resolved decisively until regulatory agencies get involved (which they are guaranteed to do eventually)
We don't know what is enough, but that doesn't mean that we don't know what isn't enough. Surround view cameras without radar, and without any way of keeping those cameras clean, are very obviously not enough.
I'm thinking that hitting ANYTHING is more likely than being captured by an intelligent species, or degrading due to time without any particles impacting it.
Because this is the way the cable industry thinks. When I called my local cable company 17 years ago and told them to discontinue my cable service, and after all the back and forth about how I simply didn't want it and wasn't watching it, and after they finally agreed to disconnect me, their final words for me were "see you in a couple of months". The person on the other end of the phone just simply couldn't grasp the concept of a person without cable.
That attitude hasn't changed. It's not that they're trying to trick you here, they honestly just don't understand the concept. This is also why people are cutting the cord, because the cable industry doesn't understand their needs. The fact that they cling to the concept of airing shows at a certain time on a certain day and not just adding them to the VOD library at that time, the fact that they cling to channel packages instead of lone channels, the limitations on viewing on specific devices in specific locations. All of these things show that they just simply don't understand their customer base.
This "article" is just a shill for the cable companies trying to convince people not to cut the cord, but as usual, they've just shown how little they understand about what people actually want.
Many vehicles today already have a large percentage of the hardware, it's needed for other more basic systems like automatic emergency braking, forward collision warning, automatic lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, parking sensors, blind spot monitoring, etc. These cars will likely still need a bit more in the sensor department, but not all that much. They'll likely need some more powerful computers processing those signals though, and then of course a lot of software.
What Ford is talking about though is about the rest of the car. If your car drives itself, why do you need to sit with a steering wheel in your lap looking through a big pane of glass? wouldn't you rather relax on a couch watching a movie? Of course what Ford fails to realize is that this evolution will come, but it can come after the self driving part. The re-imagining of the interior (and maybe even exterior) need self driving before they can happen, but self driving does not need those changes to happen before it comes to be. Most major changes in technology are not overnight revolutions, they're evolution that takes time. Self driving will be no different.
If you take a model S, and add cross traffic and rear radars, it will have the hardware to be 100% self driving. (Don't believe Tesla when they take your money for "full self driving" without those basic necessities, they're flat out lying as they have done so often in the past)
Beyond that though, there's a LOT of software work to be done, and I really don't know how far away that is. There are just so many edge cases in driving that I'm not confident that we'll get to 100% self driving with zero driver input under any circumstances for a very long time (and that's what you need if you want to get out of the car at work and send the car to pick your kid up at school without you)
Ford though is talking about the next stage, once self driving is around, you won't want what the Model S offers. sitting facing forward with a steering wheel in your lap and with the primary entertainment display off to the side and out of your line of sight will be awkward and unnecessary. Thing is, that's talking about what a self driving car CAN be, not what a self driving car MUST be, these are 2 very different things, and I don't think Ford understands that. Too many people think that you must have complete revolution, instead of simple evolution. The first fully self driving cars will be just like today's cars, but with radar, lidar, and cameras mounted on them, plus some pretty powerful computers and software. They'll evolve from there to include more vehicle to vehicle communication, and to change the interior away from a driving focus, and towards an entertainment focus, but none of that will happen instantly, nor does it need to.
The people who expect a full self driving revolution don't tend to be happy with the slow evolution that actually could get us there, and therefore these people are holding back progress.
The guy who had "no fault of his own" drove his car in to the side of a semi-truck. That is the very definition of his fault. He didn't apply the brakes, didn't swerve, he drove straight in to the side of a truck.
And don't claim it was the car's fault. The car was not self driving, you can't buy a self driving car at this point, nobody claimed the car could drive itself, and he had to agree to, and ignore, many warnings that it could not before operating it.
In response to that incident, Musk did the horribly irresponsible, and illegal, thing, by reaching in to people's previously bought and paid for vehicles without their permission and removing functionality.
Musk never said that the system in place on that vehicle needed a few more tweaks to achieve self driving, he said that the system on that car was never meant for self driving, and never advertised as such. He also said that future models of the car would include self driving by using different hardware and software. That's not "minor tweaks"
Of course that said, the system on that "insanely dangerous" vehicle, is already several times safer than your average driver, so even that would be a step in the right direction.
Unfortunately idiots like you are costing people lives every day by holding back these sorts of advances because people die (even if fewer than would die without them) And worse yet, people like Elon are listening to idiots like you and doing stupid things in response to make their products more dangerous than they were before stupid people complained.
This is difficult, and is going to have to be a government decision eventually. We'll never make a vehicle that will never kill anyone under any circumstance, there are just too many possible circumstances. The bigger problem is how it decides who dies.
The driver of a vehicle will always choose to save themselves over someone else. In fact, they'll likely choose to save themselves over several others. But what choice will the car make?
If people know that one make of car prioritizes the occupants of the vehicle, and another prioritizes the most lives saved, the former is likely to sell far more than the latter, even though society as a whole would prefer more of the latter on the road. This is why I think eventually these decisions will be regulated.
You state that a car that protects itself while getting everyone killed won't have great resale value, but in reality it probably would. As a general rule, people are quite selfish, they'll take the one that is safest for them, not for society as a whole.
our analysis of both our plane, and other planets, indicate that things collide with them all the time, in a billion years it's quite possible that the same fate would befall these probes. As for "degrade over time", that degradation tends to happen through hitting small things. Remember, space is empty, if it isn't exposed to anything, what's to cause it to degrade?
While I can view the cover image, it doesn't really speak to me enough to build a record player. And the detail from Wikipedia explains what it says, but doesn't really explain why they think it's the right way to say it.
That's the part I'm curious about, why do we think that those particular images will explain how to play the record in a way that any intelligent species could figure out?
I'd actually be more interested in seeing information on the instructions given to play the record, and what details of it are thought to be enough to allow an alien species to both understand it, and actually accomplish it. It seems to me that it almost needed to include some form of record player, but that adds to the complexity, and the likelihood of failure.
Considering the current state of the art in storage devices... probably something that degrades to unreadable before it leaves our solar system. "progress" has not been good in the "improve longevity" part of data storage.
Slashdot Mirror
People just react, but a computer has a lot more time to decide, and in fact it MUST decide because it can't work on intuition, it must chose every single action. So yes, it is a very real problem. The car will at some point have a choice between 2 things to hit, where not hitting anything isn't an option. It could be programmed to chose a random number between 1 and 2 and hit based on that, but it's more likely you'd program it to chose based on minimizing harm. But harm to whom?
It goes beyond that, because consumers chose the cheaper options, manufacturers stop making the more expensive ones, meaning that even institutional types can't buy them. It's getting much harder to find archival grade storage medium because it's just not cost effective for companies to produce it when very few people buy it.
Beyond that, when developing a new technology, why bother looking at longevity as part of the design specs when nobody will pay for it?
If you want try long lasting storage, you're left looking at older technology, much older. So to say that we'd design something today that's likely to outlive what we designed several decades ago is really just wishful thinking. The thing we designed several decades ago is estimated to last over a billion years, do you really think we'd do better than that today? Sure maybe we could do the same thing for cheaper (though that may not be the case either to be honest) but I doubt we'd do something that has more longevity.
Once again, I fully agree that these will be MUCH safer than current vehicles, and nowhere have I ever stated otherwise.
but that "philosophical debate" isn't just philosophical, it's real. There are currently an estimated 1.25 million annual fatalities involving motor vehicles in the world. Even a system that's a full million times safer (and even the strongest advocates for self driving vehicles have never claimed that) would still involve deaths averaging more than one per year. You can try all you want to explain that that's much safer than now, and it is in every possible way, but if that one person is someone you know, you'll still likely be looking for who to blame. So someone has to decide who is to blame, and how the decisions are made. That someone won't be an engineer, it will be the government, and governments DO "obsess over [...] a rounding error" that's their job.
And once again, why you'll see regulatory bodies being the ones who make these decisions eventually, not the manufacturers or the consumers. It will be taken out of their hands.
Why don't you read their claims yourself?
Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars
You do realize that those claims (although 100% false advertising) don't even apply to the vehicle in question because it didn't have that hardware on it right? The hardware you're talking about, and the claims you're pointing to are for hardware released AFTER the car you're talking about was sold.
This is like blaming your Ford Model T for the cruise control not working because modern Fords include it.
Translation: Development is done, it's already here but due to the red tape we can't say it is.
no, translation: "the hardware on our latest cars is done, but the software isn't, and still requires quite a bit of work, and we still aren't selling you a self driving car yet, so you still need to drive for yourself until we eventually release the self driving feature." Not to mention that Tesla are, as usual, lying outright in their claim that those cars will ever be self driving with that hardware.
But that's a completely different story, and not related to the idiot who took his car and drove it in to the side of a semi-truck (reportedly while watching a movie while he should have been driving)
The OP seemed to think that because technology had come so far since the first records were made that we'd have a better way now. My point was that technology surrounding data longevity has not really progressed since that time. If anything, modern storage methods have much worse longevity than the older forms.
You just can't get much better longevity than "stuff etched deeply on a strong surface" This is why we can still read stone tablets from centuries ago, but can't recover data from some CDs that are only 20 years old
Nowhere did I ever claim that vehicles wouldn't coordinate, nor that any of these wouldn't minimize crashes, injuries and death. Nor did I say that it would be simple, or that other injuries wouldn't be a factor as well. But at some point it comes down to that trolley problem, or an us vs them decision. Even your prioritization put "us" after "them", but based on what? and based on how many "us" and how many "them"?
If anything you've made my point for me. You made an assumption about who would be protected over who, and chose "us" over "them" and completely ignored numbers of people as well. These are not simple decisions, and the decision that the auto maker would make (minimize their own liability) may not be the same as the end customer would make (maximize their own safety), which may not be the same as what's in the best interest of society (minimize harm to everyone).
At some point regulatory agencies WILL mandate these sorts of decisions.
But you go back to the concept of the record "decaying". Based on what mechanism? What will cause decay that is not any form of particle? (being that you insisted it won't hit any particles)
I didn't say that the content providers were better. They're even worse, but I suspect that if the large cable companies pushed hard enough they'd have some clout too, they just aren't willing to push because they don't really get it either.
Except that for this to work right the manufacturers have to take the liability for the vehicle's actions as they're the ones doing the programming. Which means the manufacturer is going to do the math. 1 occupant or 3 pedestrians, the lawsuit for the 1 occupant will probably cost them less money, so they'd rather save the 3 pedestrians.
This isn't a simple choice, and is not likely to be resolved decisively until regulatory agencies get involved (which they are guaranteed to do eventually)
We don't know what is enough, but that doesn't mean that we don't know what isn't enough. Surround view cameras without radar, and without any way of keeping those cameras clean, are very obviously not enough.
Do they though? can you really see how to make an image from those grooves without reading any of the explanations?
I'm thinking that hitting ANYTHING is more likely than being captured by an intelligent species, or degrading due to time without any particles impacting it.
You can't seriously be suggesting that they let customers decide when they want to watch something? The horror! it would be anarchy!
Cable companies don't understand why people are cutting the cord, because they don't understand what customers actually want.
Because this is the way the cable industry thinks. When I called my local cable company 17 years ago and told them to discontinue my cable service, and after all the back and forth about how I simply didn't want it and wasn't watching it, and after they finally agreed to disconnect me, their final words for me were "see you in a couple of months". The person on the other end of the phone just simply couldn't grasp the concept of a person without cable.
That attitude hasn't changed. It's not that they're trying to trick you here, they honestly just don't understand the concept. This is also why people are cutting the cord, because the cable industry doesn't understand their needs. The fact that they cling to the concept of airing shows at a certain time on a certain day and not just adding them to the VOD library at that time, the fact that they cling to channel packages instead of lone channels, the limitations on viewing on specific devices in specific locations. All of these things show that they just simply don't understand their customer base.
This "article" is just a shill for the cable companies trying to convince people not to cut the cord, but as usual, they've just shown how little they understand about what people actually want.
The items impacting planets are often much smaller than the planets themselves, I highly doubt that Voyager is immune to gravitational effects.
Many vehicles today already have a large percentage of the hardware, it's needed for other more basic systems like automatic emergency braking, forward collision warning, automatic lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, parking sensors, blind spot monitoring, etc. These cars will likely still need a bit more in the sensor department, but not all that much. They'll likely need some more powerful computers processing those signals though, and then of course a lot of software.
What Ford is talking about though is about the rest of the car. If your car drives itself, why do you need to sit with a steering wheel in your lap looking through a big pane of glass? wouldn't you rather relax on a couch watching a movie? Of course what Ford fails to realize is that this evolution will come, but it can come after the self driving part. The re-imagining of the interior (and maybe even exterior) need self driving before they can happen, but self driving does not need those changes to happen before it comes to be. Most major changes in technology are not overnight revolutions, they're evolution that takes time. Self driving will be no different.
If you take a model S, and add cross traffic and rear radars, it will have the hardware to be 100% self driving. (Don't believe Tesla when they take your money for "full self driving" without those basic necessities, they're flat out lying as they have done so often in the past)
Beyond that though, there's a LOT of software work to be done, and I really don't know how far away that is. There are just so many edge cases in driving that I'm not confident that we'll get to 100% self driving with zero driver input under any circumstances for a very long time (and that's what you need if you want to get out of the car at work and send the car to pick your kid up at school without you)
Ford though is talking about the next stage, once self driving is around, you won't want what the Model S offers. sitting facing forward with a steering wheel in your lap and with the primary entertainment display off to the side and out of your line of sight will be awkward and unnecessary. Thing is, that's talking about what a self driving car CAN be, not what a self driving car MUST be, these are 2 very different things, and I don't think Ford understands that. Too many people think that you must have complete revolution, instead of simple evolution. The first fully self driving cars will be just like today's cars, but with radar, lidar, and cameras mounted on them, plus some pretty powerful computers and software. They'll evolve from there to include more vehicle to vehicle communication, and to change the interior away from a driving focus, and towards an entertainment focus, but none of that will happen instantly, nor does it need to.
The people who expect a full self driving revolution don't tend to be happy with the slow evolution that actually could get us there, and therefore these people are holding back progress.
The guy who had "no fault of his own" drove his car in to the side of a semi-truck. That is the very definition of his fault. He didn't apply the brakes, didn't swerve, he drove straight in to the side of a truck.
And don't claim it was the car's fault. The car was not self driving, you can't buy a self driving car at this point, nobody claimed the car could drive itself, and he had to agree to, and ignore, many warnings that it could not before operating it.
In response to that incident, Musk did the horribly irresponsible, and illegal, thing, by reaching in to people's previously bought and paid for vehicles without their permission and removing functionality.
Musk never said that the system in place on that vehicle needed a few more tweaks to achieve self driving, he said that the system on that car was never meant for self driving, and never advertised as such. He also said that future models of the car would include self driving by using different hardware and software. That's not "minor tweaks"
Of course that said, the system on that "insanely dangerous" vehicle, is already several times safer than your average driver, so even that would be a step in the right direction.
Unfortunately idiots like you are costing people lives every day by holding back these sorts of advances because people die (even if fewer than would die without them) And worse yet, people like Elon are listening to idiots like you and doing stupid things in response to make their products more dangerous than they were before stupid people complained.
This is difficult, and is going to have to be a government decision eventually.
We'll never make a vehicle that will never kill anyone under any circumstance, there are just too many possible circumstances. The bigger problem is how it decides who dies.
The driver of a vehicle will always choose to save themselves over someone else. In fact, they'll likely choose to save themselves over several others. But what choice will the car make?
If people know that one make of car prioritizes the occupants of the vehicle, and another prioritizes the most lives saved, the former is likely to sell far more than the latter, even though society as a whole would prefer more of the latter on the road. This is why I think eventually these decisions will be regulated.
You state that a car that protects itself while getting everyone killed won't have great resale value, but in reality it probably would. As a general rule, people are quite selfish, they'll take the one that is safest for them, not for society as a whole.
our analysis of both our plane, and other planets, indicate that things collide with them all the time, in a billion years it's quite possible that the same fate would befall these probes.
As for "degrade over time", that degradation tends to happen through hitting small things. Remember, space is empty, if it isn't exposed to anything, what's to cause it to degrade?
While I can view the cover image, it doesn't really speak to me enough to build a record player. And the detail from Wikipedia explains what it says, but doesn't really explain why they think it's the right way to say it.
That's the part I'm curious about, why do we think that those particular images will explain how to play the record in a way that any intelligent species could figure out?
That's possible, according to the article that will take over a billion years, which to me sounds like long enough for something else to happen.
I'd actually be more interested in seeing information on the instructions given to play the record, and what details of it are thought to be enough to allow an alien species to both understand it, and actually accomplish it. It seems to me that it almost needed to include some form of record player, but that adds to the complexity, and the likelihood of failure.
Considering the current state of the art in storage devices... probably something that degrades to unreadable before it leaves our solar system.
"progress" has not been good in the "improve longevity" part of data storage.