That's been my experience as well; I can't get a CBS station here so I watch Big Bang Theory on the CBS's web site. However, I can't find any current episodes on TPB, just the first four seasons.
Occam's razor. Rootkits don't cause power supplies to go bad, but flaky power supplies cause bluescreens. Plus, I put the same hard drive in a new case and power supply after it died completely and the bluescreening went away. If it had a rootkit, it would have continued problems.
The liability will rest with the vehicle's owner, not the manufacturer -- unless, like today, there is a defect. And these defects happen all the time with physical parts; the Pinto, the Crown Vic, Toyota, etc.
They'll release a fully autonomous car when it's profitable to do so. You know why they kept the dangerous Pinto gas tank design? Because they calculated that the ten dollars per car it would cost to remedy the defect was cheaper than the settlements for the survivors of the people who burned alive. They have armys of accountants and lawyers, and they get their money's worth out of them.
I see you've 1) never programmed, and 2) never seen Windows, or any other modern operating system.
I was programming in assembly thirty years ago. Yes, I've seen Windows, and Windows is why people are afraid of computer-driven cars.
By show of hands, who here knows a programmer who claims to make bug-free software? *sees many hands* OK. Now who here has actually seen perfect, bug-free code for any non-trivial task?
Ever seen a space launch? How many airplanes crash because of software bugs in their autopilot code? How's that LHC working, with all that buggy software?
The key is testing, code review, and quality control, which is nonexistant in most consumer-grade PC software; screw it, we can patch later is the mantra, and that's the only reason you see so little non-trivial software.
Any activity that people used to do that is now illegal because machines (designed and built by people) are so much better?
Not illegal, but no longer done. Welding and painting in automobile assembly lines, railroad spike driving machines, even computers -- a computer used to be a human being who worked out firing tables and scientific computations.
Are doctors forbidden to diagnose because now we have Watson?
Watson is no replacement for a doctor; that was an incredibly stupid question.
Fatalities are down, but I can't find any data on accidents themselves; my googlefu is weak this morning. But you've been driving since 1980 so you've seen a few of the safety improvements I have (I've been driving since 1968).
When I started driving, there were few four lane divided highways, and head-on crashes were common. Far less common today. They were usually fatal; no cars had air bags and few even had seat belts. Cars had no crumple zones and the dashes were unpadded steel. There was no ABS. Cars today handle much better, stop FAR more quickly (drum brakes were crap!) and streets themselves are more intelligently designed. The one thing that made driving safer that didn't have to do with technology improvements was the push against drunk driving (and every drunk drives like an idiot, because he is an idiot).
I'd like to see a graph of accidents per capita, but I can't seem to find one. My guess would be that accidents per capita have gone up while the fatalities and injuries have gone down.
I suspect that people drive more insanely these days (or perhaps that it simply looks that way to me; I'd need to see numbers) is that there are so many more cars on the roads; roads were pretty empty back in 1968, except in the heart of a big city. You could drive down the highway for miles without encountering another car. People weren't as impatient as they are now because they didn't have to be. Folks drive like they're the only ones on the road, they used to BE the only ones on the road.
Or how much the US economy grew before the days of the EPA?
Ever hear of the great depression? Ever hear of the Eisenhower recession? Ever hear of the Clinton boom? Apparently not. From the end of WWII to the start of the EPA, half of that time we were in recession. The economy didn't grow much at all under Eisenhower.
In other words, let India and China have the future.
The future does you no good if you've been burned up in a fire. The future is bleak if you're working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, in sweatshop conditions. But I agree, the future FOR THE RICH is much brighter in those countries.
Agreed about the barriers, but there was another this morning; a child was killed when a bus driver drove into a house after swerving to miss a pedestrian who jaywalked in front of him. Had a computer been driving, I doubt either the pedestrian or the house would have been hit.
Ironically hilarious insult, since it's you who doesn't understand. Society, and response to society do not create morals; empathy does. Without empathy we would not be social creatures and would not have morals. And some people don't have morals; they're called sociopaths.
When you have to resort to insults, you just lost the argument.
Excellent, you can start by implementing a winning algorithm for Go.
I can't, since I've never even played it, but someone will. They thought no computer would beat a human chessmaster, but it was done. Then they thought a computer winning Jeapordy was undoable, but it was done as well.
Then you can move on to a reliable CAPTCHA answerer
Unbeatable capchas keep moving, to the point that it's hard for a human to read some capchas.
Now you can build a robot that implements morality.
Far easier than winning Jeopardy. The programmer simply puts the rules of his own morality into the machine. That's all computers do, execute math-based rules; if a=b then c. Do case; case a, case b, case c, endcase.
So I'd rather preserve the right for all people to flee this country legally whenever the need should arise.
Having a right to do something is no right when you don't have the means to do so.
Keeping cash offshore can be a critical component of maintaining that freedom since offshore accounts can't be as easily siezed by the government during a crack-down
Again, that freedom comes from cash -- cash most don't have and never will have. And the only seizures I've read about are for illegal activity that usually has impoverished someone.
But freedom from oppression must be preserved first before taxing the rich man.
The two are not mutually exclusive; you can do both at the same time.
Demanding too much from the rich will be like ordering the rich man's armed bodyguard to hand you the rich man's wallet. Whose side is the bodyguard going to take, when he's the man with the gun?
The rich man and his armed bodyguard are no match for a hundred angry peasants with rocks and pitchforks. We greatly outnumber them. We underestimate our own power.
It is reasonable to ask the rich to pay a greater share of the common burden, but policies need to be pushed that increase the earning power of the middle class to grow again and offer a counter-balance to the extreme wealth and influence of the Walmart, Oracle, and Koch executives.
Agreed, but the millions the CEO gets while running the business into the ground with no accountability or penalty should end.
As for myself, I'm entertaining a job offer from Sweden, where there are slightly higher taxes but I would save millions in care for my autistic daughter, free college degree for my son, and have less worry of slipping further through the US social safety net.
I don't blame you for that; there's no reason except our own stupidity for Sweden's success not to be the case here. BTW, I have a mentally handicapped daughter myself (she's grown now).
It's been my experience that nobody picks a lock to break intro a house, it's easier to just break the door down, as I discovered to my dismay last year. That hundred dollar lock did me no good whatever, they simply pried the door open. The lock held, the door frame didn't.
your rants about the rich make you look stupid. Get a job.
That's rich, son. I've been working full time since 1968 except for two years during the Reagan-Bush recession when I spent eight hours a day looking for work. I'm solid middle class; I have all I need and give quite a bit away. My rants aren't about the rich, they're about the rich's entitlement attitude and the idiotic notion that they got there on their own and anyone who is poor is poor because they're lazy. Most "self made" rich like my late uncle got there through a combination of hard work and extremely good luck -- hard work alone won't do it. I'm especially down on those born into wealth who think they deserve it. My uncle deserved it, Donald Trump did not -- his riches were handed to him on a silver platter.
Stupid is thinking tax breaks for the rich will help the economy; history shows otherwose. Stupid is believing that anyone can get rich. Stupid is thinking poor people are all lazy; most people on food stamps actually work.
Stupid is your "get a job" remark. Actually, worse than stupid.
Evil is letting people go hungry when they don't have to be hungry. There is enough food to feed everyone, the only thing keeping people hungry is greed.
Of course you can, it's mostly down to good parenting.
I'm not too sure of that, even though my kids turned out ok. One fellow I know has two adult sons, one an honest man with an honest job, the other a lazy, never employed thief and liar. I've known others like that as well. Of course, neither example is proof of anything.
No lawyer will take the case after he sees the evidence. Auto accident lawyers work on a contingency basis: the lawyer only collects if he wins. No lawyer will take a case to court unless he's 100% positive he'll win, in which case the other side's lawyer will settle. Obviously, you haven't been in these situations (you lucky bastard!)
Because the driver is going to blame your system and claim he wasn't in control at the time
He'll have to prove it, not simply claim it.
a slick lawyer is going to realize that he can sue the big, evil corporation for a shitload more than he could get from suing the putz behind the wheel.
The putz behind the wheel is insured by a big, evil corporation.
And even showing up in court and making your case is going to cost you thousands
As is Suse, kubuntu, and Mandriva. Hell, I haven't tried Suse in ten years and it was easier than Windows is now. Well, maybe not easier, just less annoying; none are very hard.
Advertisers and propagandists really don't do all they great of a job. I don't stop at McDonald's because of their advertising, I stop because it's handy. If that was a Hardees, I'd stop there. Computers, on the other hand, you can get 100% compliance. If humans were easy to program, there would be no crime.
That's a GOOD thing. It keeps the rich bastards from laundring money and evading the taxes they don't pay enough of anyway. Whether or not there's a law against opening a foreign bank account, normal people never were free to do so. See, that's one thing wrong with mainstream libertarianism, it's freedom for the rich to do whatever the fuck they want. Any "freedom" I can't have I have no trouble with the government keeping from your rich ass.
however business cannot abuse you if you don't want it to
Mitt, is that you? Or are you Don Trump? I see you've never had the misfortune of being out of work and hungry. Tell that to your average WalMart worker. Tell that to anyone who lived by a Monsanto plant before the EPA. Tell that to someone who earns their living fishing in the gulf when BP ruined it.
But where are you going to go if your government abuses you?
To the polls. Where am I going to go when Amerin abuses me? I have no other choice of natural gas.
They are certainly now making it harder and harder to drop US citizenship.
Wow, a patriot. You rich boys really have an entitlement attitude, don't you?
I like the idea that Americans can't do intrade, because those who can't afford it will try to and be victimized, and the rest, well, fuck 'em. Let them gamble on the Chicaho futures exchange; that's what it's for.
If you want to work for liberty, work for liberty for EVERYONE. Abolish the TSA, abolish the border "no 4th amendment zones". Abolish drug laws. Intrade doesn't affect me or any other of the 97%, so you know what? We don't give a flying fuck about your "rights" because if I don't have that right, neither should you.
Great. Now all you have to do is prove your system wasn't at fault in a court of law
Trivial, considering all the sensor and camera evidence. The old lady's testamony is no match for your movie. It will never make it to court; no lawyer will take her case after seeing the evidence, and in fact there will be even fewer court cases.
They get enough headaches from faulty accelerators. Can you imagine the legal problems they would get from programming hard ethical decisions into their computers?
I see you've 1) never programmed and 2) You run Windows. I agree, I would never get in a Microsoft car considering their shoddy programming, but Microsoft would never manufacture a driverless car simply because of that.
Almost all automotive accidents are caused by human failure. Sure, there are exceptions -- I was in a head on crash because of a blown tire, and a blown tire on a megabus killed someone a couple of months ago here in Illinois. But accidents from mechanical failure are rare.
But people cause almost every accident. Have you seen how stupid people drive these days? They race from red light to red light as if they're actually going to get there faster that way. They get impatient. They don't pay attention. They get angry and do stupid things like speed, tailgate, suddenly switch lanes without looking, fumble with their radios, talk on their cell phones, get in a hurry... computers don't do that. There will be damned few if any accidents that are the computer's fault.
Hell, just this morning on the news they showed a car crashing through a store, barely missing a toddler -- the idiot driver thought the car was in reverse. Had he been driving a computer-controlled car, that would have never happened.
You can't program morality into machines until the machines have a soul.
Souls have nothing to do with it. As you say, morality is relative; it's internal to the person. You can't program morality into a person, it's impossible. Ethics, on the other hand, are a set of rules enforced externally -- and with a machine, those ethics will be internal and therefore its morals.
The whole question is silly, to my mind. Hit the car or hit the pedestrian who jaywalks in front of you? The computer will miss the pedestrian if possible every time, and will instead take the less harmful course of action. Computers are either/or, humans are not.
In the I, Robot movie, the robot did the right thing saving the one who had the greatest chance of surviving. The survivor had his own internal guilt because of it, but the robot was still correct.
Protip: if you dis the Chinese government, stay out of China. If you make cartoons of Mohammed, stay out of Iran. If you break a UK law while in the US that involves UK citizens, you're a fool to visit Britain. If you have unprotected sex with a Swede in New Jersey, stay the hell out of Sweden.
I maintain that you CAN'T really program morality into a machine (it's hard enough to program it into a human).
You can program anything into a machine. Computers are easy to program. Now people, on the other hand, are damned hard to program, as any parent or teacher can attest to.
And I also doubt that engineers will ever really be able to overcome the numerous technical issues involved with driverless cars
They already have. I'm surprised they didn't do it twenty years ago, it could have been done then.
To put it bluntly, raise your hand if YOU want to be the first car manufacturer to make a car for which you are potentially liable in *every single accident that car ever gets into*, from the day it's sold until the day it's scrapped.
Here, j, let me give your straw man a light. If your driverless car runs a red light and hits someone, yes, you're liable. If your driverless car is hit by someone else running a red light, guess what? You aren't. The rules of who is at fault in an accident don't change simply because a computer is in control.
How much would you have to add onto the sticker price to cover the costs of going to court every single time that particular car was involved in an accident?
I already pay that cost, it's called liability insurance. And since driverless cars are safer than human-driven cars, your insurance costs will go down, not up. See, you are under the mistaken assumption that people are flawless, the opposite is true. Humans get tired, angry, distracted, sometimes drunk (as evidenced by your "insightful" moderation), but computers never do.
And even with the added safety of driverless systems, the first model available will still have to contend with a road mostly filled with regular, non-driverless-system cars. So let's say that a good 25% of those first models will probably end up in an accident at some point, which will make a very tempting target for lawyers going for the deep pockets of their manufacturers.
But again, it's never been hard to discern who's at fault, and since driverless cars will have cameras and other sensors, and keep the data, it will be trivial to prove it was the human's fault -- as it surely will be, almost every time.
Slashdot Mirror
That's been my experience as well; I can't get a CBS station here so I watch Big Bang Theory on the CBS's web site. However, I can't find any current episodes on TPB, just the first four seasons.
Occam's razor. Rootkits don't cause power supplies to go bad, but flaky power supplies cause bluescreens. Plus, I put the same hard drive in a new case and power supply after it died completely and the bluescreening went away. If it had a rootkit, it would have continued problems.
The liability will rest with the vehicle's owner, not the manufacturer -- unless, like today, there is a defect. And these defects happen all the time with physical parts; the Pinto, the Crown Vic, Toyota, etc.
They'll release a fully autonomous car when it's profitable to do so. You know why they kept the dangerous Pinto gas tank design? Because they calculated that the ten dollars per car it would cost to remedy the defect was cheaper than the settlements for the survivors of the people who burned alive. They have armys of accountants and lawyers, and they get their money's worth out of them.
It will happen, and not too far in the future.
I see you've 1) never programmed, and 2) never seen Windows, or any other modern operating system.
I was programming in assembly thirty years ago. Yes, I've seen Windows, and Windows is why people are afraid of computer-driven cars.
By show of hands, who here knows a programmer who claims to make bug-free software? *sees many hands* OK. Now who here has actually seen perfect, bug-free code for any non-trivial task?
Ever seen a space launch? How many airplanes crash because of software bugs in their autopilot code? How's that LHC working, with all that buggy software?
The key is testing, code review, and quality control, which is nonexistant in most consumer-grade PC software; screw it, we can patch later is the mantra, and that's the only reason you see so little non-trivial software.
Any activity that people used to do that is now illegal because machines (designed and built by people) are so much better?
Not illegal, but no longer done. Welding and painting in automobile assembly lines, railroad spike driving machines, even computers -- a computer used to be a human being who worked out firing tables and scientific computations.
Are doctors forbidden to diagnose because now we have Watson?
Watson is no replacement for a doctor; that was an incredibly stupid question.
Fatalities are down, but I can't find any data on accidents themselves; my googlefu is weak this morning. But you've been driving since 1980 so you've seen a few of the safety improvements I have (I've been driving since 1968).
When I started driving, there were few four lane divided highways, and head-on crashes were common. Far less common today. They were usually fatal; no cars had air bags and few even had seat belts. Cars had no crumple zones and the dashes were unpadded steel. There was no ABS. Cars today handle much better, stop FAR more quickly (drum brakes were crap!) and streets themselves are more intelligently designed. The one thing that made driving safer that didn't have to do with technology improvements was the push against drunk driving (and every drunk drives like an idiot, because he is an idiot).
I'd like to see a graph of accidents per capita, but I can't seem to find one. My guess would be that accidents per capita have gone up while the fatalities and injuries have gone down.
I suspect that people drive more insanely these days (or perhaps that it simply looks that way to me; I'd need to see numbers) is that there are so many more cars on the roads; roads were pretty empty back in 1968, except in the heart of a big city. You could drive down the highway for miles without encountering another car. People weren't as impatient as they are now because they didn't have to be. Folks drive like they're the only ones on the road, they used to BE the only ones on the road.
Or how much the US economy grew before the days of the EPA?
Ever hear of the great depression? Ever hear of the Eisenhower recession? Ever hear of the Clinton boom? Apparently not. From the end of WWII to the start of the EPA, half of that time we were in recession. The economy didn't grow much at all under Eisenhower.
In other words, let India and China have the future.
The future does you no good if you've been burned up in a fire. The future is bleak if you're working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, in sweatshop conditions. But I agree, the future FOR THE RICH is much brighter in those countries.
Agreed about the barriers, but there was another this morning; a child was killed when a bus driver drove into a house after swerving to miss a pedestrian who jaywalked in front of him. Had a computer been driving, I doubt either the pedestrian or the house would have been hit.
Ironically hilarious insult, since it's you who doesn't understand. Society, and response to society do not create morals; empathy does. Without empathy we would not be social creatures and would not have morals. And some people don't have morals; they're called sociopaths.
When you have to resort to insults, you just lost the argument.
Excellent, you can start by implementing a winning algorithm for Go.
I can't, since I've never even played it, but someone will. They thought no computer would beat a human chessmaster, but it was done. Then they thought a computer winning Jeapordy was undoable, but it was done as well.
Then you can move on to a reliable CAPTCHA answerer
Unbeatable capchas keep moving, to the point that it's hard for a human to read some capchas.
Now you can build a robot that implements morality.
Far easier than winning Jeopardy. The programmer simply puts the rules of his own morality into the machine. That's all computers do, execute math-based rules; if a=b then c. Do case; case a, case b, case c, endcase.
So I'd rather preserve the right for all people to flee this country legally whenever the need should arise.
Having a right to do something is no right when you don't have the means to do so.
Keeping cash offshore can be a critical component of maintaining that freedom since offshore accounts can't be as easily siezed by the government during a crack-down
Again, that freedom comes from cash -- cash most don't have and never will have. And the only seizures I've read about are for illegal activity that usually has impoverished someone.
But freedom from oppression must be preserved first before taxing the rich man.
The two are not mutually exclusive; you can do both at the same time.
Demanding too much from the rich will be like ordering the rich man's armed bodyguard to hand you the rich man's wallet. Whose side is the bodyguard going to take, when he's the man with the gun?
The rich man and his armed bodyguard are no match for a hundred angry peasants with rocks and pitchforks. We greatly outnumber them. We underestimate our own power.
It is reasonable to ask the rich to pay a greater share of the common burden, but policies need to be pushed that increase the earning power of the middle class to grow again and offer a counter-balance to the extreme wealth and influence of the Walmart, Oracle, and Koch executives.
Agreed, but the millions the CEO gets while running the business into the ground with no accountability or penalty should end.
As for myself, I'm entertaining a job offer from Sweden, where there are slightly higher taxes but I would save millions in care for my autistic daughter, free college degree for my son, and have less worry of slipping further through the US social safety net.
I don't blame you for that; there's no reason except our own stupidity for Sweden's success not to be the case here. BTW, I have a mentally handicapped daughter myself (she's grown now).
It's been my experience that nobody picks a lock to break intro a house, it's easier to just break the door down, as I discovered to my dismay last year. That hundred dollar lock did me no good whatever, they simply pried the door open. The lock held, the door frame didn't.
your rants about the rich make you look stupid. Get a job.
That's rich, son. I've been working full time since 1968 except for two years during the Reagan-Bush recession when I spent eight hours a day looking for work. I'm solid middle class; I have all I need and give quite a bit away. My rants aren't about the rich, they're about the rich's entitlement attitude and the idiotic notion that they got there on their own and anyone who is poor is poor because they're lazy. Most "self made" rich like my late uncle got there through a combination of hard work and extremely good luck -- hard work alone won't do it. I'm especially down on those born into wealth who think they deserve it. My uncle deserved it, Donald Trump did not -- his riches were handed to him on a silver platter.
Stupid is thinking tax breaks for the rich will help the economy; history shows otherwose. Stupid is believing that anyone can get rich. Stupid is thinking poor people are all lazy; most people on food stamps actually work.
Stupid is your "get a job" remark. Actually, worse than stupid.
Evil is letting people go hungry when they don't have to be hungry. There is enough food to feed everyone, the only thing keeping people hungry is greed.
Of course you can, it's mostly down to good parenting.
I'm not too sure of that, even though my kids turned out ok. One fellow I know has two adult sons, one an honest man with an honest job, the other a lazy, never employed thief and liar. I've known others like that as well. Of course, neither example is proof of anything.
In the meantime we are loosing the war so we need out of the box thinking
God no, we've loosed enough war on this planet! Don't let it out of the box!
And guess what, you're still going to get sued.
No lawyer will take the case after he sees the evidence. Auto accident lawyers work on a contingency basis: the lawyer only collects if he wins. No lawyer will take a case to court unless he's 100% positive he'll win, in which case the other side's lawyer will settle. Obviously, you haven't been in these situations (you lucky bastard!)
Because the driver is going to blame your system and claim he wasn't in control at the time
He'll have to prove it, not simply claim it.
a slick lawyer is going to realize that he can sue the big, evil corporation for a shitload more than he could get from suing the putz behind the wheel.
The putz behind the wheel is insured by a big, evil corporation.
And even showing up in court and making your case is going to cost you thousands
It won't get to court.
As is Suse, kubuntu, and Mandriva. Hell, I haven't tried Suse in ten years and it was easier than Windows is now. Well, maybe not easier, just less annoying; none are very hard.
Advertisers and propagandists would beg to differ
Advertisers and propagandists really don't do all they great of a job. I don't stop at McDonald's because of their advertising, I stop because it's handy. If that was a Hardees, I'd stop there. Computers, on the other hand, you can get 100% compliance. If humans were easy to program, there would be no crime.
Ask Tracy Kidder.
You can't open a foreign bank account
That's a GOOD thing. It keeps the rich bastards from laundring money and evading the taxes they don't pay enough of anyway. Whether or not there's a law against opening a foreign bank account, normal people never were free to do so. See, that's one thing wrong with mainstream libertarianism, it's freedom for the rich to do whatever the fuck they want. Any "freedom" I can't have I have no trouble with the government keeping from your rich ass.
however business cannot abuse you if you don't want it to
Mitt, is that you? Or are you Don Trump? I see you've never had the misfortune of being out of work and hungry. Tell that to your average WalMart worker. Tell that to anyone who lived by a Monsanto plant before the EPA. Tell that to someone who earns their living fishing in the gulf when BP ruined it.
But where are you going to go if your government abuses you?
To the polls. Where am I going to go when Amerin abuses me? I have no other choice of natural gas.
They are certainly now making it harder and harder to drop US citizenship.
Wow, a patriot. You rich boys really have an entitlement attitude, don't you?
I like the idea that Americans can't do intrade, because those who can't afford it will try to and be victimized, and the rest, well, fuck 'em. Let them gamble on the Chicaho futures exchange; that's what it's for.
If you want to work for liberty, work for liberty for EVERYONE. Abolish the TSA, abolish the border "no 4th amendment zones". Abolish drug laws. Intrade doesn't affect me or any other of the 97%, so you know what? We don't give a flying fuck about your "rights" because if I don't have that right, neither should you.
Great. Now all you have to do is prove your system wasn't at fault in a court of law
Trivial, considering all the sensor and camera evidence. The old lady's testamony is no match for your movie. It will never make it to court; no lawyer will take her case after seeing the evidence, and in fact there will be even fewer court cases.
They get enough headaches from faulty accelerators. Can you imagine the legal problems they would get from programming hard ethical decisions into their computers?
I see you've 1) never programmed and 2) You run Windows. I agree, I would never get in a Microsoft car considering their shoddy programming, but Microsoft would never manufacture a driverless car simply because of that.
Almost all automotive accidents are caused by human failure. Sure, there are exceptions -- I was in a head on crash because of a blown tire, and a blown tire on a megabus killed someone a couple of months ago here in Illinois. But accidents from mechanical failure are rare.
But people cause almost every accident. Have you seen how stupid people drive these days? They race from red light to red light as if they're actually going to get there faster that way. They get impatient. They don't pay attention. They get angry and do stupid things like speed, tailgate, suddenly switch lanes without looking, fumble with their radios, talk on their cell phones, get in a hurry... computers don't do that. There will be damned few if any accidents that are the computer's fault.
Hell, just this morning on the news they showed a car crashing through a store, barely missing a toddler -- the idiot driver thought the car was in reverse. Had he been driving a computer-controlled car, that would have never happened.
You can't program morality into machines until the machines have a soul.
Souls have nothing to do with it. As you say, morality is relative; it's internal to the person. You can't program morality into a person, it's impossible. Ethics, on the other hand, are a set of rules enforced externally -- and with a machine, those ethics will be internal and therefore its morals.
The whole question is silly, to my mind. Hit the car or hit the pedestrian who jaywalks in front of you? The computer will miss the pedestrian if possible every time, and will instead take the less harmful course of action. Computers are either/or, humans are not.
In the I, Robot movie, the robot did the right thing saving the one who had the greatest chance of surviving. The survivor had his own internal guilt because of it, but the robot was still correct.
Protip: if you dis the Chinese government, stay out of China. If you make cartoons of Mohammed, stay out of Iran. If you break a UK law while in the US that involves UK citizens, you're a fool to visit Britain. If you have unprotected sex with a Swede in New Jersey, stay the hell out of Sweden.
I maintain that you CAN'T really program morality into a machine (it's hard enough to program it into a human).
You can program anything into a machine. Computers are easy to program. Now people, on the other hand, are damned hard to program, as any parent or teacher can attest to.
And I also doubt that engineers will ever really be able to overcome the numerous technical issues involved with driverless cars
They already have. I'm surprised they didn't do it twenty years ago, it could have been done then.
To put it bluntly, raise your hand if YOU want to be the first car manufacturer to make a car for which you are potentially liable in *every single accident that car ever gets into*, from the day it's sold until the day it's scrapped.
Here, j, let me give your straw man a light. If your driverless car runs a red light and hits someone, yes, you're liable. If your driverless car is hit by someone else running a red light, guess what? You aren't. The rules of who is at fault in an accident don't change simply because a computer is in control.
How much would you have to add onto the sticker price to cover the costs of going to court every single time that particular car was involved in an accident?
I already pay that cost, it's called liability insurance. And since driverless cars are safer than human-driven cars, your insurance costs will go down, not up. See, you are under the mistaken assumption that people are flawless, the opposite is true. Humans get tired, angry, distracted, sometimes drunk (as evidenced by your "insightful" moderation), but computers never do.
And even with the added safety of driverless systems, the first model available will still have to contend with a road mostly filled with regular, non-driverless-system cars. So let's say that a good 25% of those first models will probably end up in an accident at some point, which will make a very tempting target for lawyers going for the deep pockets of their manufacturers.
But again, it's never been hard to discern who's at fault, and since driverless cars will have cameras and other sensors, and keep the data, it will be trivial to prove it was the human's fault -- as it surely will be, almost every time.
Because nuke testing has only been around less than a hundred years.
Above ground testing only lasted for about 20 years, from 1945 until the middle of the sixties when we signed the test ban treaty with the USSR.