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The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#241

Post by mseebach »

foota wrote: post #70
mikeash wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Per hour" is rather ridiculous. I'm talking about per crash . There are a couple million vehicle crashes in the US each year, so if it really is 99.9999%, that's two or three ethical crises per year here. Among a billion vehicles it would be maybe ten per year. And honestly I'd be surprised if it's that many. When have you ever heard of a crash where there was any kind of ethical dilemma in the response? People keep…

I'm actually familiar with a situation like this, the person was on a highway at night and came around a corner to see a deer lying in the road and a crowd right behind the deer. There was a couple of people off to either side. They couldn't brake in time to stop and not harm the people on the other side of the deer.

I'm pretty sure the correct behaviour is to not come around a corner so fast that you can't stop for a non-yet-visible obstruction. Human drivers routinely flout this due to poor risk assessment, but an AI driver would easily be able to to do it.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#242

Post by teekert »

I don't really understand this fight. Why not let the market sort it out? I for one stopped buying Macbooks as soon as they were being glued shut. My 2011 MBP can be opened, I put 16 GB of RAM in there and a TB SSD. I know Apple thinks it is ridiculous [0] to use a 5 yr old PC but the thing is blazing fast. I'll never buy a laptop that is unusable in 5 years time when there are also models with up to 3 m.2 slots available at only a slightly increased size. Vote with your wallets people, that is the only way to do fair fighting in this case!

[0] http://thenextweb.com/opinion/2016/03/21/apple-hypocritical-...

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#243

Post by ubernostrum »

mseebach wrote: post #241
foota wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually familiar with a situation like this, the person was on a highway at night and came around a corner to see a deer lying in the road and a crowd right behind the deer. There was a couple of people off to either side. They couldn't brake in time to stop and not harm the people on the other side of the deer.

I'm pretty sure the correct behaviour is to not come around a corner so fast that you can't stop for a non-yet-visible obstruction. Human drivers routinely flout this due to poor risk assessment, but an AI driver would easily be able to to do it.

I'm pretty sure the correct behaviour is to not come around a corner so fast that you can't stop for a non-yet-visible obstruction.

Do you actually practice this? Setting aside legality concerns (many freeways have minimum as well as maximum speeds), if you truly did this at every curve and corner you'd be more likely to cause than to prevent an accident. The number of times there will be something you avoid by slowing down will be outweighed by the number of times your speed differential relative to surrounding traffic causes an accident (and it is speed differential, not speed itself, which is responsible for virtually all "speed-related" accidents).

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#245

Post by mseebach »

ubernostrum wrote: post #243
mseebach wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the correct behaviour is to not come around a corner so fast that you can't stop for a non-yet-visible obstruction. Human drivers routinely flout this due to poor risk assessment, but an AI driver would easily be able to to do it.

I'm pretty sure the correct behaviour is to not come around a corner so fast that you can't stop for a non-yet-visible obstruction. Do you actually practice this? Setting aside legality concerns (many freeways have minimum as well as maximum speeds), if you truly did this at every curve and corner you'd be more likely to cause than to prevent an accident. The number of times there will be something you avoid by slowi…

For truly blind corners, yes. However, I don't have great faith in my ability to correctly judge all partially blind corners, and occasionally find myself surprised.

I don't advocate slamming on the brakes seconds before the turn, there's such a thing as slowing down safely as well.

All of this is something AIs will be nearly infinitely better at doing safely than even a minimally impaired (tired, distracted) human driver.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#246

Post by tzs »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #191
astrange wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you remember CRT TVs? Those were pretty dangerous to open up.

But only to the person opening them.

Some of the high voltage tubes in old televisions could generate dangerous amounts of x-rays and so the manufacturers had to include shielding to keep those x-rays from escaping from the television.

Someone futzing around in there without understanding this could damage or remove that shielding making that TV dangerous for those who are merely trying to use it.

In the mid 1960s, GE sold about 90000 televisions that had a manufacturing problem with the shielding. These televisions were emitting something like 10000 times more x-rays than were considered acceptable for a consumer device. They were mostly emitted downward toward the front so most adult users of these televisions would not have been harmed, but kids often sat right in front of the TV and so were right in the path of the x-rays. GE successfully recalled and fixed most of these televisions.

This incident is probably the origin of the myth that sitting too close to the television is bad for children's eyes.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#247

Post by crispyambulance »

mikeash wrote: post #140
crispyambulance wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but given that there will likely be vast numbers of self-driving cars (tens to hundreds of millions), 99.9999% leave room for a small but steady stream of horrific cases where the machine and its maker are called into question. In wildly litigious societies like the USA, this could very well go beyond "not worth considering" and land firmly in the "existential threat" territory as far as self-driving car makers a…

There are about 30,000 traffic fatalities per year in the US. If ethical problems come up 0.0001% of the time, then that's one ethically questionable fatality every 33 years. I think the industry can withstand this. Especially when self-driving cars drop the annual fatality rate from 30,000 to 3,000, or whatever it ends up being.

I (and the person I was responding to) was being loose with the 99.9999 % figure. That number was pulled out of thin air.

The point is there are "a lot" of cars and "many" accidents "some" of which will present an ethical challenge to self-driving cars.

It does not take many accidents for these concerns to become a big problem for auto-makers given the litigious proclivities of places like the USA. Admittedly, if it really was every "33 years" that would be a good place to be. At this point, however, it remains to be proven that self-driving cars will even lower fatality rates.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#248

Post by TeMPOraL »

markcerqueira wrote: post #163
dllthomas wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because eventually, computers will be able to.

But by then the car will be able to engage its flight module, take off, and fly you directly home.

Even if, the car will have to calculate whether it has enough clearance to deploy the wings so that it doesn't cut down a pedestrian, or whether there's anyone that could be caught in the engine wash.

Interesting as it may be, it's only shifting the problem ;).

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#249

Post by thesehands »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

I think this whole open source and right to repair/modify will be very interesting with self-driving cars, because of their interaction with the commons. Here are some issues. There have been some discussions about the ethics of self-driving cars if it should sacrifice the lives of the people in the cars to save more lives. In a right to repair/modify wouldn't a lot of people pay to have the algorithm changed for the…

It strikes me that once we get to a point of autonomous driving why won't law enforcement be autonomous, a network of sensors along our road network that receive pings from all passing vehicles. Anything that causes your vehicle to deviate from its specification e.g. modding would flag you on the system.

Re: The Fight for the “Right to Repair”

#250

Post by tzs »

themartorana wrote: post #80
CaptSpify wrote: post #77

I used to do after-market repair medical equipment (MRI's, CT's, X-Ray, etc). One of the biggest frustrations was: $manufacturer wants $5000 to repair a CT. We'd charge $1000. We'd repair the CT, and it would pass all the built-in diagnostic tests. But then when the customer went to make a scan, a pop-up would appear saying "Unauthorized Repair! Call $manufacturer to fix!". $manufacturer repair tech would come in, pl…

Pretty scary that they don't run a diagnostic pass - I wonder, if the repair was bad and caused human injury/death, who would be liable? Company X did the repair, but $manufacturer basically certified it.

It could be that the unit keeps track of when diagnostics were performed and the results, and the "Unauthorized repaid, call manufacturer to fix" only happens on units that already had diagnostics performed after the repair and passed.
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