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"Our love affair with self-driving cars is a form of 'techno-chauvinism,' Prof. Broussard says. 'It's the idea that technology is always the highest and best solution, and is superior to the people-based solution.'"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current disillusionment is a natural consequence of the preceding over-hype and over-exuberance. We've been there before. After the AI winter, many people argued AI will never come, and many achievements we already have (such as speech recognition) are impossible.
I wouldn’t say speech recognition is solved. It’s still quite error prone. Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die. Perhaps self-driving cars can be deployed in a limited way, as taxis, for example.
Sure it is, but it's doing a hell of a lot better than many critics thought ever possible.
>Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die.
People will always die. Requiring with certainty that self-driving cars will never cause accidents is a purely emotional instinct with no regard for facts or well-being of people. The only thing that self driving cars need to demonstrate is statistically lower deaths or injuries caused per mile (or hour) of driving than the average human would cause. This would mean that adoption of technology would reduce total deaths if substituted for human drivers, which is what actually matters.
"Our love affair with self-driving cars is a form of 'techno-chauvinism,' Prof. Broussard says. 'It's the idea that technology is always the highest and best solution, and is superior to the people-based solution.'"
But human drivers kill a lot of people. It would be a shame if that's the best we can do. And some car tech improvements have saved lives, so it's not necessarily chauvinism it's just extrapolation.
Presently human drivers cause an awful number of deaths with cars. However even despite the edge cases of machine learning, which can be adapted for relatively quickly, would drunk drivers still kill more people every year even if we replaced all of the cars with robot ones? We've been trying for decades to minimize the damage caused by drunk drivers but policies don't seem to have much of an effect. Compared to the massive amount of data we could collect from robot cars in order to optimize them and adapt them... it seems like we'd be faster at making them safer than preventing humans from making poor decisions.
I think in the case of piloting a slow-moving bullet around crowds of humans... I'd trust technology more in this case. It did wonders for the aviation industry and while cars are more complicated to pilot in many cases I don't see how we can make current human-piloted cars safer vs. optimizing robot piloted cars. We've been trying the former for decades with diminishing success.
I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more cities like Seattle with its rail expansion and fewer New York City where the infrastructure is finally getting money so it doesn't fall apart.
There are already so many tax breaks going into driverless companies. If Alphabet or Here want to do this on their own, go for it; but governments around the world should stop giving tax breaks and municipal incentives for this technology.
I can see it being more useful in Europe, where so much of the country is connected and it'd help sold the last leg problem. But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity, not just for those who can afford to live in the city, but all the people who are barely making it who's lives fall apart if something on their car breaks.
https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/driverless-hype-collides-wi...
(edited to remove unique shortlink url)
"Our love affair with self-driving cars is a form of 'techno-chauvinism,' Prof. Broussard says. 'It's the idea that technology is always the highest and best solution, and is superior to the people-based solution.'"
We like the idea of technological solutions that don't require us to change our lifestyle or make hard choices. Driverless cars are appealing because they would allow us to largely maintain the status quo (as opposed to, say, reorienting toward public transportation). It's like an obese person who says, "I don't want to eat healthy and exercise. Why can't scientists just invent low-calorie versions of the food I like…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But human drivers kill a lot of people. It would be a shame if that's the best we can do. And some car tech improvements have saved lives, so it's not necessarily chauvinism it's just extrapolation.
Self-driving cars will also kill a lot of people. We just don’t know how many yet.