Apple Gears Up to Challenge Tesla in Electric Cars

I feel like AI would outperform the heck out of us in that situation, because solving it correctly involves a) high situational awareness, which we suck at because we get distracted, and b) making split-second calculations, which we suck at because we panic and our reflexes aren't that fast. I mean, this is a simple situation, when it comes down to it:

Something runs out into the road.

- Can you swerve and avoid hitting it without hitting anything else or driving off the road? If yes, do. If no:

- Can you hit the brakes without endangering anyone behind you? (Humans tend to have trouble with this decision, because half the time we forget to watch the rear view mirror and now there's no time to check. An AI would ALWAYS know what was behind it.) If yes, do. If not:

Are you more worried about endangering the thing before you or the thing behind you? If it's an animal, hit the animal. If the thing in front of you is a squishy human and the thing behind you is a car protected by all the engineering that protects cars in crashes these days, hit the brakes.

That's all there is to it, 99 % of the time. Sure, this is a situation where AI might make the wrong decision in 1 % of cases, but it's also a situation where humans are wrong much more than that.

How do you deal with a lack of markers on the road?

This one is actually probably most easily solved by just putting markers on all roads. Sure, that would require driving down all roads in a specially-engineered expensive vehicle with a dedicated crew, so you think it sounds like unaffordable insanity until you realize google has already done it once, for the googlemaps mapping project. Just do it again, this time in a car made for spray-painting markers instead of mapping stuff.

Apart from that, the overwhelming majority of problems on the road can be solved by yielding even when you're technically in the right and just slowing the heck down, if necessary to walking speed and below. There will still be problems that only a human being can solve, but there's going to be a human being in the car, so worst case, pull over and ask them. If your human is drunk or underage, pull over, wait for the next passing car, watch how their human solves it, and do what they did. In the rare case where there's no other car likely to pass any time soon and the human in the car is incapacitated - possibly some sort of remote solution would work, where a human in some kind of remote driving center can take control of your car for a minute if necessary?

There'll still be high-speed situations where the AI will fuck and kill someone, but I do think people would come to accept self-driving AI even if it occasionally fucks up and kills people, because it'll be world-changingly convenient. And so far we've accepted a LOT of occasionally-deadly shit if it's sufficiently convenient. (Trains. planes. Nuclear reactors. Every single one of those things had waves of protests and people going "It will never work, and when it fails, people will die! Not worth it!"

And occasionally they failed, and people died, but we still keep using them.

Occasionally getting downvoted not withstanding, a user's karma tends to only go up over time, as long as the account isn't flagged in any way. It's generally not a battle between negative and positive karma - getting downvoted is more of a short-term signal that others found the quality of your post wanting. So in an environment where there are many more upvotes than downvotes, a 500 karma limit is merely a means to stop novice users from dishing out punishment until they become more experienced users.

Downvoting a comment sends a harsh signal to the commenter that you believe their comment is so bad it shouldn't be there, but it's an unsuitable tool to influence the discussion at large.

> Why was it raised?

I've been here a few years and to my knowledge the limit wasn't raised during that time.

> If karma doesn't work to exclude people with unpopular opinions then there's no point to the limit.

As someone who mostly only posts if he has something contrarian to say, I don't think it's about unpopular opinions. Yes, I receive some downvotes, but mostly people just ignore me, so my average comment karma is very low. That's what you can expect for having unpopular or boring opinions. Reaching the karma threshold necessary for downvoting on the other hand isn't really that big of a deal, nor is it really a challenge.

HN's primary exclusion mechanism is flagging, not downvoting. In a way it's more insidious because you may not even notice it's happening. People get shadowbanned, even. Or, as apparently happened to me yesterday for the first time as far as I can tell, a moderator steps in and forcefully pushes your comment below the much older "green newbie" comments where the thoroughly grey content goes to die.

Downvoting is at least an overt signal, like I said. And personally I think the capability to issue a downvote is probably overrated.

> tilt the discussion toward their viewpoint

Discussions on HN are generally not happening on the razor's edge of opinions. Instead, they tend to be carried out by people who are very certain of their own viewpoint. There is so much momentum, tilting these things is not an issue. But if you can voice a coherent minority opinion, that comment might still get to the top of the thread.

> Surely you must have noticed how cliquey HN is.

It depends, I think there are several big blocks of people here who think alike, but I noticed the biggest influence on how a post is received often seems timezone-related.

That would be a good solution, but many people who talk about self-driving cars don't want that. They want to sleep in the car. They want to "drive" home drunk. In both cases, a manual override would be disastrous and probably illegal. (We can already get a DUI just for getting into a car while drunk!) They also want to be able to "fetch" their cars without a driver, which wouldn't work.