Driving at a high level is one thing. It requires a lot of skill and concentration.
Not killing people is completely different: it requires basic skills and some small measure of multi-taking ability. Which is more important, reacting to the car changing lanes without a signal in front of you or finishing your sentence RIGHT NOW?
The problem isn't even skill level. Driving normally at city and highway speeds is easy. The vast majority of 1st world residents know how to do it, and very very few of them make mistakes severe enough to affect anyone else's lives. The average driver is nowhere near as bad at it as most people seem to think.
But taking the driver's commitment to and awareness of the risks inherent in driving away and placing that burden on active "safety features" is a bad thing. I know their hearts are in the right place and that I'm not the person these systems are designed for. But they're going to get people killed.
My issue with Mercedes's Traction Control in particular isn't even that it makes drivers lazy. It's that in at least that situation, it can't tell the difference between power-induced oversteer and breaking-induced oversteer. In that situation, it reacted EXACTLY WRONG. It doesn't matter whether the driver is competent or not if the system makes the opposite changes that it should.
I understood it to be a rhetorical question, apologies if I misunderstood.
Driving encompasses both mechanical and human risks. Here we are talking about just the mechanical, so I don't think the comparison is particularly fair.
I used driving as a way to illustrate the scale of the background knowledge required for the activities. There is a fair amount of background information required to drive safely that has nothing to do with physics. The rules and conventions of the road are not based on physics. Sometimes they seem to be completely devoid of logic as well. Teenagers regularly master these well enough to function. There is little fear that they will have trouble with this. Everybody does it right? (But when that fear is present, it is equally debilitating in the auto world, its just much more rare.)
Neurosurgery on the other hand, is hedged by an impenetrable wall of background knowledge that must be mastered in order to achieve even basic competency. It takes a dedicated expert a lifetime of study and practice. It really should be left exclusively to experts.
My point was that most people think operating to computers is closer to neurosurgery than driving so there's no point in even trying to understand. Just call the expert. Once they realize this is not the case, they often learn the basics fairly quickly.
Well, but are you human? Then you are not qualified to operate a car safely.
It's obvious that humans can't drive, and while the majority of car accidents are perfectly avoidable if humans would at least not be reckless, that doesn't mean we can raise the bar to a point where it will be safe.
Drivers aren't trained to follow checklists and usually don't have dozens of seconds to respond to mechanical emergencies. Cars also don't fall out of the sky if they break down. It's not a great metaphor.
It's also not good enough for them to be better than average human drivers. There are many bad drivers and if you are a good driver, you wouldn't want to switch to anything less safe than your driving
>A driver with a disability that makes them inattentive can't be a "safe driver."
A driver with a disability that makes a computer system classify them as an inattentive driver is not the same thing as a driver with a disability that makes them inattentive.
It won't be about an abstracted concept of "safer". It will be about whether the car is perceived to be a better driver than "me". Most people estimate their own abilities as above-average.
I don't know, I was trained in the navy to drive ships and sometimes I have a near accident when driving my car, and a car is way easier to drive. I think people are just imperfect and sometimes have accidents, so we should allow for that when engineering tech.
Overconfidence in people who think they know how to drive so they don't trust new fandanled gizmos is also a huge problem.
A human is incapable of performing as well as a modern ABS system which can independently operate each wheel and can adjust hundreds of times per second. Same with traction and other stability assists. Most of these things tend to be unused at highest levels of motorports not because the drivers don't need them but because they're banned so as to make the spectacle more exciting.
Even if you fancy yourself a Colin McRae, leave your electronic assists enabled while driving on public roads.
I didn't mean to implicate anything other than oversteer there. My point was that being in an accident is disorienting already, with no extra tech needed. Such that needing full teaching on it is an overly large burden.
I disagree. Anyone with minor observation can get behind a wheel and drive. Will they do it well? No (same with a computer) Is it legal? No, but thats because we all decided that as a group. The danger is different, but I think it's still an interesting analogy.
I think we need to all realize that most people aren't cut out for computer science, per se, but most people are cut out to learn to responsibly use a computer.
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