Reply to post: Re: I want some of what Musk is smoking

Tesla’s Autopilot losing track of devs crashing out of 'leccy car maker

Lee D Silver badge

Re: I want some of what Musk is smoking

No, the only way it'll work is if you remove all intelligence from the system.

This is a road. There's a BIG LINE down the middle. Encoded down that line is all the information you need about the road you're on and the road ahead (in case the line fades out!). When a car deviates off the line, it stops. The "self-driving" cars literally just rely on being told EXACTLY what to do, when. And tell each other exactly what to do, and when. I am 5m ahead of you, slow down.

The drive to put "intelligence" that we don't have and can't even define into things that are not, and may never be able to be, intelligent is just stupid. What you want is artificial stupidity - computers that obey orders, perfectly, every time.

You wanna change lanes? You have to wait for a lane-change line to approach, then announce that lane-change to everyone around you, and then follow the line you're given.

Such things only work on a "dumb" road. With other "dumb" cars. And "dumb" junctions. Make life easy for the computer. I don't understand why we're deliberately trying to make life difficult for the thing we're putting in charge of ours and other's lives. Make it easy. The same way that we designed a steering wheel for humans to steer the car easily. So when a computer drives, we should make it easy for the computer.

The obsession with putting this junk on the roads with real humans is the single largest downfall of it. It's ridiculous. And then you find that the systems we have made "dumb" generally "just work". Everything from automated train and tram lines, to production factories, to TVs that just play content rather than try to come preloaded with apps and voice recognition and network connections that can get viruses.

I am a *massive* IT guy, I program, I studied computing at university, I was hooked from a young age on these machines. And I would not trust it thinking for itself. If I was to design *any* system it would do what it was told. Sure, that means you have to tell absolutely everything that you want it to do. But I'd rather have an obedient and dumb system than a disobedient "smart" one.

You wanna play with this stuff, do it away from the roads and away from humans and in a controlled environment where the most that can happen is you bump someone's ankle at low speed.

You wanna do something useful... dumb it down to the absolute basics. Like a washing machine with seven thousand programs on it... you just want it to wash the damn clothes. Make the car go from A to B in the simplest way possible where there's no chance of error. That means stop all this automated car junk and - at minimum - designate one lane "automated vehicles only". Stick a crash barrier between it and other people. Jam the cars into it, inches from each other's bumpers. Have them talk to each other, and blindly obey rules about what they do. And label every few hundred yards with a radio transmitter that tells them where they are, what's ahead and what they should do (stop, go, etc.), and the whole system comes to a halt in absence of such instructions.

By the way, it's called a railway.

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