pic: Google Streetview driver autograph

[JesseK]

I can't find the transcript, but I read the black box voice recordings from the final minutes of the AirFrance 447. It essentially came down to a confusion between what the autopilot ("fully autonomous") was supposed to and not supposed to do. It also came down to 2 co-pilots being unable to sync flight controls with each other due to an automated 'smart' algorithm that replaced a physical link between the flight sticks.

Let's take that premise and think long term, on the order of decades. It's difficult to do for those of us who are only a couple of decades old. Yet let's suppose autonomous cars do hit the streets for the common person next year and gains popularity so that 20 years from now about half of them are autonomous (literally, millions of cars).

I seriously doubt Google overlooked the AirFrance case -- where the human in the loop gets complacent because the software works "99.999% of the time". Yet last time I checked, that 0.001% failure rate still means the autonomous vehicle could be at fault for several thousand incidents because the human didn't take over in time. That 1 in 100,000 ratio is enough to cost someone their job. It's also enough for the programmers in question to remove "developed and integrated Google's autonomous vehicles" from their resume. Finally, if any of the incidents were fatal, would that one person's death still be honored by vehicle autonomy, or would there be an acceptable threshold so long as the overall fatal accident rate in the country fell?

If anything I would hope Google's end goal is autonomy that augments or constrains a human's ability rather than completely supplanting it. I conjecture that if we constrained most incidents of aggressive driving then most fatal accidents wouldn't occur.

Mind you, I wasn't referring to the hoards of cab drivers who may be out of work in 50 years. Nor was I referring to "true AI", where the code really is intelligent and can re-write itself to change its behavior. (Ironically, the programmer would then go from being a computer programmer to being a computer psychologist...).