The Exigent Duality
Dreadful Idea - 18:11 CST, 12/21/18 (Sniper)
I couldn't agree more with what is written here.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: as a professional software developer who has written "machine learning" code, who has utilized image recognition libraries, and who has attended numerous conference sessions regarding computer cognition, it is absolute madness to not just implement "self-driving" apparatuses into cars, but for the State's actors to enable and encourage their spread!

I recently abandoned a self-driving lawn mower personal project, in large part due to safety concerns. And that's a lawn mower moving at like two miles per hour: no matter how much training data I fed it, there was just no reliable way to get it to recognize all of the incredible complexities of real life: sloped surfaces, arbitrary length grass, dawn-dusk-noon, rain, extreme sun shine, obstacles like children, dogs, cats, and so on.

Now imagine scaling up those problems to a thirty-five hundred pound car, going seventy miles per hour on the freeway, with not only human passengers, but other cars and even pedestrians! This is why we've seen cars like Teslas fatally drive right into the sides of semi-trucks, smash into medians, ram into parked cars at high speeds, and so on. And that's not even getting to the moral considerations of cars intentionally killing their own passengers according to John "Silicon Valley Hipster" Doe's internal sense of utilitarian ethics-turned-case statement.

In some ways, I don't know if these problems will ever truly be solved: scientists do not understand how the human brain picks apart objects, and assigns meanings to the symbols-- like, an object shaped a certain way is a "chair", and could be sat upon. It's an almost impossibly non-trivial problem to attempt to code into a program, and its a necessity if the idea is for computers to be substitutes for human judgements when lives are directly at stake.

I once heard the adage, "Let humans do what humans are good at; let computers do what computers are good at." That's a bit of wisdom software developers would do well to heed. It would also have the side-benefit of not automating away half of the human race's livelihood.