[ocdtrekkie]

I absolutely want to ban self-driving cars that behave in ways no human can explain or understand! The mere idea that anyone would think that should be legal is borderline insane.

All you are doing here is convincing me that tech companies are just runaway trains with nobody at the controls!

[cabalamat]

> I absolutely want to ban self-driving cars that behave in ways no human can explain or understand!

Can you explain or understand the algorithms humans use to drive cars?

[Nowado]

Screw that.

Explain to me step by step how you walk.

[askesum]

Humans are held responsible if they cause harm to others. If a driver hits a pedestrian on purpose he is charged with murder. Who do you charge if a self-driving car behaves in this way?

[abiogenesis]

Who do you charge when the brakes don't work on your car? When the airbags don't activate? When your rain sensor doesn't work?

Believe it or not, your car is not that primitive when compared to a self-driving one in terms of the number of things it does autonomously.

[hippari]

Isn't it the case that car manufacturers will have to issue a recall on defective models ?

[abiogenesis]

Yes, and the same holds for self driving cars. I fail to see the difference.

[leetcrew]

the humans that designed the car? to be clear, computers don't intentionally do anything. if an engineer deliberately programs a car to hit pedestrians for no reason, they would be charged with murder. if the car hits a pedestrian as a result of an engineering mistake, the company would be liable for damages, and if particularly egregious, engineers might face manslaughter charges.

[askesum]

To be clear, that was my point. You can't punish the computer and good luck finding the one to punish for an accident ten years later. But maybe if it's free software...

[azornathogron]

Punishing bad driving is - I assume - intended to incentivise better driving.

If a company makes a self-driving car and that car then drives badly, surely the response needs to be to incentivise the company to improve their engineering practices, eg, spend more on testing, or require more levels of review of changes, or whatever other organisational changes they need to make safer cars. You don't need to find an individual person responsible to create that incentive. And if you really do want to find an individual responsible it can easily just be the executives of the company (and the executives are probably pretty easy to find even a decade later).

[ocdtrekkie]

Well, you blame the black box algorithm that nobody can predict or understand, and you just call it an "accident".

[abiogenesis]

Who would you blame if the algorithm could be printed on paper?

[executive]

only if caught

[wholinator2]

What about all the other examples he listed. What about cancer detection? Or viral spread prediction? Drug discovery or medical imaging diagnosis? Physics research?

Machine learning is very widely used in the sciences and extremely beneficial to humanity in uncountably many ways and assuredly countless more to come. Of course technologies can be used for evil but so can nearly everything that exists. I believe your proposal comes from a desire to help or better the world, but to ban all non-human-readable algorithms is frankly ridiculous and demonstrates a naive understanding of the issue. It sounds a lot like the calls by the U.S. Congress to ban encryption.

[hippari]

Here is what I think:

- In medical: your doctor should be responsible for your diagnosis and drug company is responsible for defective drugs, except when they get away with lobbying and hiring good lawyers.

- In physics: I'm not sure if it's as big of a problem as in social networks. But consider this case: If you cannot reproduce the result of an experiment due to a ML model being cryptic, that would lead to huge credibility issue in science.

[ocdtrekkie]

At best, you may be able to justify black boxes providing secondary indicators: Maybe using AI to study cancer detection might lead you to a new solid discovery, but "we use AI to determine if you have cancer" should never be the mission, as it fails to generate useful information about how it is detected.

[mbreese]

> fails to generate useful information about how it is detected

Patients don’t care how cancer is detected. Patients care if the diagnosis is correct.

[alfiedotwtf]

Continue this line of thinking, would you want all algorithms banned? Might as well shut everything down :shrug:

[abiogenesis]

We can't even explain all physical phenomena, so good luck with banning anything that depends on the gravity of earth to function, because we don't know what gravity is.

[hippari]

But gravitational laws stay unchanged for millenials isn't it ? If I toss an apple, it will falls down. If I throw it fast enough, it goes into orbital mode.