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by gambiting 1456 days ago
Ok, maybe a different, well known example - the radiation Theraphy Therac-25 machines which would sometimes(extremely rarely) deliver a lethal dose of radiation instead of the one entered. Undoubtedly those machines saved more lives than they took, and also it's without question that they did so more accurately than any human operated machine could ever do. Yet they are considered one of the biggest failures of medical engineering ever.

I see it the same way - the current "self driving" systems shouldn't be allowed on the road, period, no matter how much safer they are than a statistical driver, unless they can be demonstrated to be completely 100% perfect in all scenarios(other than actual hardware failure - they shouldn't for instance run into a truck that's turning across a highway just because the system chose to ignore it).

1 comments

Would I be incorrect to suppose that you don't use seatbelts?
I don't see why I wouldn't use them(or why would anyone), can you explain?
Yeah, I guess my comment was kind of off the cuff.

What I was thinking about, was that seatbelts are hardly "100% perfect in all scenarios." I mean, they can make it a more difficult to get out of a burning vehicle quickly, just as an example. Even ignoring the possibility of malfunction, or jamming and such, they're not perfect.

The fact is, even if seatbelts decrease your risk overall, they are nowhere near 100% perfect. Nevertheless, many of us choose to use seatbelts, and indeed even chose to do so before widespread legislation.