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I'm going to disagree with everyone explaining how a flash crash isn't a valid analogy here. It actually is, although the word "crash" in this case is semantically overloaded and it does not mean that a true automotive crash is the likely result. Both the market and the road have a number of autonomous agents interacting with each other under some rule set. The nature of the players has an enourmous impact on how the game is played. A set of humans is physically incapable of "flash crashing" a stock market because they are literally physically incapable of trading fast enough for that to happen. The introduction of other effectively-autonomous agents into the market changes the nature of what the collection considered as a whole can and does do. It is true that introducing computer-controlled cars onto the road in quantity will almost certainly qualitatively change the nature of driving on the road, and it is valid to be curious or even concerned about what this effect may be. It would be particularly bad to imagine that all the cars are running the exact same code; it is a completely valid concern that one particular bug could be trigger which could cause mass failure of some type, including true automotive crashes, but possibly also just being software crashes. If you dig into real automotive code, you'll find similar things that have happened in real code. Long term, I think it is likely to be a net positive effect. You'll have a lot more drivers on the road taking what will probably be a very conservative approach to driving, with much more careful management and maintenance of margin for error, including in situations where humans tend to play fast and loose without even realizing it. It seems likely to me that computer cars will eventually refuse to drive in certain bad conditions, like icy roads, and that over time we will consider that to be an acceptable reason to not drive. But I do think we also want to be careful to ensure that there are many implementations of self-driving cars; monoculture has too significant a chance of a Black Swan event. But it isn't impossible we'll pass through a period where the net result is a bit more dubious. There's a lot of corner cases to work out, and that includes things that today we wouldn't even consider. Suppose 99% of the cars on the road are computer controlled. What do they do when a teenager hops on an overpass and starts throwing paint balloons? What happens when teenagers start jumping into highways on a dare? As the system becomes a computer system rather than a human system, we must also consider how it will be attacked not only by the real world, but by humans as well. Google's really being too optimistic here. They've made enormous strides, truly enormous strides, and now we're seriously talking about them as a thing that may happen for real, rather than the ever-nebulous "someday", and that's big. But they've got a long way to go before we can truly put them in the hands of the public. |
False. They did it in 1962.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870395760457527...