Comment on Followup on the vehicle "kill switch" mandated by the Infrastructure Bill
HelixDab2@lemm.ee 8 months agoDriverless cars would be worse; programming the kind of judgement calls into an expert system is… Not easy, and likely won’t work. They will probably do well with routine driving, when everyone else is also using an expert system to drive, but in an emergency? How do you convince your car that it’s an emergency? And what keeps someone from, say, lying? Like, I’m late to work because I overslept, so I need my car to drive 100mph, versus my home is on fire and I need to get there ten minutes ago to get my cats out?
The problem is that edge cases exist, and it’s really, really hard, if not outright impossible, to plan for them with an expert system.
Mojojojo1993@lemmy.world 8 months ago
No they wouldn’t break the speed limit. But less people would die from car crashes. So in fact they would be better. Just not in this situation. Which again is incredibly rare.
It never ever breaks speed limit. It doesn’t have to. No situation requires you to put your life above others.
HelixDab2@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Demonstrably false in the case of emergency vehicles. Going faster is not necessarily a risk; the autobahn has generally lower rates of accidents than the US interstates, despite people routinely driving >140mph.
Speed limits have always been a compromise between utility and lethality. You could nearly eliminate all accidents by having speed limits be no more than 20mph in any place. But it’s recognized that this isn’t practical, so we set speed limits at 25mph in school zones, 35 in residential/city roads, 45 on rural roads, 55 on unlimited access highways, and 65/70 on most interstates. Higher utility–an emergency–necessitates taking more risk.
If someone will die if you don’t break the speed limit, versus someone might die if you do, you’re probably going to break the speed limit.
Mojojojo1993@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Emergency vehicles cause quite a lot of fatalities. They are also taught how to drive at speed and motorway driving should have less crashes. It’s intersection and corners that causes issues.
Not American so no. Not how all places operate.
People break the limit all the time. Speed isn’t really the problem with drivers. It’s attention. Speed is a factor as you can’t react as fast but phones and other issues.
Sources. My dad was a firefighter for 30 years.