Our Robots, Ourselves

What Hacker News says

1. tuatoruJun 2025
   Didn't realise the pedigree of the idea went back to 1983.

   I read about this in a book "Our Robots, Ourselves". That talked about airline pilots' experience with auto-land systems introduced in the late 1990s/ early 2000s.

   As you'd expect after having read Ironies of Automation, after a few near misses and not misses, auto-land is not used any more. Instead, pilot augmentation with head-up displays is used.

   What is the programming equivalent of a head-up display?

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2. tuatoruSep 2021
   >They work just well enough so you're not paying attention and then the car hands you control without warning.

   There's a book, Our Robots, Ourselves by David Mindell, which describes the aviation experience with auto-land. Auto-land is no longer used for this reason, and the related one that the automatic system gives up when the situation is bad and you only have seconds to recover, which is when you want the pilot to have been paying attention for quite a while.

   Planes use pilot assistance (head-up displays of where the plane thinks it's going, and where it thinks it should be going), rather than automatic landing systems these days.

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3. tuatoruAug 2021
   > Safety and convenience are both the top priorities of an autonomous vehicle’s design. By drastically reducing or eliminating human error on the road, the chances of accidents and crashes are significantly reduced.

   The safety argument for autonomous vehicles is a crock.

   Safety is at bottom about stopping without harming people. There exist lots of ADASes ("advanced driver assistance systems") that can be and are being fitted to cars that are not self driving that do this job of stopping without harm, and keeping vehicles stable so there isn't an "uncontrolled sudden stop" event.

   > Fatigue and getting distracted are some things machines and algorithms won’t have to deal with.

   With less-than-total ability to control vehicles in all situations, making it easier for fatigued or otherwise hampered people to be nominally in control of a vehicle also decreases overall safety.

   Self driving that likes to hand control back to a human[1] when events get difficult, is less safe than a vehicle that requires the human-in-nominal-control be engaged all the time, even if she isn't fatigued or distracted.

   This was discovered with passenger planes when "autoland" systems were brought in in the 1990s. They were fairly quickly pulled out and replaced with head-up displays of key information to the pilots.[2]

   Honest advocates of self driving would admit that they want it for its convenience.

   1. Whether or not that human is in the vehicle.

   2. source: Our Robots, Ourselves, David Mindell. Mindell was (is?) a practising engineer involved with underwater autonomous vehicle design and operation.

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4. spuzFeb 2016
   The problem you are stating is called the 'handoff' problem which I believe will be a serious challenge for manufacturers of driverless cars. The handoff problem is when an automated system identifies a scenario in which it needs to hand over control to a human. How will that work in a vehicle that is not designed to be occupied by someone that knows how to control it? This problem has been written about in the book Our Robots, Ourselves [0] and there is an Econ Talk podcast about it as well [1].

   To me, it makes sense to make use of the brain power provided by the occupant of the vehicle. For example, if one of the main vision sensors in the car breaks, why not let the human occupant drive the car manually?

   [0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Robots-Ourselves-Robotics-Autono...

   [1] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/david_mindell_o.htm...

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5. amsilprotagDec 2015
   His position seems to be similar to MIT engineer David Mindell's, who recently wrote Our Robots, Ourselves[1]. It seems to me that the more hours one spends solving real problems with AI, the less likely they are to believe an apocalypse is imminent. Conversely, the more dependent a prognosticator is on book or film sales, the more likely they are to predict or depict a near-term AI apocalypse.

   [1] Google Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nDdqGUMdAY

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