alt Hacker NewsThe "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast. A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough".
A car that only fails in a road conditions edge case is good enough for the vast majority of cases. You accept that, and issue a manual override for when that edge case pops up. Then you add that edge case to your training sets. Then the issue never comes up again.
If you think that "flooded roadway" is a case that's handled gracefully by every human driver, and it's the AI that's uniquely prone to failure, I have news for you.
Multiple cities with uncommonly flooded roadways get surges of "water flood engine damage" cars at the repair shops in the wake of extreme weather events. Human drivers underestimate just how flooded a roadway is, try to push through it, and have their car choke, die, and float there, waiting for some good samarithan with a snorkel and a long rope to pull it out. Then someone gets to play the fun game of "is this ICE toast or will it run once you get the water out".
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Well its not that simple. In the same way that throwing an LLM into a process will always have a risk of blowing up spectacularly.
In this case it failed open. It didnt recognize that it was in an edge case (which itself is an edge case). So what are you proposing to be the solution to that? If the car itself does not recognize that its in an abnormal situation that needs intervention then how do you intervene?
> A part of growing up is learning to put up with "good enough".
"I feel content with good enough in this case." - quote from child whose body got folded in half by a Tesla
Your growing up and adulthood sounds a lot like settling for mediocrity from those who push shit on us without asking if we ever wanted it. Floods aren't a special edge case, they happen all the time. The people making these are so stupid and blind to reality they didn't think about the most basic 101 case of "what if it isn't a perfectly dry and sunny California day" because thinking isn't on the to-do list for these people. This shit is ass. Get it off the streets.
> The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast.
I wouldn't call being prepared for very common life threatening events experienced by drivers "chasing perfection". The people with stalled cars are the lucky ones. Most of the drowning deaths in floods come from people who drove right into them.
I'll give them credit for over-correcting before deciding to pull out until they figure out how to handle floods even though it left people stranded on the road because of a small harmless puddle. Better to do that than take the risk and drive into a dangerous situation. Even still, this is something they should have fully tested before the cars ever hit a public street.