Exactly.

As TFA illustrates, Google's autonomous cars aren't yet ready to drive on every road in the country. But the same could be said of many, many people who are driving those very roads at this very moment.

We don't need a system that always outperforms the very best human drivers. Even if it only outperforms 95% of human drivers, it will still make the roads safer for everyone -- even that 5%, because they'll be at less risk from the 95%.

And remember, there are an awful lot of people in that lower 95% -- heck, in the lower 50%, or the lower 10% -- who are absolutely convinced that they're in the elite 5%.

I think it's the same as a lot of other AI applications. Because autonomous cars can be so much better than human drivers in so many ways -- more and better senses, faster "reflexes", less susceptibility to distraction/impairment/fatigue, inter-vehicle communication, learning from the experience of an entire fleet (including the vehicles that "died" in serious accidents) -- they may never need to be ANYWHERE CLOSE to "human-level AI".

As a very simplistic analogy, consider anti-lock brakes. It takes humans a huge amount of experience, along with lightning reflexes, to deal with rapidly-changing road conditions. Machines don't have anywhere near the human capacity to attend to weather conditions (and weather forecasts), interpret subtle changes in the appearance of the road surface, remember which local roads are prone to ice or standing water, and so forth. But because machines can observe the actual behavior of each wheel of a car and modulate the brakes independently in response, much more quickly than any human's reflexes, they can reliably outperform even experienced and attentive human drivers. And that's with 1970's mechanical technology.

My point was this:

There are a few situations where you're worse off wearing a seat belt than not wearing one. There are people who have died because they were wearing a seat belt.

Those situations are immensely rarer than the situations in which a seat belt will save your life, and since "accidents" are inherently unpredictable, you can't tell in advance when you should or shouldn't wear a seat belt.

Given these facts, it's really really stupid not to wear a seat belt, even though there are some situations in which it might harm you.

Similarly, self-driving cars will eventually reach a point where they'll sometimes kill you, but far, far more often save your life. At that point, avoiding them because you're afraid of the rarest scenario will be an equally stupid decision. It's one that people will make, though, because people are demonstrably terrible at this kind of risk evaluation.

I'm sure that there will always be a few situations where a skilled human driver will make better decisions, and produce better outcomes, than standard automation.

I'm equally sure that there will be exponentially more situations where standard automation will make better decisions, and produce better outcomes, than average (or even well above-average) human drivers.

I'm sorry, but "there will always be situations where a human performs better than AI" sounds an awful lot like "I won't wear a seat belt because it might trap me in a burning car". It's not wrong, but it is foolish, and it's a poor decision.

In related news, since staring at the sun through a large telescope can damage your retina, DON'T DARE LOOK AT YOUR PHONE SCREEN! It emits DEADLY PHOTONS of electromagnetic RADIATION!!11!

Something to keep in mind should you ever decide to timidly stick your head out of your cave.

The peak rate of flow for blood appears to be well under 1 m/s, even in the largest vessels. No, you won't get a noticeable effect.

"How long" isn't the question, but "how fast". You should be accelerating it to a few kilometers/sec, then reversing its velocity when it's a few millimeters from your scalp. You should probably do this in a vacuum, to avoid confounding influences from shockwaves.

No, not spinning, reciprocating -- moving in and out.

You know, like the ones in that Insane Clown Posse song that everyone keeps quoting.

Wow. That's an impressive body of work.

You're on the right track, but I think you'd still be short on power by several orders of magnitude. Even if you strap it directly to your head, your subwoofer's still only good for causing headaches and annoying bystanders.

It's the rate of change of magnetic flux that does the trick. You get changing flux from a changing electrical current, or from a moving magnet. So maybe if you loaded the magnets into a shotgun, then fired them through your brain, you'd notice an effect.

These are magnetic pulses. No, strapping magnets to your wrist/ankle/belly/tinfoil-hat still won't accomplish anything.

This is very interesting, and maybe that's good enough. But isn't there some evidence of what method they might have used? Wood fragments? Tracks? Tools?

I'm asking this as a completely naive onlooker. I'm sure there is research on this spanning hundreds of years; anyone want to provide a quick summary?

This would seem to present a compelling case for buying a telescope on the used market.