For sure. And that's why I think it's important to distinguish harm caused despite good intentions and reasonable practices being followed from harm caused because someone did not follow reasonable practices or actively chose to cut corners.

Just my personal opinion, but given the track record in this particular industry, I think there should be demonstrable intent by decision-makers to follow good practices, not merely a lack of evidence of intent to circumvent or cut corners. This is expected in other regulated industries, compliance failures are a big deal, and for good reason. I see no reason why similar standards could not be imposed on those developing and operating autonomous vehicles, and every reason they should be given the inherent risks involved.

Maybe this will be an area where the US simply gets left behind because of the pro-car and litigious culture that seems to dominate discussions there.

Reading online discussions about driving -- admittedly a hazardous pastime if you want any facts to inform a debate -- you routinely see people from the US casually defending practices that are literally illegal and socially shunned in much of the world because they're so obviously dangerous. Combine that with the insanely oversized vehicles that a lot of drivers in the US apparently want to have and the car-centric environments that make alternative ways of getting around much less common and much less available, and that's how you get accident stats that are already far worse than much of the developed world.

But the people who will defend taking a hand off the wheel to pick up their can of drink while chatting with their partner on a call home all while driving their truck at 30mph down a narrow road full of parked cars past a school bus with kids getting out are probably going to object to being told their driving is objectively awful and far more likely to cause a death than the new self-driving technologies we're discussing here. You just don't see that kind of hubris, at least not to anything like the same degree, in most other places, so we might see more acceptance of self-driving vehicles elsewhere too.

IMHO the only sensible answer to is separate responsibility in the sense that a tragedy happened and someone has to try to help the survivors as best they can from responsibility in the sense that someone behaved inappropriately and that resulted in an avoidable tragedy happening in the first place.

It is inevitable that technology like this will result in harm to human beings sooner or later. Maybe one day we'll evolve a system that really is close to 100% safe, but I don't expect to see that in my lifetime. So it's vital to consider intent. Did the people developing the technology try to do things right and prioritise safety?

If they behaved properly and made reasonable decisions, a tragic accident might be just that. There's nothing to be gained from penalising people who were genuinely trying to make things better, made reasonable decisions, and had no intent to do anything wrong. There's still a question of how to look after the survivors who are affected. That should probably be a purely civil matter in law, and since nothing can undo the real damage, the reality is we're mostly talking about financial compensation here.

But if someone did choose to cut corners, or fail to follow approved procedures, or wilfully ignore new information that should have made something safer, particularly in the interests of personal gain or corporate profits, now we're into a whole different area. This is criminal territory, and I suspect it's going to be important for the decision-makers at the technology companies to have some personal skin in the game. There are professional ethics that apply to people like doctors and engineers and pilots, and they are personally responsible for complying with the rules of their profession. Probably there should be something similar for others who are involved with safety-critical technologies, including self-driving vehicles.

The perfect vs good argument is the pragmatic one for moral hazards like this. IMHO the best scenario as self-driving vehicles become mainstream technology is probably a culture like air travel: when there is some kind of accident, the priority is to learn from it and determine how to avoid the same problem happening again, and everyone takes the procedures and checks that have been established that way very seriously. That is necessarily going to require the active support of governments and regulators as well as the makers of the technology itself, and I hope the litigious culture in places like the US can allow it.

I agree. The functions provided by this bed do not require internet connectivity AT ALL, let alone some ridiculous cloud based architecture. $5000 is enough to include a $200 miniPC to monitor temp and positional sensors.

At which point it will hallucinate that every building is a McDonald's only to get you murdered by a drug cartel gang.

Lying to you to give you that terrible restaurant recommendation. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.06105 is a white paper mathematically proving that LLMs will lie.

I have said this all along- most of AI is GIGO- Garbage in, Garbage out. LLMs were trained on the largest garbage producer in our society today, Web 2.0. Nothing was done to curate the input, so the output is garbage.

I don't often reveal my religion, but https://magisterium.com/ is an example of what LLMs look like when they HAVE curated training. This LLM is very limited. It can't answer any question that the Roman Catholic Church hasn't considered in the last 300 years or so. They're still adding documents to it carefully, but I asked it about a document published a mere 500 years ago and it wasn't in the database, but instead of making something up like most LLMs will do, it kindly responded that the document wasn't in the database. It also, unlike most AI, can produce bibliographies.

You don't think policies like VAT on private school fees and pushing up business taxes instead of personal ones play well with the typical Labour voter?

They're cratering in the polls anyway for a host of other reasons, and I suspect Starmer is already toast anyway for a host of other reasons (though it's significantly harder in practice for Labour to replace a leader they're not happy with than it is for the Tories), but I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that some of these policies are being chosen because of their political alignment.

They appear to be playing heavily on the politics of envy. Look at some of their education policies, for example, or the way they treat small businesses and the people who run them. They don't seem to want to pull up the less fortunate if they can be busy pulling down the more fortunate. It's not a good look if you actually want a successful economy, but it plays well to their base.

I agree with you that they seem to be all over the place in policy generally, and after trying to give them a fair chance in the early months, I now have a fairly low opinion of them (with the odd exception in Cabinet who does actually appear to be at least recognising the real problems and trying to do something about them, which I can respect even while thinking little of their party politicians and government as a whole).

You're right about the investment culture as well, but presumably if we're talking about entrepreneurs who have already been successful and are looking to move elsewhere, that's of limited relevance unless they're planning to start at least one more business after they arrive, so in this particular debate, I doubt that is such a major issue.

While we're hardly Russia, our democratic and stabilisation credentials are looking more shaky than ever as well. Our electoral system produces results very far from proportional. One of our two traditional main political parties is now essentially irrelevant. The other, which currently holds power, is breaking all the wrong records and is widely expected to suffer severe losses at the next election already, barely a year into their term. Waiting in the wings (and currently leading by a very wide margin in the polls) is the nascent far right populist party that has become the default protest vote. It looks scarily like that party might actually be pulling so far ahead (whether thanks to their own merits or, like the present incumbents before the last election, because the government of the day is so unpopular) that even with the usual reversion towards traditional voting patterns when a real election happens, they might still win. And the prospects of what happens next in that timeline are truly terrifying, particularly for anyone who isn't a white British citizen from birth.

The irony of the two stories being together on the front page, "More Screen Time Linked to Lower Test Scores For Elementary Students" and "Microsoft to Provide Free AI Tools For Washington State Schools" is just too good to fail to mention.

And so I'm replying to the both First Posts with it.

The irony of the two stories being together on the front page, "More Screen Time Linked to Lower Test Scores For Elementary Students" and "Microsoft to Provide Free AI Tools For Washington State Schools" is just too good to fail to mention.

And so I'm replying to the both First Posts with it.