Can we get Natalie Portman and hot grits involved somehow?

That's not the issue - insurance companies have no problem giving insurance to humans which have "individual learning capabilities."

The problem is that while insurance companies can extract compensation from humans - essentially they can coerce the humans to work "for them" to pay them back - they can't get compensation from the AI, and there isn't a good framework to get compensation from the AI developers.

The issue isn't that the AI learns - the issue is that our legal framework doesn't have a good way to get "compensation" from errant AI - because the AI itself doesn't care if it gets shut off. You can't hold the AI itself "liable" like you can a person. So until we change the liability framework, we'll be stuck. This isn't a technical problem, so much as a social one.

Part of self-driving cars being safer than people is that they don't drive "very close together" - they follow at the appropriate following distance and speed for the lines of sight. This alone accounts for a large portion of the improved safety performance of these systems.

Autonomous cars are actually very good at the driving task. Where they fail is when they encounter situations that are "abnormal" and I think the industry has a problem here; state of the art is either to train specifically for every situation (impossible in the limit) or to kick the decision to a human in a support center somewhere. Things like emergency vehicles, school buses, farmer markets, construction zones, etc.

The industry needs to figure out how to get their systems to "get confused, then reason their way out of a situation."

This long tail is where humans still do better - when there is some "new" scenario, like a particular combination of debris in the roadway, on a Tuesday, with gawkers, during a fireworks display. You will never be able to "train" your way out of that - you need the correct structural formulation for the problem space.

The big takeaway I have from their study is that their study areas - major metropolitan centers - is that cities have way, way worse than average incidents per vehicle mile travelled.

I mean the national average is only something like 1.25 fatalities per 100M miles, injuries only 75 per 100M miles, and "all" incidents like 140 per 100M miles. But the benchmark numbers on the linked websites range from 200 to almost 700 injury incidents per 100M miles in those cities.

Like, if you are using the average number, you can't even reduce the number of incidents by 841 over 271 million miles, because the expected value is only 203. You have to have a rate of at least 300 injury-incidents per 100 million miles to reduce by 841 at over 271 million miles. So really, their results are driven by San Francisco, Austin, and Atlanta.

Their confidence bands are also pretty low; for example they quote 2 serious or greater injuries in San Fran, which on 82 million miles there is a rate of "0.02 per million miles". But 2 injuries is not really enough to make a statistical inference.

Least of all because all the miles are with different versions of their software - you can't make any predictive claim.

Statistics never lie, but you can make them say whatever you want...

Remember when the Chinese destroyed that satellite in space a few years ago (2007 - geez, it's been a while) to "demonstrate their capabilities"? We NEED systems in space to defend/retaliate against that kind of stuff.

This isn't Reagan's "Star Wars" that was ridiculed. It's the new realpolitik.

> One thing I noticed about modern Linux is if you "cat > file" and then press CTRL-C it overwrites with a blank file

That maybe a shell-ism. In bash if you ' >file ' with nothing else, you end up blanking the file (and updating the date/time on it) without ^C even being involved.

...and if the laptop drive wasn't even encrypted, even more of a fool.

Sucks to have stuff stolen, but the individual is responsible for taking at least basic precautions to protect property - including intellectual.

...and a former Mainframe op, this means very little to me unless / until it has a decent TUI and/or GUI interface to report on, configure, and manage things.

Give me an ISO to boot and an interface as described above, and I'll dedicate some time to testing it.

Planet gonna keep getting hotter bc politicians don't have the political will to actively try fixing things

Europeans will (finally) install AC

People will keep getting sick and dying from the heat

People will relocate to try and escape from the heat

Eventually we will implement the Mexican mid-day Siesta due to the heat

After that we will be forced to convert everything to night-shift and become a night-based society starting an hour before sundown, bc nothing can be done anymore in the sunlight

Planet keeps getting hotter

Eventually the whole place is a smoking ruin and hopefully we have migrated to space cuz the Earth ain't worth living on anymore - bc H U M A N S A R E S T U P I D for destroying the only planet we were given.

Having solved all other problems...

/ srsly, why do people waste their time on stupid crap like this