Image transcript:
White background meme with the text “People want to build a massive connected network of driverless cars to ‘solve’ traffic. Doesn’t that sound a bit like giving SkyNet control of all the nukes?”
There are illustrative images of the proposed “network of driverless cars” as well as a menacing image of a terminator robot and an image from a news report about a deadly crash caused by a self-driving Uber.
Exactly, in a swarm system, losing a drone is fine. A car fully automated network, as CGP suggest, is a swarm system. If they are cars with people inside of it, it isn’t acceptable to lose units, we can’t accept even a single autonomous car randomly losing control into a tree. No matter that humans do that. The system has to be better than humans, not equally bad. Train systems are inherently free from this variation.