Futurology

If there’s an officer trying to direct the car around or through a detour, autonomous cars aren’t trained for all that, so they don’t even listen.

Do you actually know that to be the case? There was a recent video showing the current state of Tesla self-driving and it was handling detours through construction zones just fine.

I mean let’s get real, do you trust bits of cryptic silicon over your own brain?

In a great many circumstances, yes, very much so. I use GPS to navigate, I time out my activities using clocks and alarms, I use a compiler instead of hand-coding assembly langauge, I communicate using telephones and computers rather than writing letters to be hand-delivered. I have fortunately not needed significant medical treatments in my life, but when it comes to that there will be all manner of medical devices that I'll be trusting my life to.

The reason we trust these technologies is, as I have said, because of statistics. We know that on the whole these things work. Every once in a while someone will come up with an anecdote about that one weird time that the GPS led them astray or an alarm failed or whatever, but those are anecdotes. The plural of anecdote is not data.