PNW_Doug

u/PNW_Doug@lemmy.world
2 posts · 147 comments

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Unless and until we as a society address the trolley problems raised by self-driving cars—who and what determines who lives in a situation where a choice must be made—I can only look on with dismay.

This is a real issue, and we've not yet addressed it. If your car has a choice between saving you or saving a child, or another person, or any number of unusual circumstances made inevitable by the sheer number er of miles collectively driven, what does it do? What do we want it to do? How do we balance the scale between saving your life or sacrificing it to save others?

Outlandish situations may be rare but they will happen, and we need to decide how our machines will weight the lives they are asked to save or sacrifice.

It's a neat diagram, but I'm unsure what they mean by "ignore it." This is exactly how good recipes have been designed for many many decades, minus the nifty visual cheat sheet and with better instructions. [i.e. Do you beat the eggs? How thoroughly? How do you know when it's done baking?]

I absolutely get that this might help those who are more visually based learners, but the structure of recipes already follows this pattern. This turns the written instructions into a simplified chart, and I hope more thorough written instructions are simply being elided here.

I do like it though. It would certainly make a nice visual shorthand to glance over at during prep.

By 'well regulated monopolies' I'm specifically thinking of the pattern common in the U.S. to run power and water as municipal monopolies. We've seen firsthand what happens when you deregulate power.

Enron's ghouls strip-mined California wealth in record time, and the state quickly rolled back the deregulation when the company destabilized their entire power grid.

Some of these things are not like the others. I for one do not want to live in a world without occupational licensing, ISO standards, or a Bar Association. As is often said, 'regulations are written in blood,' and organizations such as these were created to pull order out of chaos, to separate con artists from the legitimate.

And presenting the electrical grid in this list as if it were something bad? Makes no sense. Its existence, pieced together over decades of painstaking work, is what allows the modern world. We've only recently—as in the past few years—even been able to contemplate moving away from a full grid as a model to deliver power, much less implement something else. Civilization would quite literally collapse overnight without it. And 'duplicate infrastructure?' Much of the modern grid's frailty is due to not enough duplicate infrastructure. Nothing made by mankind lasts forever. Engineering resilience by definition requires some duplicate infrastructure. There's no way around that.

Gatekeeping and regulated monopolies aren't ALWAYS bad. They can absolutely serve a purpose for the greater good, with enough oversight.