>> Can you imagine a police chase with the car being so intelligent that it cannot be stopped. How would the police interview the car when eventually stopped

Now imagine the chasing police car also driven by AI robot :-)

Unless your feet have been permanently attached to mother earth, you will have been in an aircraft which is capable of:

• flying for hours on autopilot without doing a belly flop on the nearest field or mountain
• landing on a runway without hitting the control tower

Few if any malfunctions due to hackers and equipment failures (built in redundancy). As yet no automated take off or taxiing.

I am currently reading a book by Christine Negroni (who has 20 years experience of Aircrash Investigations).

She documents 6 instances where fluid leaking from the galley on 747,77, 777 and Airbus 300 airliners had caused malfunction of electronics in the equipment room below the galley..

Also a case where a depressurisation valve failed and a flight attendant was killed when opening a door after landing, the cabin was still pressurised and blew him out with the door.

She also points out that for many years Boeing used the same cockpit warning siren for a take-off configuration and for pressurisation failure at altitude, this had caused confusion and near disaster, this was not changed until the FAA instructed manufacturers to use different warning sounds for the different problems.

Aircraft design, manufacture and maintenance have improved over the years but still not 100% proof against malfunction. Admittedly human misuse or misunderstanding is the trigger in most cases, increases in capability lead to even thicker instruction manuals.

Failure to RTM is a common cause of problems with cars now, could be much worse with "self-driving" ones.

I didn`t see it here but it was mentioned on a radio station that the car maker will be responsible for the software and hardware on the motor. not sure why that wasn`t included.

Its very interesting, in the US it was the other way:

Uber 'not criminally liable' for self-driving death

www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47468391

Humans write software and design computers and it is arrogant to place human lives at risk to rely on them completely

So a paper based system can't be flawed and just because it's run by an individual postmaster there can't be any flaws?

As usual, Alan, you have to take a contradictory position.

A paper system can be checked by anyone competent in arithmetic, this is the basis by which companies have been audited for many years.

I worked with auditors at annual company stocktakes for a number of years so have some experience in this process.

If defective software produces dud figures it is not t.o so easy to verify, which this disaster proved beyond doubt. .

Andy, I agree with your points, on quality of performance.

On another forum today someone raised the question "what happened to proof-reading of newspapers?".

I know my daughter was made redundant over 10 years ago, along with all the others, on the newspaper owners' assumption that reporters were a) capable and b) conscientious enough to save the cost of independent proof-readers.

Another consequence of dumbing down education and rating cost cutting above quality. A trend noticeable with the cars produced by some manufacturers, dealers and repair workshops if posts on here are to be believed.

Edited by galileo on 23/04/2022 at 15:48

I suppose the change from concept --> design --> test --> release to market has now changed to minimise the testing phase to make it safe but now outsourcing testing as 'beta testing' to the end user who now has to put up with poor useability (for the high price they pay) and endless 'software updates' and other mods that inconvenience them and (with cars) cost them money (fuel and time spent) taking them to be updated.

The number of engineering software packages I had to use (to 'be more productive' [i.e. to cut costs [I never saw any of the benefits - they all went to the firm's owners]) I found were incredibly poorly written (even after several updates) amazed me.

I found that using my own automated calcs using spreadsheets was sometimes better for some calculations rather than industry software - and I'm no expert on software. Most computer-literate engineers could easily do the same if they had the time.

I did read on the Interweb recently about some Army vehicle having hundreds of defects and the designers have thus far only managed to fix a dozen or so. I suppose at least they don't put it in the field yet, but still - the amount of money this must be costing (the MoD is probably the biggest over-spender [vs budget] for project work in government) is probably HUGE.

Sadly the KISS principle seems to be increasing ignored in modern tech.