People cannot "just pay attention" to (boring, routine) things
42 points by carlana
42 points by carlana
This is the reason that all these “self driving” mode cars with cameras to watch the drivers eyes, sensors to ensure they’re holding the steeering wheel, etc are fundamentally broken.
They are requiring a greater degree of inactive constant attention and response time than we expect of pilots. The whole purpose of this nonsense is to allow manufacturers of faulty cars to offload liability onto the driver. It’s essentially the same as if a manufacturer said it that drivers must constantly tap their brakes so they can detect failure earlier while driving, and if they were not doing that then claiming any accident caused by faulty manufacturing was still the drivers fault.
I fundamentally agree to this and I've been referring to drivers of "self-driving" cars as "sacrificial drivers" (because they're there to basically take the blame), but I just noticed that trains work the same way — you have to confirm your attention constantly so the train doesn't stop. Now, admittedly, there's no vile deception about technological capabilities behind that, but I wonder if there's a better way to make train conductors drive trains witout constant nagging.
Well, one aspect is that train drivers have actual things to do beyond mere 'wait around in case things go wrong': look ahead, read signals, respond by changing or maintainig speed, repeat at next signal.
A train's dead man's switch' has a different history and purpose (in the POSIWID sense) than a software-driven car's driver presence confirmation prompt. The dead man's switch's purpose is to fail safe in case of sudden incapacity of an active operator. Self-driving vehicles sideline the driver – place them in a into passive observing role – and then use presence prompts as goads to make them perform attention and, as you say, make them responsible for a process they are not operating.
I wonder if there's a better way to make train conductors drive trains witout constant nagging.
One way to increase alertness and reduce mistakes: Several countries' and cities' railways make the 'pay attention moments' (e.g. signals, and checks/checklists) a full-body activity.
There's full-autonomy mode for ETCS https://transport.ec.europa.eu/transport-modes/rail/ertms/what-ertms-and-how-does-it-work/etcs-levels-and-modes_en
We also have a tendency to see what we expert to see and not see what we don't expect to see
Would be pretty great if the author purposely misspelled "expect" as "expert" to drive the point.
Sadly it was definitely not deliberate, although maybe that also illustrates the point. I've fixed the mistake now.
(I'm the author of the linked-to article.)
I'm using a current version of Helium at the moment and I'm hard-blocked from reading the page because by browser is "suspiciously old" :/
I’m using Safari on a version of iOS released in late 2024 and getting the same thing. Whatever definition of “suspiciously old” this filter is using is kinda dubious.
Bainbridge's paper "Ironies of Automation" is so so so good on this subject — not just on what humans can not do, but also on what skilled and engaging process operation does looks like. I'll post quotes later today or tomorrow; link for now.
https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica.pdf
I was very confused at first, this seems to be a post about LLM crawling not matching the title of the submission, but I think the site flags me as a crawler.
Your browser has suspicious Sec-CH-UA-* headers
I'm using Google Chrome Beta on a Google Pixel ...