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Randy_M comments on Humans can drive cars - Less Wrong
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I'm occasionally still amazed that traffic works as well as it does. I must say I'm hesitant at using this example to claim that people are more capable than you might think. Driving is just something humans happen to be competent at. There are plenty of things roughly as complicated as driving a car that people aren't surprisingly good at.
This also reminded my of something people said at the latest meetup. At least two people told me they had deliberately tried to get more scared of driving, because they had noticed they had less fear in a car than on a plane despite planes being safer.
I don't think it is pure chance, since it was designed in iterations around human capabilites.
Indeed. The problem of driving has been set up by car designers so that it should be easy for us to solve it. By contrast, the problem of creating a safe AGI has not been set up so that it should be easy for us to solve (if you don't believe that there is a God who has made this the best of all possible worlds that is...). So I don't think the analogy works. If you want to make an argument making use of human past performance, it would be better to use examples of problems (that we've solved) that weren't set up by us (e.g. moon-landing, relativity theory, computers, science in general, etc).
Or nuclear weapon design. Chicago Pile-1 did work. Trinity did work. Little Boy did work. Burster-Able failed - but not catastrophically. Who knows if whatever the North Koreans cobbled together worked as intended - but it doesn't seem to have destroyed anything it wasn't supposed to. No-one has yet accidentally blown up a city. That's something. Anyway, I'll edit the post.