Re: A potentially lethal computer

Eric Jacobsen wrote:
On Wed, 1 Oct 2008 12:25:24 -0700 (PDT), Rune Allnor
<allnor@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It doesn *not* report 'There are 5 liters of fuel left'
or anything relating to the amount of fuel left in the tank.

It reports '15 km to next refueling', meaning it pretends
to know how far one can drive on the remaining fuel,a
number one obviously can not know since one can not possibly
know what fuel usage profile the car will operate under,
from now on and till it is refueled.

It's a tiny detail, but it makes all the difference.

I disagree that it makes much difference. It's a simple
translation from estimated fuel remaining to estimated distance
remaining. The computer may or may not improve the estimate by
using recent average fuel efficiency computation, or it might
not.

Perhaps not so simple as it's an additional layer of extrapolation.
By their nature extrapolation processes are "unstable" -- i.e., both
heavily dependent on seed information and divergent from ground truth
in the not-too-long term -- and are thus often best left to the most
sophisticated processor available. Which in the present case is most
probably the driver with all the implicit knowledge his experience
affords rather than some faddish piece of silicon.

If one decides to assume that an information source (and
I'd argue any information source) is accurate enough to bet
their personal safety on, I think that's a personal decision
which one needs to take responsibility for.

And who can't hear must feel? We are (or are becoming) engineers and
stand a good chance of having been in the basic mindset that implies
since childhood, so it's sometimes hard to realize that ordinary
people don't scrutinize their assumptions like that. (Nor are we
necessarily good at it in nontechnical arenas.) Humans in general are
very much at the mercy of framing (or presentation, in Rune's words)
and also don't transfer things learned in one frame to another all
that readily. Anyone interested in this discussion should read
Taleb's "Black Swan" on issues of knowledge, learning, and
prediction.

My point in bringing up automotive gauge reliability in general
is that there's no reason to believe they're that accurate.
The fact that the display is digital or that it's undergone a
simple conversion (from volume to distance) shouldn't change that,
and I think it's reasonable to expect even a layman to understand
that.

As noted above it's naive to assume that understanding in one
instance will suffice to engender recognition of technically similar
but spatially, temporally, or socially distant cases. If we call
saying "but the assessment shouldn't change" the "moralist" approach
then I think Rune's point is that safety is a matter of pragmatics --
of observing over judging. And we do observe that the assessment
changes; that gratuitous levels of mediation between device and
operator may be hazardous; that this sort of "tiny detail" is as
important a source of disaster as the big gaping hole. On these
matters, see e.g. Perrow's "Normal Accidents" or Rochlin's "Trapped
in the Net" which is online at
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/books/rochlin/ .


Martin

--
Values of beeta will give rise to dom!
.

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