Originally Posted by
genec
Please explain how a human can see a deer standing in the woods off the side of the road at night.
I see deer all the time on the side of the road at night, whether they are right on the edge or barely in the woods.
Originally Posted by
ianbrettcooper
The point is, an advanced computer with an infra-red and radar tracking system can see a deer or a thousand deer long before a human can, whether the deer is/are at the side of the road or in the trees. It can then modify speed to minimize the threat of such animals. If the animal becomes a danger, a computer will not react in shock as a human would, but will calculate all the possible movements of all the deer that are dangers or threats. It can also calculate the state of the road, the health and abilities of the car's systems, positions and movements of any other vehicles, positions of obstacles and all possible variables. Then it can choose the best course of action to minimize harm - all in a few milliseconds. A human cannot come anywhere close to that.
Let's see, a road that is known to sometimes have potholes. Doesn't that describe most roads in North America? Would you be willing to make the decision to check the box saying there are no potholes on any given street? The reality is that the program will necessarily err on the side of caution. Either way, it will have no way to know about actual potholes because sometimes they are created in storms and sometimes they are fixed by the city. All the car can do is hope to have a sophisticated enough detection system to safely make that determination on the fly.
Regarding deer, they are animals and as such, it is possible, at least to an extent, to judge the likelihood of them running onto the road at the last minute. A lot of it depends on whether they have fawns, if they're in a group, if the group is separated by the road, etc. A person paying attention can figure out a lot of this very quickly and I have serious concerns that a piece of software would do anything other than bring the car down to an excessively "safe" speed in every instance. Or, what about recent road kill that gives off a heat signature? We get enough of that around there that it isn't a joke. There are often buzzards taking care of it, which also have a heat signature, etc. Sorry, but I have enough experience programming computers to know that accounting for all these contingencies is much harder in practice than in conception.