Turing Award Winner Patterson: Direct Horses-to-Autonomous Cars Transition Would've Been Unquestioned
davidpattersonx · x · 2026-08-01
Turing Award winner David Patterson offers a counterfactual reflection on autonomous driving: if we had transitioned directly from horseback to autonomous cars without the era of human driving, few people would have questioned the technology.
He points out that in hindsight, letting humans manually pilot heavy steel vehicles at high speeds, mere feet away from oncoming traffic and navigating through intersections, is actually a terrible and inherently dangerous idea.
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