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Comment by injidup

10 hours ago

I'm sure he drives stick as well because offloading cognitive function to an ECU changing gears for him would also be against his religious beliefs.

15 comments

injidup

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savwolf  10 hours ago

Outside of America, most people drive cars with a manual gearbox.

  • ahmedfromtunis  10 hours ago

    Not true. Even for a lower middle income country like mine, cars with manual gearboxes had become very rare (with the exception of cabs where they remain the norm).

  • threetonesun  10 hours ago

    Outside of the United States? Even then, I don't think this has been a true statement for at least a decade, if not more with the rise of EVs in places other than the USA.

  • busterarm  10 hours ago

    This is only still true because in the parts of the world with the most population, cost is the #1 deciding factor in vehicle purchasing. Manuals are cheaper. Globally the industry is trending against manuals over time.

    Also in large parts of Europe if you pass your driving test in an automatic car you _can't_ drive a manual, so it becomes the default out of convenience.

  • paxy  10 hours ago

    And how is that relevant here?

    • sandworm101  9 hours ago

      Because it shows that there are a large number of people who do not want to offload a basic task, people for whom an insignificant convenience is not worth a significant outlay of money.

      I think if you mapped smart home technology to transmission preference, those who op for manual transmissions probably also opt for oldschool switches and thermostats .

close04  10 hours ago

This kind of automation takes the execution away from you, not the decision, and even that execution only concerns you. You wanted to shift into a higher gear, the car's computer does it for you. The result is what you wanted. A fully autonomous car that decides everything for you would be a better example.

If you let an AI grade an exam then a big part of what comes next is a decision that you didn't take or validate. You didn't remove yourself just from the execution, you removed yourself from the responsibility and cognitive effort to take the decision, and from the accountability for that decision.

If you can simplify and call every button press "just the computer doing things", then someone else can exaggerate and say a fully autonomous drone hunting humans is the same, business as usual, computers doing things.

  • nphardon  6 hours ago

    theory: there are two groups that a lot of hackernews commenters fall into. And these two groups clash on every Ai post every day. One camp only uses Ai to write code and thinks of them strictly as LLMs with a clearly understood design and purpose but that show some surprising behavior, they've watched youtube videos that show how everything ties together computationally and mathematically, from neural nets to RL, etc. and dont see them as capital A, Ai. It's another tool in the toolbox, and thinking about them in the way you describe, as something closer to capital Ai would cause severe cognitive dissonance, akin to the idea that a hammer could hop out of the toolbox and start building a house. Even though what you've done is just take one small step of critical thinking, it would be a leap to the other camp members, who are themselves, quite technical thinkers.