It might not be a health risk, but I found this study [1] interesting. It showed impaired decision making at CO2 levels that you could encounter indoors.
> 2) The robot helps you drive, you start to zone out, and plow into, let's just say as a random example, a truck crossing your lane of traffic.
This is my concern. How many days of sitting around for 12 hours not doing anything (because the computer is pretty good) does it take before the truckers who are supposed to be alert and ready to take over are completely zoned out. I would probably last about an hour.
that's the thing, at the point that the computer is already that good, missing that one accident isn't optimal sure, but it's definitely better than the current state of vehicle operation.
No it's not. People here have a really exaggerated vision of how bad human drivers are. Even the most pessimistic views of how common accidents are suggest that there is one contact collision every 75k to 100k miles or so.
An autonomous driver which was twice as dangerous as a human, then, would still go 37k to 50k miles between collisions. A human who was trying to backstop that robot's fallibilities would be required to pay close attention for weeks between actions. Which is inhuman.
I admit that I have no idea what the accident rate is in Uruguay or Brazil.
In the US:
The Department of Transportation gets reports of one accident per 250k miles (roughly). It is broadly agreed that many accidents are unreported, with estimates of the true rate ranging from 1/200k miles to about 1/75k miles.
For example, this document from the US Department of Transportation:
Wow, yes, there are a LOT less accidents in the U.S. According to other statistics, there are 5 million accidents, for a population of 300 million. In Uruguay there are 50.000 accidents for a population of 3 million, and with a LOT lower average mileage per driver.
That's something we've discussed a lot here - there's NO way self-driving cars can go around South American streets - unless they learn to be very aggressive, beep the horn, cross streets whenever they can, shout and otherwise interact with other drivers.
And we mostly don't have highways. Americans drive a lot in highways, that must skew the per mile accidents.
I don't know how often accidents like fender-benders go unreported in the U.S. though.
Before anyone chimes in, yes 5 million in 300 million is the same as 50.000 in 3 million.
What I wanted to mention is that there are a LOT more cars it the U.S., and the average US driver drives a LOT more than the average Uruguayan driver. (I'd have to look up hard numbers, but that's the gist of it)
An easy way to play around with parametric or specification based custom manufacturing is by making custom food (like sandwiches) for people, but only accept orders in a standard computer readable format.
Interesting questions are raised. Is there a limit to topping counts? Is there an implied order to toppings? If toppings have a cost, do you calculate that as the supplier or leave that to the consumer? How do you make sure an order is vegetarian? What do you do if you can't fulfill an order due to topping shortage?
Also, if it's that kind of party, people will start making their own food order generators, raising another set of interesting questions.
[1] "Is CO2 an Indoor Pollutant? Direct Effects of Low-to-Moderate CO2 Concentrations on Human Decision-Making Performance" . https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3548274/