Posted on 03/22/2023 5:33:36 AM PDT by Scooter100
When my father (b.1924, d.2017) was in his teens, it was a big event to finally be able to borrow the family horse and wagon to go into town on a Saturday night. Early Sunday morning, Dad recalled he would invariably fall asleep on the return trip home, only to wake up with the wagon and horse standing beside his house. It turns out that the horse knew the 6-mile route by heart and would simply carry on while Dad snoozed on the buckboard. Today, they get all excited about "self-driving" cars. Big deal. Nothing new!
Some reports indicate that allowing the horse to pick his route without supervision leads to accidents since most horses can’t read road signs. They run stop signs, etc.
Horses are more akin to chauffeurs than robots.
Years ago a fellow in my hometown would take his horse and buggy to the VFW club. The horse was the sober driver.
Even though a horse has very limited mental capacity, it is smarter than some AI driven car. The horse has senses and skills that equates to a safer ride.
Personally, I’d trust a horse.
Same here.
Sheesh, lighten up, I wasn’t advocating it. It’s a humorous story about a farm boy in the 1930’s. Besides, there were few road signs or stop signs out in the rural countryside in those days, let alone any traffic on a Sunday morning.
We've laughed on that for decades. LOL
Now you’ve done it. You’ve aroused all the solemn, humorless folks here who are going to now get all worked up over your little anectode and let you know how unsafe it was for your Dad to fall asleep on the wagon while the horse took him home after those Saturday night forays into town.
Good story!
A modern driverless car has more horsepower, but less horse sense.
The horse had more intelligence than most “artificial intelligence” systems.
My friend’s daughter has a masters in biomedical engineering and works as a researcher in a university lab which happens to do research on passengers involved in crashes in self driving cars. Her daughter told her she will absolutely never ride in one after she’s learned how easily they malfunction.
Ain’t that the truth. Rigging and hitching up a horse to a wagon was certainly part of the male’s task domain. Not that I have anything against the idea of women performing it; but, you know, back then they just wouldn’t have typically done that. Men wouldn’t have been caught sticking their nose in the kitchen, and women wouldn’t have stuck their nose in the stables. It is just the facts of history...good or bad, like it or leave it.
When I used to walk to the grocery store in college, I took my roommate’s dog. The dog always wanted to carry a bag when I came back out fo the store. And the dog would walk ahead of me back to the house and be waiting there with the bag in its mouth when I got there. It was impressive.
It was not my intention to be critical.
I figure these vehicles can only be as smart as the programmers... you know, the ones who came up with the bright idea.
(That was humor, BTW, a joke; you know, like a joke)
Like your comment about the Dudley-Do-Rights.
We hunt on horseback in winter, starting out for the high country from basecamp in the wee hours. From twilight onward, we stop and glass the distant hills, usually at the same spots. We dismount. The horses step off the trail and go to the very tree they’ve been tied to for years . . . even on the first ride of the new season.
Horses, man. If you could truly understand horses, you (I) would be a far better person.
“Horse sense”....does that refer to the human, or the horse?
As someone who works in AI and ML, I agree with you. It’s relatively easy to seed a set and run pattern recognition, but to react to the unknown is what tosses AI out of wac.
Sheep are kind of robotic in that respect - not wild sheep but the domesticated ones that we dumbed down
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