Is this a long and pretentious way of saying turning a steering wheel is mentally taxing? I honestly can't tell. Ha.
Control loop: some kind of input, followed by some processing/filtering, followed by some kind of output, then feedback. A standard way of looking at the world and doing things in engineering.
You want your FM radio to lock onto the subcarrier so it can extract the stereo audio? Control loops. You want a roller to squeeze hot steel to a given thickness in a steel mill? Control loops. These things are all over the place; there’s hundreds of them in the hardware of a PC.
There’s lots of differential calculus to analyze and design these loops. Some loops are linear, others are nonlinear, which leads to Fun.
Thing is, it’s quite possible to insert a human into a loop. The obvious: drive a car down a road with marked lanes. The human is looking out, seeing the lanes, moving the wheel back and forth to stay in the lane.
As a component in the loop, the characteristics of the human have to be taken into account. Delay, strength, resolution of vision, you name it. This isn’t an, “It’s obvious!” situation. It’s quite possible to design a vehicle that literally
can’t be controlled by a human. If a car does something faster than a human can keep up with, well, it’s not going to sell well if people crash them on test drives. It’s why there are test pilots in aircraft: and some of them have had to eject if the designers didn’t get the ergonomics right.
Heck, about once or thrice a year we all hear reports of some over ambitious idiot in a super car with the traction control off wrapping said super car around a tree. This isn’t a hypothetical.
So, some gonzo on this thread says, “It’s not hard to control a car! Just twitch the muscles back and forth a bit! It’s easy!”
Like. Suuurree it is. And getting a computer to do all that image recognition, path recognition, avoiding pedestrians, not turning so fast as to roll the car,
and all that jazz, is simple, too?
There’s nothing simple about
any of it. Whether it’s a computer driving a car, a human driving a car, or a human just walking across the landscape.
We all can do the latter, mostly, but we’re all the product of several hundred million years of evolution that has pretty much wired us up to do the job; and the ones who didn’t do the job well got eaten, and generally didn’t pass their genes down as a result.
And it’s pretty blinking amazing that, in the space of 80 years or so, we’re building machines that can navigate down a highway, duplicating something that took us and our ancestors hundreds of millions of years to do.