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Fake News Invading Driverless Cars Stories, Be Wary!
Dr. Lance B. Eliot, AI Insider
Fake news.
That’s an expression that has gained a lot of notoriety lately.
One person’s fake news often seems to be another person’s real news. Real news versus fake news. Fake news versus real news. How can we discern one from the other?
Believe it or not, some states like California are now even trying to make mandatory a core course for all high school students that would involve teaching them the differences between fake news and real news. Though this generally seems like a good idea, questions abound about what constitutes fake news versus real news. Also, some worry that this would become nothing more than an agenda to try and impose upon impressionable minds a particular political bent, whether liberal or conservative, and use the guise of outing fake news as a means to brainwash our children.
For now, I’d like to concentrate on a specific genre of fake news. There is a lot of “fake news” about AI and self-driving or driverless cars (sometimes also referred to as Autonomous Vehicles, or at times flimsily called robot cars).
I see it every day in the headlines of major media outlets. It appears on the back-page stories and the front-page stories. It creeps into the dialogue about self-driving cars. The general public is misled by many of these stories. Regulators are being misled.
Companies are both helping to mislead and also being misled. The bonanza of self-driving cars has produced a jackpot of fake news. I’ll explain what I mean by fake news, and you can decide whether my perspective of fake news is your perspective too, or whether you consider my fake news to be real news. You decide.
One place to start when talking about fake news is to initially aim at hoaxes or scams. I think that we can all pretty much agree that if a news story is based on a hoax or scam, we would likely be willing to label that news as fake news.
Let’s suppose I reported that John Smith has turned lead into gold. This is of course the infamous alchemists dream. Mankind has sought to turn various ores into gold as long as gold has been considered a valuable commodity. If I take John Smith’s word that he did turn lead…
