A US driver made it to hospital while suffering a pulmonary embolism after putting his car into autopilot.
Joshua Neally was driving his Tesla Model X home from his office in the US city of Springfield, Missouri, to nearby Branson.
But after pulling onto the highway, he started suffering piercing pain in his stomach and chest.
Rather than call an ambulance, the lawyer decided to find a hospital using his car's self-driving mode.

Around 20 miles (32km) down the road, the 37-year-old's Tesla arrived at the road leading to the hospital emergency department.
He told Slate that he manually steered the electric vehicle in to the car park and checked himself in to the emergency room.
A pulmonary embolism is a potentially fatal obstruction of a blood vessel in the lungs.
Doctors say he was lucky to survive it while driving.

Tesla's autopilot, which automatically changes lanes and reacts to traffic, is under the microscope in America after it was involved in two crashes.
A man died in Florida after the driver-assist function in his Tesla Model S failed to detect a lorry in its path in May.

Then last month a driver was unhurt after his Model X car crashed after swerving to hit wooden rails next to a two-lane road in Montana.
The electric carmaker suggested that the function wasn't being used correctly at the time of the second accident.
The use of the technology is being investigated by the US road safety watchdog, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

But Joshua Neally says he was happy to use the autopilot function and thinks it will save lives.
"I'm very thankful I had it for this experience," Joshua told local news station KY3.
"If something like that happens where I become unconscious or incapacitated while I'm driving, I'm not going to cross over the interstate and slam into somebody or slam into one of the big rock walls."

Avatar 720 wrote:Jumping on the 'call an ambulance' wagon.

Now we just need a way of instructing the car to automatically request an ambulance or other service, sending exact co-ordinates and stuff. There are plenty of times when I look back on things and think "if I need to call emergency services, I'd best hope they can track my position, because I haven't the first clue where this specific area is".

 Smacks wrote:

Avatar 720 wrote:Jumping on the 'call an ambulance' wagon.

Now we just need a way of instructing the car to automatically request an ambulance or other service, sending exact co-ordinates and stuff. There are plenty of times when I look back on things and think "if I need to call emergency services, I'd best hope they can track my position, because I haven't the first clue where this specific area is".

Funny you should say that, it's a big problem for the emergency services since the proliferation of cellphones. Often they can't track your position beyond the nearest cell tower, and waste valuable time struggling to locate people.

Given that he was already in a vehicle, driving to the hospital immediately might actually have been the fastest way to receive medical attention, and could have saved his life. Calling an ambulance means he'd have to wait for an ambulance to be dispatched, drive out to get him, hopefully locate him quickly, and then still be no closer to the hospital. The fact that an artificial intelligence did the driving for him, rather than another person, is somewhat incidental... my faith in other people is so low, especially when it comes to map reading, I think I'd almost prefer the machine being in charge.

 d-usa wrote:
People forget that the ambulance is pretty much a hospital.

Yourself: spend time in regular traffic driving to the hospital, walk yourself to the hospital, find the ER, then somebody actually takes a look at you and the diagnostic and treatment process begins.

Ambulance: the ambulance can get to you fast, they make contact, the diagnostic and treatment process begins before you get to the hospital, they can get you to the appropriate hospital, they can communicate with the hospital to tell them what is going on, and by the time you get into the ER they are ready to do the procedure needed.

You might get to the hospital 5 minutes sooner by yourself, but treatment starts sooner by calling 911. That can be the difference between already being on a stretcher on the way to a heart cath vs just now getting an EKG to diagnose your MI.

Treatment time is the HUGE difference between calling 911 and driving yourself, not "arrival at the hospital" time.

 reds8n wrote:


somewhat related :


http://moralmachine.mit.edu/


seems I tend to kill a lot of animals and older people

 Yodhrin wrote:

 reds8n wrote:


somewhat related :


http://moralmachine.mit.edu/


seems I tend to kill a lot of animals and older people

Hmm, this is why I dislike that kind of test - it assumes my reasoning rather than letting me tell it. For example, apparently I have a "preference" of which gender to save when in fact I was making purely utilitarian judgements; people over animals, more people over less people, obeying the law where all other factors are equal. But because they choose the distribution of people in each question, the test attributes motivations that didn't exist.

What I find disturbing though is that there have apparently been a fairly substantial number of people willing to have the car kill its occupants to save a dog and a cat, judging by the "Others" average shown at the end.