How fixed-gear bikes can confuse Google’s self-driving cars
washingtonpost.com
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Ok, I'm just going to come out and say, I'm a licensed human driver and a bicyclist, and I find track stands confusing too. Like a skateboarder in the bike lane, there's a lot of potential for unexpected motion, and that needs to be accounted for.
The bicyclist is wobbling in place, but could easily transition to going forward or backwards without warning. The bicyclist is intent on the stand, so drivers won't be able to gain eye contact.
I think the cloud of uncertainty around bicyclists is also why cars wrongly yield to my bike so often at stop signs. Some bicyclists do unpredictable things, and drivers incorporate that into their mental models.
People learn, and I'm confident that self-driving cars will too. Eventually.
Although I suppose keeping a rolling video of everything would suffice as well, for diagnosis purposes.
Somebody looking over your shoulder from the calm surroundings of a court room are very likely to second-guess everything you do, looking at a video of it. That's why we have a jury, an advocacy system, and we question witnesses.
As I mentioned in a cousin reply, I once struck a bicyclist who wasn't obeying traffic rules (she blew a stop sign at a 4-way) and was found liable for the accident at least by the officer who wrote the accident report. We're all lucky her injuries weren't major, but there's no way I'm going to risk hitting a biker who is barreling down a hill toward a 4-way by assuming they're going to follow the traffic laws.
But if a driver suddenly decides throw the 4-way stop etiquette out the window and start directing traffic from behind a windshield I often can't see through clearly because of tinting/my sunglasses/glare-from-the-sun. I'm at a bit of a loss...are they waving me though? talking to a kid in the back seat? messing with their phone?
If I go, I'm risking my neck if they were in fact distracted and not waving me though. If I resist going out-of-turn, that's awkward because my feeling is some drivers get frustrated I'm ignoring their attempt to help me out.
The bicyclist didn't stop, was struck by my car, fell off, went to hospital. She was okay in the long run, but sued over the incident; the police officer who wrote up the event determined that I was at fault (despite eyewitnesses to the contrary) based on the claim that I should have stopped for the bicyclist.
At this point, given that bikes are known to do this I really don't have any choice in the matter. I'm glad I didn't kill anyone - head trauma can be really tricky. I'm concerned that I was the victim of insurance fraud (she really did run out in front of me). My insurance company just settled the complaint - didn't want to get deep into litigation over a matter of hearsay and he-said-she-said.
So, what should I do? If it's a car approaching a 4-way, I assume they will follow traffic laws. If it's a bike, I'm not so certain. My experience isn't just that one time in berkeley I hit someone, now that I live in SF, there's plenty of times when I've observed bicyclists taking their lives into their own hands and dodging traffic without obeying stop signs and red lights.
In Boston, the roads are shit, the drivers are crazy (including me), and everything is permanently under construction. Once people learn how to spot these cars, very quickly the tricks to passing them are going to be learned. Not to mention the jokers using laser pointers and whatnot to mess with them. If you think this won't happen, you are sorely naive.
I think self driving cars will work for specialized cases, like long haul trucking on highways, but for the commuter, it's going to be a long ways off.
[1] http://gizmodo.com/6-simple-things-googles-self-driving-car-...
Crazy driving is itself often tricks to pass human-driven cars.
> Not to mention the jokers using laser pointers and whatnot to mess with them. If you think this won't happen, you are sorely naive.
No need to wait; laser pointers are effective at messing up human vision sensors today. But no epidemic yet...
Most of the operation of current society depends on the vast vast majority of us not being in a mass-murderous mood.
So read a book or work on something on your laptop or go on Amazon and buy a present for your partner with the health insurance money you'll eventually save by registering your commute as autonomous.
There are a large number of reasons you'd notice that won't work the very first time you take a car out for a drive (you give a great one: "it's going to take twice as long for it to make it through rush hour traffic"). With no eye contact or hand gestures available it's a harder problem, but aggression and counter-aggression is going to have to be a part of any self-driving model. Even if all cars were self driven you'd still have pedestrians willing to cross the street at any sign of hesitation.
[1] So there I was[2] driving through Iraq when an Iraqi army convoy approached rapidly from behind us. While swerving past my trucks, that had pulled over for them to pass, one of the vehicles left the road and rolled over multiple times. 2 people died in that accident, I applied tourniquets to 2 additional people who lost limbs, and no, they didn't get the gunshot victim to the hospital any quicker that way.
[2] Fun fact. Do you know the difference between a fairy-tale and a war story? War stories start with "So there I was".
Police often have additional driver's training. I happen to think that police often drive faster than they should, but this is less the case for emergency vehicles. I rarely see an ambulance or fire truck moving at high speed. They are pretty aware of their job to get somewhere safely, and I am typically only passed by an ambulance if I am stuck in traffic myself.
But then I thought, that couldn't happen, because it's too clear that any such lobbying puts police unions squarely at odds with citizen safety. Now, shoot-first cops, civil forfeiture, and highly militarized police forces already point at this, but there's plausible deniability. Opposing self-driving cars could be too direct of a swipe at public safety from public safety officers.
I don't know...
Self-driving cars will completely remove this avenue of investigation because there will be much fewer infractions.
I think that this is a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, you won't get police harassing random innocent people on the off-chance that they're criminals. On the other hand, the police will start doing other things because they don't have to pull people over anymore, and those things might be much more invasive.
You do get idiots saloming around in somewhat heavy traffic, but that doesn't actually slow others down much while they're putting everyone at risk.
Furthermore, the total time might be less on a good day, with aggressive driving, but the more aggressive drivers there are, the higher the likelihood of an accident, which takes substantially longer than slow drivers.
t1 = aggro drive time t2 = slow drive time t3 = accident drive time
small cities, say less that 500k, it's probably not worth it, because p(accident) is pretty low, freeway backups relatively rare, say in the neighborhood of .1
bigger cities though, traffic gets messed up all the time. t2 wins.
t2 < p(accident) * t3 + p(1-accident) * t1
http://www.npr.org/2013/11/29/247825768/phantom-traffic-jams...
I routinely drive at 90km/h on the main 100km/h stretch of my 28km commute. 23km at 90km/h, and I pull up next to or immediately behind the person that passed me a few minutes ago: the difference in arrival time between a car doing 120 and another doing 90 on that stretch is 4 minutes, assuming they hit 120km/h as soon as they leave the lights at one end of the road. If they have to overtake slower traffic like busses, cranes and me, they get less of a head start.
Eleven minutes versus fifteen on the only stretch where aggression makes a difference. There is no way in the world that this counts as "double" the time. The rest of the trip is the same average speed of about 25km/h, with the more aggressive driver getting to use their brakes more than me.
Red lights are the great equaliser.
Aggressive driving buys you one or two cycles of the traffic lights, along with a much higher fuel and maintenance bill.
That's a common idea based on not-very-careful observation and just isn't factual. There's plenty of data showing that aggressive driving has minimal effect on travel times. In fact, you actually get a bigger speed-up by strategically avoiding left turns: companies with delivery fleets plan their routes with this in mind.
[1] Not-super-technical explanation: http://lifehacker.com/does-speeding-really-get-you-there-any...
You say that as if arriving at your destination one car-length in front of a self-driving car somehow renders autonomous vehicles worthless.
Who cares if they stop or slow down when you cut them off? It's only idiot humans who think that the reward pathway signal of "woohoo I'm in front" means that you've won something. You haven't.
They arrived within a minute of another another, and the aggressive driver (who was Grant I believe) reported that it totally wasn't worth all the stress to arrive so close.
People who stress, get upset, and try to maximum their arrival time down to a second are only hurting themselves.
Aside from dangerous driving I try to keep as calm driving as possible, and like to just get a safe distance (4 sec rule) behind a semi on the freeway, and sit on cruise control until I arrive. Even if the space I give isn't massive, a lot of people utilise the space between me and the semi to transition from the fast lane[s] down to the slow lanes/exit, which I think is a legit public service, nothing worse than getting stuck on the freeway because you cannot transition.
This strongly suggests that the cars, in their current form, are not as autonomous and self-reliant as people assume. It also implies that the cars are not going to cope well if they encounter sudden changes in the environment.
Human drivers also face immense difficulty when there is a giant tree fallen across the road. Luckily, such changes in environment are relatively infrequent.
While currently I end up with dozens of human drivers every day stopping in front of a retractable fence (and some try to trick it), do I have to expect Google’s cars soon just driving right through it, or refusing to use alternative routes?
Especially because we have shit weather with lots of wind and rain and snow and fog and below 10m vision often during winter. How’s the Google car supposed to drive in that situation?
If they can’t even provide reliable maps, how can we expect reliable self-driving cars?
Humans rely almost solely on vision from a single source (counting both eyes as just one source) when driving. Autonomous vehicles have far greater potential when it comes to sensors. Google's current vehicles utilize LIDAR and GPS. Tesla's lane following uses cameras, but they get more than one perspective. If it added anything, infrared could be used. There's potential to have tonnes of cameras on the car to get a fuller view. They can triangulate position more effectively by listening out for Wi-Fi and cellular network signals. There's gyroscopes, too. CPUs can calculate exactly how much stopping distance is required in the particular road conditions and adjust speed accordingly. When you think about the sensors and processing capability compared with two human eyes and a brain, it seems to me as though humans are very poorly equipped for dealing with driving in hazardous weather.
You're probably right that the current cars struggle under poor weather conditions, but it hardly seems like an unsolvable problem. Once they do function in poor weather conditions, they'll probably do a far better job of it than a human driver would.
1: To take images from just above 2.50m height you need permission from every house owner, cause most house owners build their hedges and fences in expectation for a person with an eyeheight of 1.90m or less. Google actually intentionally increased the height after their first test runs because they were annoyed with hedges blocking the sight. According to the news back then.
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To your point: Well, the issue is, if Google is not willing to provide or collect up-to-date data – even if they get it for free – then data-based driving is quite risky.
And in the narrow, crowded streets of european cities I’d rather not have an automated car drive on sight in a winter storm.
11 years later the world had it's first regularly-scheduled commercial airline. [2]
A lot can happen in 10 years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Flights
[2] http://www.space.com/16657-worlds-first-commercial-airline-t...
I vaguely recall the google director saying their autonomous cars already drive better than his parents.
Even if it's only daytime clear weather driving, super cruise control would be insanely useful for commuters, truck drivers, and city busses.
It's easy to fall into the trap of perfect or nothing. Even partial solutions create a lot of value. Complete autonomous driving will be here real soon, but there might be a few intermediate steps along the way.
There’s something that does exactly that, is cheaper and safer: It’s called rail.
Example cities with okay or good rail infrastructure: New York, London, Paris, Vienna.
You also save a LOT of time, because you are never stuck in traffic, and you can use the time in the train to check up on your emails, etc – and you never risk getting into an accident because you are tired after work.
I’d like to have even better infrastructure, and 24/7 service, but I don’t have an issue. I have 3 bus stations within of 300 meters, and a train station 800m from my current home.
Part of the problem in 2015 is that unless there was planning for rail from the start, the cost to build out rail in established areas is enormous - typically because you need to tunnel - in addition to the cost of community consultation and other access-related issues.
I otherwise agree that well-planned rail into key areas would have benefited a lot of cities, especially those feeling the pain from road congestion now.
Make every lane 30cm thinner, remove 1.5 lanes, and you have enough space for a bike path on every side and light rail tracks.
Clearly you've never ridden the subway in NYC during rush hour. Most of the major lines will have some delays, you'll have to wait for multiple trains to pass before you can get on, or once you're on the train will stop because "we are waiting for train traffic ahead".
I’ve seen bad train traffic, too (here is my city at 2am during a festival http://i.imgur.com/KyWkUzJ.jpg), but still:
Imagine the same amount of people using the train now being on the street, everyone in a seperate car.
The human congestion in the central tube stations at rush hour is appalling, as is the air quality down there, as is the lack of personal space on the train itself. It's a very stressful, undignified experience for everyone.
I'd much rather be spending a bit of extra time in traffic, sat comfortably in a self-driving taxi, than take the tube. That said, I think there's good reason to believe that as self-driving cars become more prevalent, traffic flows will actually improve due to better flow management, less need for traffic lights, and fewer cars parked.
Rail does the job, but it does not do it elegantly. It's very unpleasant to take mass transit railways in major world cities. Nobody who's done it for any length of time would reasonably contest this. Self-driving personal vehicles could be a major improvement on the commuting experience, if indeed the future involves commuting at all - a vast increase in remote work may simply sidestep the issue completely by the time self-driving cars are a mature tech.
A single person in the tube takes, technically, 0 space due to being in a tunnel, and even in overground railway a single person takes less than a square meter.
With a car, you waste far more space.
And, by the way, I’m taking public transport every day, all year round, even in situations like http://i.imgur.com/KyWkUzJ.jpg and I still find it far more pleasant to wait 20 minutes in a crowd than to be stuck for 40 minutes on the highway.
Do you have any sources on this? I agree that space on the roads of major cities is an issue now, but several changes in the future could mitigate these issues significantly:
1) Self driving cars will probably end parking in city centres. Suddenly, a lot of congested roads have ~twice the surface area.
2) Self driving cars may eventually be able to drive within centimetres of one another.
3) No need for a huge bonnet (small electric engine), boot/trunk (rooftop rack storage), pedals, dashboard, etc in an electric automated taxi. A 2-4 person vehicle is now rather compact indeed.
4) Remote/part-time-remote work may mean commutes are avoided, or staggered throughout the day, for the majority of people. There's a lot less peak capacity required, compared to today.
Additionally, in many cities there is already almost no downtown parking.
It’s not like you’re going to turn the laws of physics over.
One of the sources why cars are worse than bikes or busses, from the city of Münster: http://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2014/07/Public_Tra...
That said, rail does have superior cargo and passenger capacity, so these costs can be offset by the increase in potential revenue.
The sheer capacity of rail makes it even on small scale sustainable, on state scale it’s even more effective. (especially on the east coast).
And with cars having such low efficiency (transporting 2 tons of metal for a single passenger using gasoline at 90km/h seems a waste when you can have a single train transporting 400 people at 320km/h using electricity instead) it’s just not really effective on large scale.
New York City is a good example in the US, but cities in Europe and Japan show how even small cities and whole countries can benefit from rail infrastructure.
Most people out there drive if they have to go somewhere.
The thing that sucks though, it's a big upfront cost. super cruise control is an incremental cost that takes advantage of existing infrastructure.
Rail isn't so great at getting food to grocery stores. (cities, sure, but not actual transportation endpoints.) Such a system could be built, but trucks are so obviously effective, and they work with the existing infrastructure.
Rail is cool but a big upfront cost for something that's not obviously superior to the current system seems wasteful.
Maybe fill train stations with self driving taxis to cover those last few miles to home, or work, or wherever.
And, well, yes, cars and trucks will still be necessary, but not nearly in the same amount.
Thanks.
I only have a specific study for my city, where they were comparing the costs from fixing the streets in the cities from the busses running over them vs. building light rail instead, and in that study it turned out the light rail would be, if you also consider stuff like maintenance and accidents, cheaper.
$35million/mile for rail, $25million/mile for a single lane. Rail maintenance is cheaper, and ongoing costs are generally lower - you don't need police patrolling railroads.
Railroads are cool, and they have a lot of advantages, but we've got this huge investment in our existing system. And unfortunately, unlike self driving cars, there isn't a smooth transition. It's like switching from pc to mac, but all of your software is home made, and must be rewritten. You have a huge upfront investment to just get started, and you have to maintain the other system as well.
- much shorter stopping distances. This lets roads be "general access" in a way that rails have never been, even if you were to have a railway running past your house.
- much smaller minimum turn radius
- ability to drive around obstacles
- low amounts of people (or goods) - going into different directions - coming from different places
The situations where rails are better:
- high amounts of people (or goods) - going into the same general direction - coming from the same general area
Which is why roads are damn useful in rural cases, but if you think about building a 23-lane highway, maybe rail might be better.
Does your going into the mountains contain "driving on the same lane with thousands of others from the same place to the same place every day"?
Because that’s what I was suggesting – nothing more, nothing less: Replacing mass-scale commuting with rail.
Yes, if you drive somewhere where no one else wants to go, cars are still useful – but if you’re going the same path that another million people are also taking, maybe rail might be better.
Rail and Road are not exclusive, they can coexist.
Sure, they're limited, can't drive in snow. Snow shut down Atlanta because humans couldn't hack it. Autonomous cars can't compete with humans at their best, but they're consistent and know their limits.
It's tough to see in tech, but some older people's driving fades fast. They arrange their lives to avoid driving on the freeway or at night.
There were also (according to local legend) three snowplows for the whole city in the 2000s.
There are also many other analogies you could have made with different timelines. Virgin Galactic, which bills itself as the first commercial spaceline, is already half-a-decade behind its original launch date. Even Tito's 2001 flight was four decades after Gagarin.
Why look to commercial flight and not commercial space travel as the relevant comparison?
It's not perfect, I sometimes have to step in; but it works at night, it works in all but the heaviest rain, it works in snow... and this isn't some crazy future product, it's a thing I already own.
Self-Driving cars are coming faster than the naysayers expect.
Yes, those are exactly the difficult edge cases that are going to make the reality harder than it may seem.
Ok these aren't coming to Montreal for a long time!
Google speaks of a need to leapfrog the driver assistance systems and instead focus on fully-automated driving systems because the driver assistance technologies won't incrementally improve to the level we need for full driver-less cars[1]. I think that's a fair point, but I'd go one step further: self-driving cars thrown into a mix of human-operated vehicles and roads that aren't specifically designed for self-driving cars is (in my opinion) a similar mistake. I believe we'll reach a point very soon where great technical advances in the vehicle alone will have diminishing returns in terms of safety on the road.
If we are going to solve this problem once and for all, I'd be much more enthusiastic about a self-driving system that operates only on distinct roads/lanes/tracks that are designed only for self-driving vehicles. Perhaps that's an unreasonable expectation, but trying to design systems that anticipate and make decisions based on the (often irrational) behaviors of other human drivers seems no different than designing a full human-level artificial intelligence - and even then, it'll still be prone to mistakes because other humans are involved.
Either we get to the point where all vehicles on public roads are networked and cooperating through software to self-drive, or we're just making guesses about other people's behaviors. As Chris Urmson puts it, "just making the cars [and I'll add, roads] incrementally smarter, we're probably not going to see the wins we really need."
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_...
When I'm driving, my rear view is somewhat obstructed by a toddler's car seat in the middle of the back row, my blindspot is further obstructed by a sunblocking mesh on the infant's side. When I check my mirrors or especially the blindspot, I am taking my eyes off the road in front of me.
I think I'd rather a superior robotic driver that stalls in tricky situations than all of us crazy humans making panicked decisions when facing pressure.
That is probably the biggest danger to me as a bicyclist in the city: People opening doors on parked cars for me to slam into (and potentially throwing me into a lane of car traffic) Your cars could easily outperform most humans in preventing this dangerous situation.
How about instead providing some kind of warning so people will know it's a bad time to open the door?
This would be some cool tech for sure!
In the not so far future this will be a concept impossible to explain to kids. That we all used to drive around these multi-thousand pound machines and rely on the expertise of often distracted strangers to not be maimed or killed (and dying by the millions by the way)... It already is starting to sound ridiculous. The thought of no machine in control will be terrifying before long.
"No way, grandpa! And nobody ever got hurt?"
"Oh no! Every year millions died!"
Wait, no I don't.
That said, I am very frightened about the closed-source software that will be running in these cars.
That is perfectly valid, but currently we have humans who vary widely in skills and reaction times who are controlling cars. I'll take closed-source software over a random person any day.
I'm not worried by bugs that will be included unintentionally in the accident-prevention aspects of the code: even if there are bugs they can be fixed and in the long run the software will be better.
My concern is the things that will be put into closed source software intentionally: things that monitor where you go, things that can be used to control your car remotely. It adds a very fundamental attack vector in the war governments and corporations are waging on personal freedom and privacy.
I would rather take responsibility for the relatively known risk of getting in a car accident than have all of society give up the ability to travel without the permission of their government. As Franklin said, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
That people used to operate vehicles themselves? I don't see why this is a concept hard grasp for kids.
As a kid, this was hard for me to grasp. "Why did they hire someone to push a button?"
Now try driving in dense NYC traffic, and you'll see humans communicating everywhere. Good luck to self driving cars in that scenario - unless humans are 100% off the roads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_sense_multiple_access_...
Sounds a bit like what the car was already doing, just that a track stand creates a few false positives.
Not unless the more aggressive cyclists also start following the rules of the road as they pertain to bicycles. I can't count the times I've seen near accidents caused by cyclists who make abrupt, last-second dashes into oncoming traffic because they feel they have 100% of the right-of-way 100% of the time. And I say that as a bicyclist myself.
Example: The cyclist cuts in front of me, violating traffic laws, and I hit him and he's injured or killed. Not only does this affect me emotionally, but suddenly I'm in the liability hotseat unless I can prove the cyclist was in the wrong. After all, I'm in a one ton car and he's on a 30lb bike. It is this situation that I'm hoping to avoid, and if a cyclist nearly causes it, I'm pissed.
Unless it'd been another car. Then the damage to the other vehicle is pretty obvious and, since we're on city streets, neither driver is injured.
I agree, however:
> People inconvenienced for a few seconds by cyclists need to get over themselves and probably have the wrong attitude to have a driver's license.
How does observing someone else doing something completely out of my control, that almost causes an accident with me, make me have the "wrong attitude" to have a driver's license? That doesn't begin to make sense. You're also contradicting your own point of view between sentences (in your first sentence, the cyclist is the jackass; in your second, the driver who dares to question the cyclist's bad habits is the jackass unworthy of a driver's license).
Will the self-driving cars be able to handle this?
...not that I think you're wrong.
That's what I would call to have a great job.
It's sometimes employed in track cycling (where fixed gear bicycles are used), hence 'track stand'.
The term comes from track racing where jockeying for starting position by moving at a snails pace and/or frequently stopping signals the start of the race.
Good to see the car handled it safely.
Track stand on reg bike no problem. So that's a problem.
Sounds about right. I think that we all want to see self driving cars, but I don't think were ready for software with morality. If I'm driving a car filled with kids and I'm faced with the choice of running over the old lady or driving the kids off the cliff I'm pretty confident in what choice I'm going to make. Is that the choice everyone would make? is that the choice the programer made? do I have a morality switch in the car? will it make value judgements about the occupants and the external world when forced to make a bad call?
Its going to be interesting times if these things end up on the road.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths...
"In 2010, there were an estimated 5,419,000 crashes (30,296 fatal crashes), killing 32,999 and injuring 2,239,000.[2] The 32,479 traffic fatalities in 2011 were the lowest in 62 years (1949). Records indicate that there has been a total of 3,551,332 motor vehicle deaths in the United States from 1899 to 2012."
Uhh what? You said:
> Self driving cars are by no means the only solution to road deaths.
I asked you "what other solutions?" You're literally pointing at other unnamed solutions as better alternatives to road deaths, it is very reasonable to ask you to be more specific.
It is in no way up to driverless car advocates to complete an argument that you made.
There is no reason to believe that human driven cars can't be made safe through technology without requiring self-driving. There may be other benefits to self-driving cars that are desirable, but as I said, the road deaths argument is clearly just fear mongering based on the false idea that other technological safety measures are not being developed.
As for costs and numbers - those certainly aren't provided by self driving car advocates, who can't even say when the technology will be available or how basic legal and economic problems it presents will be overcome.
If, for instance, Google is held liable for accidents while reducing the overall rate, self-driving cars aren't going to be a thing (unless you fix that particular problem). Or if the victims of self-driving car accidents have difficulty getting compensated.
The reality is that at some point, some where, some piece of software is going to have to make a very hard choice. The road will always have exposure to irrational actors (kids, drunks, a random person crashing their bike).
Are we at a point where we WANT software making that decision? If I have terminal cancer I might make a different choice than if I just had a baby and I was a human behind the wheel. Will we be able to inform the system that were willing to commit self sacrifice? Is there going to be weighing on the system based on ages of those involved? What happens when someone decides to kill themselves by jumping in front of a self driving car?
Lets forget about the legal battle that ensues the first time this happens. We will pretend that no lawyers will be allowed to be involved. The guy who wrote the code that said 4 kids > granny do you tell him? Maybe you have to go back and tell him his code killed 4 kids, and NOT granny and he has to fix it, cause that was wrong? I saved 32,999 people in THEORY but I know my code killed 4, they told me, it was a bug, I have to fix it now.
Lets look for a real world example where we see some of this today. Train drivers kill people on a fairly regular basis. Some times its because people choose to kill themselves, sometimes it really is an accident where there was no intent on the part of the person killed. Do you know what happens to those folks? Do you realize the impact these actions have on their lives? They certainly do, its part of the job, they get training before they go out and drive, the get counseling after. For some of them IT DOESNT HELP. Stats aren't people, they don't react the way we want or expect.
Like I said it is going to be INTERESTING.
It's not going to be easy, but I don't agree it's harder than the gazillions moral choice we already made as a society nowadays.
Im not so sure on that. The two closest things I can find, that address something "remotely close" are the following, and they more or less drag the law into it (sadly) but it is a sort of moral arbiter:
This is an actual case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens
And the more philosophical version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_of_the_Speluncean_Exp...
There is a quote in the Dudley and Stephens one that is rather interesting:
"We are often compelled to set up standards we cannot reach ourselves, and to lay down rules which we could not ourselves satisfy. But a man has no right to declare temptation to be an excuse, though he might himself have yielded to it, nor allow compassion for the criminal to change or weaken in any manner the legal definition of the crime."
In this case, I appreciate the momentum behind self-driving vehicles. The sooner people are replaced, the better.
As humans killing others is something we do, and based on history were pretty good at. We have the ability to justify our actions in some fairly ugly ways. There is a great quote from fog of war (check it out if you haven't seen it) on the firebombing of japan in WWII
"LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
So thats war, thats folks who build the engines of war, and send folks out to die and kill. I would say that in writing a missile guidance system, your writing it as "fit for purpose" and should KNOW and COMPREHEND what is going to happen when it is used.
Is that going to be the same mind set for someone building a self driving car? Would I, or you, feel any better knowing that I had saved lives in 'theory' or 'statistically' only to know that I had caused actual death with my programing? I don't know how I would feel, I'm somewhat thankful that I'm not facing that dilemma in my current job.
My point was, software has advanced far enough for unmanned vehicles can fly on their own and navigate without human intervention. The X47-B (the Navy's "Salty Dog" UAV) can take off from an aircraft carrier, navigate to waypoints, refuel on-air from a tanker, and land back on an aircraft carrier deck in the ocean without any human intervention.
Its not a stretch to think that self-driving cars are of similar complexity, and the problems around them will be solved in due time as well. There is no reason to have "meat" in the driver's seat anymore.
Look at the problem tree for the drone, if it comes to a decision between crashing into the big expensive carrier or dumping it self in the sea, whats it going to choose? You can base this decision on dollars only and still make the right call.
The self driving car is going to face a genuine ethical dilemma at some point (or its coding will have to deal with one, as it isn't "self aware"). For the sake of simplicity lets make that "occupant or pedestrian". Are the lives of equal value? How does it choose? Am I allowed to influence that choice as the "passenger" in the car? By getting in the car do I have to agree to some TOS that says the car will sacrifice me to save someone else when it is unavoidable?
A huge number of accidents are because of inattention or distraction today. How are you going to the the bag of meat to pay attention in case of an anomalous situation if 99+% of the task is being taken care of for them?
For below: I totally agree that autopilots can be distracting. The same was said of cruise control and even automatic transmissions. We adapt.
The time it takes a human to regain competence suggests that the only way to safely hand over is for the robot to come to a complete halt before ceding control.
I'm still waiting to see how these google-cars manage with hand gestures, people directing traffic. Just today I was waved through a red light by a volunteer firefighter not in any sort of uniform.
That already doesn't exist in a lot of cars (drive-by-wire).
The car is going to make the best effort to minimise impacts to its self, given there's a cliff for it to fall off it's not going to swerve over it. Also as said in a sister comment while you're car full of precious children go over the cliff you can find peace in the knowledge that on average less children have died because there's self driving cars.
Does my car have ethics? If I'm terminal can I tell my car that in a me or someone else situation choose them? What other factors come into play if Im not saying I'm willing? Is it age? Does my car have some sense of WHO is involved and makes a decision based on some arbitrary stat? does it flip a coin?
In theory 32k people live with self driving cars. In theory 32k people live if we all stop driving. If you are give you the choice of writing two programs, one that prevents cars from working at all or one that is going to kill four kids what program are you going to write? There are a lot of things about this that aren't cut and dry at all. Like I said its going to be interesting if we ever get them.
If I'm terminal with cancer, can I tell my car that when it gets to a me vs them, that I'm willing to sacrifice myself? What happens when the me vs them scenario is someone attempting to kill themselves by jumping in front of a car? How does the car resolve the conflict in a case where it has NO other parameters? Are we going to say "auto sacrifice car occupant"? Do we have the ability to make a guess based on age of the involved? How about the "value" of the people involved? Would you trust a self driving car built by bill gates in a scenario between you and bill gates to choose you over bill? Like I said, its going to be interesting.