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Once self driving cars reach a certain penetration level I wonder how long it'll take the remaining human drivers to start taking advantage of that fact by assuming most cars will automatically stop for them when they try stupid maneuvers like this one.

I commute on foot in Boston and I regularly witness pedestrians cross streets in front of traffic when they know they can get away with it, for example, when they're part of a crowd of pedestrians or the traffic is moving slowly. Every time I see that I wonder how much worse it'll be when they don't have to worry about being hit. Our sidewalks are narrow and crowded, will pedestrians just move to the streets?

Based on our geography, drivers and pedestrians I fully expect my city to pioneer the field of taking advantage of self driving car's automated accident avoidance systems.

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> Once self driving cars reach a certain penetration level I wonder how long it'll take the remaining human drivers to start taking advantage of that fact by assuming most cars will automatically stop for them when they try stupid maneuvers like this one.

I don't understand this argument. If you do something abusive in front of me ... I will do what a robot will do. I will stop. Because I don't want to crash. I might open the window and yell some profanities at you ... but I can do that anyway, regardless of who triggered the stop, whether it was me or the on-board computer.

If you're arguing that the on-board computer has better reflexes and therefore people will engage in even more demented behavior ... that penetration level would have to be 99%. If it's something like 90%, then 1 out of 10 times you do something that abusive will result in a crash and you'll die.

By the time penetration reaches 99%, you essentially have all cars with automation built in and it's likely that using that automation will be mandatory. Cars that aren't automated will be illegal on public roads exactly because of this problem.

No you don't understand: if 99% of the traffic is automated and resilient to idiots, what prevents me from passing a red light? What prevents me from going the wrong way on the motorway? You'll have overstressed idiots that will get that and start driving like fools to meet their appointments.

It has already happened in some way: the overconfident TMAXes that don't think the laws of traffic apply to them.

TMAXes?

The parent is probably from Europe and refers to TMAX Scooters, http://www.ocregister.com/articles/tmax-672750-bike-motorcyc...

These are very powerful scooters, almost as fast as motorcycles but they don't require manual speed shifting, making. Usually drivers or those are reckless in cities like Paris

what prevents me from passing a red light? What prevents me from going the wrong way on the motorway?

Exactly the same as now: Common sense, self-protection, and the law.

Currently, people do all they can to avoid incidents, so if I do the things you mention, I will be safe to the extent that the driver sees me and can take evasive action. If what I do is detected too late to avoid a collision (such as crossing an active junction on a red light, or driving into the path of an oncoming car on a motorway) then it doesn't matter whether the driver is human or software if the event is detected too late for any response to be effective. Human or software, you're still reliant on brakes, traction, and structural stability. Those things don't miraculously improve when there's someone with faster reflexes at the wheel.

That's not to say it won't be safer when detection and response time is shorter, but it won't be so much safer as to reward stupidity.

It is not exactly the same as now: there is much greater certainty about what the outcome will be. The physics is the same, but the human is out of the loop.

There's been a subset of people who already behave this way for as long as I can recall, and it probably started soon after the invention of the automobile. Automation will greatly facilitate it.

You won't be able to guarantee there are no cars around you without human drivers. Also, you might get prosecuted for reckless behavior.

I don't get this whole argument. We needn't be so worried about a few others taking small advantages when the overall state will be better for us.

> You won't be able to guarantee there are no cars around you without human drivers. Also, you might get prosecuted for reckless behavior.

That is true now (and obviously more so in the first case), yet people still do it. If it wasn't being done, you could suggest that automation will not change the situation enough for people to start doing it, but as there already are people doing it, then that threshold has already been crossed, and it is implausible that it will not increase in frequency as the risk of doing it is decreased.

Not sure where you drive, but it must be a wonderful place.

Here in Atlanta, the only rule during rush hour seems to be "What gets me to my destination quickest?" (And that's with us having what I consider fairly law-abiding drivers in comparison to some cities)

>You won't be able to guarantee there are no cars around you without human drivers.

By the time we have 99% market penetration of automated cars, we'll have had V2X standards for a decade or more. You probably would have a report of every vehicle nearby, but... At that point cars could just interleave at intersections, and the lights can just switch on when a human driven car shows up.

The robotic cars have faster reflexes but they aren't magic. It is possible that the car will simply not physically be able to stop in time, imagine blind intersections with a large highway.

Also you should recognize that right now most of the time people run red lights or stuff like that they don't crash. If they did we wouldn't need red light cameras.

I wonder if there has ever been studies into automated vehicles that only move considering the amount of energy that can be dissipated at any time.

> Exactly the same as now: .... and the law.

One might assume that if the majority of car do not speed, do not make illegal maneuvers, do not drunk drive, and do not get into accidents then law enforcement will severely reduce enforcement.

> One might assume that if the majority of car do not speed, do not make illegal maneuvers, do not drunk drive, and do not get into accidents then law enforcement will severely reduce enforcement.

HA! Who will pay their salaries? They'll likely double-down on enforcement against "old school" drivers.

I figure it will happen like this. Just like red-light cameras catch people running red lights now, in the future all the cars are now moving cameras. You do something illegal like in this video, you have their license plate, and proof that they are doing something dangerous, so they should get a ticket.

You still don't get it. It's the pedestrian doing the wrong, not the driver.

He's saying pedestrians will take advantage of cars auto-braking for them.

Pedestrians are subject to traffic laws. And perhaps some self-driving cars will be equipped with paintball dispensers.

Pedestrians are often equipped with more effective methods of retaliation than paintballs.

This seems to imply a giant sense of entitlement on the part of automobile passengers. If you want to go fast get in an airplane. Urban areas are shared with others. If a car has to stop every ten yards to accommodate pedestrians, then that implies a certain maximum possible speed, which is fine. "Jaywalking" is as fake a legal concept as "intellectual property".

"Jaywalking" is not a fake concept. Streets are public property, maintained by the government, so the rules for who gets to use them and how are very legitimately in the government's purview.

If you're talking about the justification for governments making those rules in the first place, I could say the same about a rule saying pedestrians can cross in the middle of the street and cars have to yield - both are arbitrary rules, and should be judged based on their public policy outcomes.

Jaywalking law, including its ridiculous name , was pushed through by the auto lobby in a power grab for auto manufacturers.

Does that mean it's a bad public policy? For comparison, lots of public transit development is pushed through by developers who have an interest in their property values going up, but that doesn't make the results a bad thing.

The separation of traffic of different speeds has popped up in different countries and for different modes of transportation repeatedly, because the logic of the situation makes it make sense. In this case, a fast car loses a lot if its utility if it's limited by slower traffic that it's sharing the road with. The existence of car-only roads added value, and from the perspective of a society just introducing the technology, if that reduced the space available to pedestrians then so be it.

I think there's a good argument to be made that too much land has been allocated exclusively to motor transport, especially in city centers, but the existence of such dedicated thoroughfares makes total sense.

Just because areas are shared doesnt mean there are no rules.

Otherwise why pay attention to traffic lights and street lanes? Just drive wherever you want - in fact why stop for pedestrians at all? Don't pedestrians have to accommodate cars too?

They haven't always had to. Presently, they do. Eventually, in a better world, they won't. Walking hasn't changed for millennia, and it won't in the foreseeable future. Riding in automobiles, however, is about to change completely.

Projecting our typical pissed-off aggressive auto-commuter attitudes into the future is a mistake, and will come to be seen as a sort of mental illness. Well-adjusted robocar passengers will pay no attention to traffic, just as normal people today don't constantly bother air stewardesses about how long their flight is taking.

Has nothing to do with what he said.

> You still don't get it. It's the pedestrian doing the wrong, not the driver.

With cops freed up on traffic duty, they can start making examples of jaywalkers disrupting automated traffic.

You still don't get his point. You're trying to think up solutions but that has nothing to do with what he said.

Let's imagine a world in which every car has active collision avoidance systems. These do not even need to be self-driving cars; they just need to be able to reliably detect imminent collisions and override driver input to prevent them.

In that world, could one safely run a red light? Sometimes yes, but there are limits even to the highest-performing sensors and servos. An intersection with large buildings on every corner would still be dangerous--radar and lasers can't see through walls or around corners, and even with perfect reaction times and brake control, a car doing 30mph has as a minimum stopping distance that would take it into the intersection.

So, I don't know that people would think that they are invincible. And traffic signals would still be enforced by law.

Maybe a non sequitur, but maybe a future step would be putting the radar at every intersection and linking it all up to the cloud and then to cars. It would be like Google Maps traffic except super granular. If every car had data about what cars were coming up the street and generally at what speed, perhaps not only could accidents around corners be prevented, but automated cars could just go anytime it's safe without regard to traffic signs.

What a surveillance-state dystopia that sounds like. Do not want!

I would guess the 99% will report you in and road law and the courts will do the rest. Perhaps the 99% will gang up on you ;-)

make law-breaking maneuvers auto-detected by cars (even on manual mode) and auto-detection systems mandatory on ALL cars and that's it..

You'll be doing it in front of the other 99% of traffic who all have constantly in use cameras, which could be sent to relevant law enforcement with a voice command.

Enough people getting made at stupid people and getting the feature of auto-reporting people to the police :)

Making the cars more aware and having better reflexes will not step the from ploughing straight through you if you're dumb enough to jump in front of them. They would try to avoid and mitigate, just as drivers these days try to do, but they still have to obey the laws of physics.

I think the argument is: While a sane/rational person will stop, you are still risking your health. You're doing something unexpected (Like the idiot in the YT video).

The premise is that self driving cars will and can react defensively. While someone driving home after a long day in the office might not.

So - yes, you can abuse human drivers, today. But the GP seems to think that it's far more risky now and will be ~trivial~ given good enough self driving cars.

> I commute on foot in Boston and I regularly witness pedestrians cross streets in front of traffic when they know they can get away with it, for example, when they're part of a crowd of pedestrians or the traffic is moving slowly. Every time I see that I wonder how much worse it'll be when they don't have to worry about being hit. Our sidewalks are narrow and crowded, will pedestrians just move to the streets?

Once upon a time, streets were for people. And then the automotive industry coined the term jaywalking...

Adam does ruin everything.

For anyone interested in this, 99% Invisible did a great episode on this[1].

[1] http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-...

Once upon a time, people shit in bowls and threw it out their windows.

Pedestrians taking roads from motor vehicles is a modern example of the tragedy of the commons.

Once upon a time I never heard this silly idea that the idea that you shouldn't blunder out into the street is a conspiracy by automakers. Then it was an article on HN and now I hear it all the time.

Separating pedestrians from vehicles just makes sense.

Streets before 1900 still had sections for horses and sections for people. And you didn't need to tell people not to stroll down the horsey sections, they were covered in horseshit.

Really? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RF9wV-57dE

Doesn't look like Market Street in SF did (admittedly, 1906, not before 1900. But pretty close).

I'm not sure what you're looking at, but there's clearly kerbs with pedestrians and trams/horses/cars in the middle.

Skip to 1:46 and you can see it easily on the right hand side of the frame (too much darn traffic most of the time).

I don't know about about your city, but I would expect drivers to stop for pedestrians even if they are crossing in the middle of the road. The reason I never cross in front of a moving car is a matter of courtesy and not wanting to break the law, not out of fear of being run over.

As a pedestrian who has to do this regularly when I have priority at a crossing: I live in hope

That would be awesome. The streets can return to belonging to pedestrians instead of to cars. We could get rid of crosswalks and crosswalk lights and just let the automated cars deal with it.

Or, in the dystopia of my nightmares, bicycles and pedestrians are forbidden from using all roads, not just highways. For their own protection, of course.

The automated cars will all be taking video of the incident, recording speed and direction info from radars and lidars, and transmitting all the data to some cloud server. At the cloud server, license plates will be read, driver faces identified, and the relevant info forwarded to law enforcement, insurance companies, and, of course, Youtube.

> I commute on foot in Boston

Boston is special. You know how sometimes pedestrians will cross on red and when they see a car and make eye contact with the driver they will turn their head the other way to make sure that the driver understands that they aren't looking in their direction and is forced to slow down? Yeah, Boston is the only place on the planet where I've seen actual drivers do the same thing. Unbelievable.

In Philadelphia everyone maintains eye contact with the driver. Less bassy, but also less passive aggressive I think.

Isn't one of the ideas of self-driving cars the idea that they'll reduce overall congestion and traffic volume? It might become pretty reasonable to step off into the street, because there won't be much traffic there to inconvenience.

Although it would definitely be a habit that'll end up killing someone.

There's no way self-driving cars will reduce traffic volume. If anything, it will increase since not only you don't need to be able to drive in order to travel in a self-driving car, the car might be completely empty and driving on its own for some sort of reason. And of course people who currently drive a car will still be driving a car (which might be self-driving or not).

There is a way: A lot of traffic these days is people looking for a parking spot. If the car leaves the area right away after dropping you off, it will be less congested there.

I doubt they'll turn major arteries into quiet streets, especially at rush hour.

Unless it becomes cheaper and more convenient to share rides in robotic vans booked on a smartphone and scheduled via a robotic taxi platforms that can match the bids (vans with spare seats going in the right direction) with asks (potential passengers requesting a cheap trip on their smartphone).

They may decrease congestion (backups) due to improved flow, but that does not necessarily mean there will be fewer automobiles, if anything, better flow/throughput likely would encourage new or more motorists to take to the road.

It's very likely that once self-driving cars reach a certain penetration, we'll see continuous-flow intersections where no human driver would dare try and cross.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pbAI40dK0A

"Our sidewalks are narrow and crowded, will pedestrians just move to the streets?"

I hope so. If drvierless cars allow pedestrians to safely reclaim the streets that, as you point out, have marginalized them for so long, then that's fantastic.

Agreed... it will be similar to putting your hand into a closing elevator door knowing it will open for you.

I'd imagine new laws will be made to restrict pedestrians from egregiously abusing the self driving car.

I wonder how the next generation of automated cars will respond to this generation? Will they dodge around an auto-car in front of them that's emergency braking? Will that cause them to emergency brake for oncoming cars in that lane? Will those cars have to dodge back into this lane? What loops and bugs and combinations of emergency responses will occur, at the speed of electronic control? Who will law consider 'to blame' in all this?

I'm pretty sure that's a given that people drive more aggressively when their vehicles have safety systems ABS being the big one.

Would love to see how self driving cars perform on crazy Boston roads and with Boston drivers especially near hvd square, route 2,3 ;)

A self-driving car will have better reactions, but it's still governed by the laws of physics. Beyond a certain point, all the self-driving car can do is minimize the collision speed. After that, you can be sure the cameras on the self-driving car have recorded exactly what stupid maneuver someone pulled.

There was an article awhile back, I think linked from HN, about this. Not about expecting self-driving cars to stop, but about the fact you can take advantaee of their "drives like grandma" behavior -- cutting them off, tailgating etc

The various threats and exploitation strategies that will be used against self-driving cars are going to be very interesting (and likely ranging from inconvenient to lethal). There needs to be significant public discourse on the subject.

Sadly, I expect that the fact that general purpose computers are a major component of self-driving cars will mean further legislative restriction on the use of general purpose computers. The idyllic vision of everyone riding in self-driving cars with "tamper-proof" and "trusted" firmware / processors is seductive (and arguably easier to build) than developing systems that are resilient in the face of malicious actors. Cars will end up being computers you ride in, running code that you legally prevented from examining or modifying. I hate the thought of it, but I can't see another scenario actually playing out.

At least part of one alternate scenario is playing out, the EFF won the petition to inspect and modify software that controls cars https://supporters.eff.org/civicrm/mailing/view?reset=1&id=1...

For the next three years, and then the exemption could be revoked. When industry lobby successfully stirs up other groups with "safety" concerns I don't think it will be so easy to win another exemption.

Security is definitively going to be a concern. Tesla currently deals with it by some strong sandboxing the user interface. I've heard of breaches into the controls with other manufacturers but no internet bourne breach afaik.

I think the key is common sense good security engineering with strong verification of security models. We have had a few networked systems that can be target by malicious actors for a while now, like factory control systems; thankfully there's no big motivated enemy out there, but the risk will surely increase in the face of possibility of mass modification (overriding the manufacturer's firmware en masse), even accidental modification by the manufacturers.

Of course, if the user purposely modifies his own control systems he's going to be liable for any damage it causes.

I think you're wearing rose-colored glasses, and you're underestimating the number of attackers that will be targeting autonomous vehicle systems.

Your faith in "common sense good security engineering" saving the day flies in the face of years of IT security reality. Computer security has been discussed, both formally and informally, since there have been networked computers (have a look at the "Ware Report", prepared by the RAND corporation for the DoD in 1967), yet the general state of IT security is horrendous.

The Toyota uncontrolled acceleration bug and the subsequent software quality issues were reported by Phil Koopman make me think the auto industry isn't particularly qualified to take on security, reliability, or formal verification of their software. (Toyota might be a single example, but I find it hard to believe that software quality is generally any better across the industry. VW's software-based emissions defeat device makes me that much more suspicious of the industry as a whole.)

Attackers are going to be everyone from nation-states who want to surveil their citizenry to individuals who "game" the algorithms in other drivers' autonomous cars to allow themselves to move more quickly through traffic. I'm sure that staged accident insurance fraud, carjacking, hit-and-run, and other vehicle-related crimes will evolve in the face of the rise of autonomous vehicles.

I expect an outcry from law enforcement and "grass roots" groups to demand draconian measures to "lock down" autonomous vehicles. I expect that copyright maximalists and others who would benefit from restrictions on the use of general purpose computers will jump on the bandwagon too. I'm envisioning a future like Stallman's "Right to Read", but applied to our cars and any computers that interface with them.

> when they try stupid maneuvers like this one.

It's called natural selection. Eventually they will meet each other.

> I wonder how much w̶o̶r̶s̶e̶ better it'll be when they don't have to worry about being hit

There. Fixed it for you. (I commute by T and foot in Cambridge and Boston, by the way; and, yes, sounds flippant, but how awesome would it be for all streets to be "complete streets"?)

Everything will be recorded.

automagic cars by design have tons of cameras, at some point politicians will legislate mandatory reporting of recorded infractions .. for the children, you know

It'll do wonders for carjackings, that's for sure.

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