Then again, they've contributed to about 200 members of Congress, several senior White House positions are filled by Googlers...
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/toprecips.php?id=D000022008&... Congress, 2014 term. Many of the top recipients actually wrote letters on Congress letterhead begging the EU not to rule against Google, which is a fairly unprecedented action.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/09/04/two-googlers-take-top... http://www.govexec.com/management/2014/09/white-houses-roste... Googlers take up some of the top technology positions in the White House, including "Chief Technology Officer". Eric Schmidt and other high ranking Googlers also visit the White House nearly weekly.
Think they behaved themselves? Nope: http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/white-house-deputy-cto-a...
In case you're curious how Google's using their White House positions: It's to get money. http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/265932-obama-pledge...
And some more of our taxpayer dollars. While this article carefully avoids mentioning Chromebooks, they're now the leading purchased portable computers in schools, they're pictured in the header of this blog, and it's written by their "former" Googler, who is the CTO: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/01/30/computer-science-...
That's a lot of strong government ties, but are they worried about regulation? Well... for the longest time they controlled the US's regulatory body too:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/williamalden/ftc-commissioner-appear... The FTC was basically run by a paid Google shill, Joshua Wright, for the last couple of years. (The FTC reopened their investigation against Google within a month of him stepping down last year.) His pre-FTC behavior wasn't much on the ethical manner either: He was paid as a university professor to write "academic studies" supporting Google's legal views.
One would wonder by the United States has been one of the slowest and most hesitant countries to regulate and pursue legal action against Google, until one does their research. Then it stops being much of a surprise at all.
I mean sure he is biased, but the link doesn't really seem all that negative to be honest. Of course it will have issues in the early stages.
Urmson, of course, whitewashes Google's progress, it's his job. But if you look at the number of miles between safety-related takeovers, or these 'almost accidents', and compare to the estimate of human safety provided by insurance companies, it's hard to believe these cars are yet safe enough to trust on the road. The only reason they haven't been in an accident is because trained, professional humans have intervened.
Self-Driving Cars will probably, eventually, be safer than humans, but Google's PR team has misled people on how far off that point is. Last year Urmson indicated that he wanted to have them ready for consumer use before his kid got his driver's license in four years.
That's pretty unrealistic. Don't believe little old random Internet commenter me? Take it from Robert Scoble, who's been hyping self-driving cars for the last year: https://medium.com/@scobleizer/don-t-worry-uber-lyft-drivers... He's been to see or ride in a variety of self-driving car prototypes from a number of companies working on the problem.
Well yeah, but is anyone expecting them to be put onto the roads in the near near future?
There's already people advocating that California's laws requiring self-driving cars be driven by licensed drivers are potentially discriminatory, and Google's already complaining that their statistically-more-dangerous-than-people drivers currently require licensed drivers on the road: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-28/self-drivi...
Given where we're at, it's insane to consider California's laws anything but reasonable. We're a long way off from the necessary confidence to allow a driverless car to run without human intervention. But Google's constant indications that this law and others like it are a problem insinuates a much higher confidence in their technology than any reasonable person should have.
Frequently in these sorts of discussions I've often seen people talking about 2018 or 2019 as likely consumer release dates, which seems to be the real incredible claim needing defense.
> In 10 of the 13 simulated contact events, the SDC’s predicted behavior would have, in simulation, caused contact (though 2 of these involved simulated contact with traffic cones).
The 13 events happened in the 15 months from September 2014 to November 2015 (both incl). 424,331 miles driven.
Can the average driver drive 30,000 miles without making contact with a traffic cone or another car?
The broken pylons at my closest bike lane and highway exit indicate that very few drivers can achieve this.
Detail:
I'm speaking in generalizations here, but it seems that small and even less traveled roads that have pylons often have these damages.
Scarily, on a run today, a "lightly" traveled road in a residential area had multiple "stop for pedestrian" signs that had been knocked down. I find this particularly scary on the (non major side street) that I live - where other than residents (300ppl) and 1 business (< 300 ppl) few people should choose to drive - loses these road pylons in a matter of days.
I am asking, if anything, that we take a more critical look at the statement being made every time Chris Urmson opens his mouth. Because when he brags about the safety of his cars, he's ignoring or failing to mention these incidents where humans saved him from having a very, very bad day.
I agree with some of what you have said, but this is the most bizarre statement I have read today.
There are probably hundreds (or more) traffic cones hit for every small child hit by a car, just because there are way more cars per day passing close to traffic cones than to children.
I personally have had my car hit by others 5 times without reporting it to my insurance company (car was parked, hit and run), as the damage was less than my deductible, and I opted to just live with a few dents. Estimating the number of times a car collides with anything per mile driven is very hard.
My intention in comparing a traffic cone to a small child is the actual safety issue. If a SDC could hit a cone, it could also hit a small child. They're small road hazards which are not generally going to be mapped by the car in advance. I don't want to dismiss the fact that the SDC would've hit a road obstacle, just because in that case the obstacle was a cheap plastic object.
I think the point is that if you counted these kinds of incidents in human driver statistics, your miles per accident numbers would come way, way down.
I suspect those average numbers are being skewed by the rural drivers who rack up lots of miles without interaction with other cars.
San Francisco averages 6.4 years between accidents. https://www.mainstreet.com/slideshow/most-car-accident-prone...
That matches roughly with my experience. And, while the Google car isn't driving San Francisco, the Santa Clara area isn't that much more benign.
But then, we can also go into their statistic basing on a single insurance agency, unreported incidents not factoring in, there's definitely a lot of margin of error here.
I'm glad we're talking about it critically though, and not just glossing over the figures.
One of the other potential points is something Tesla said about Geohot's garage-built car. That it's easy to build a car that performs correctly 99% of the time, but it's exponentially harder to build a car that performs correctly 99.9999% of the time. The number of miles may be less material than even I've focused on here.
Google likes to tout the mileage figure, but it ignores the times that it's human drivers take over. The reality is, driving on straight stretches of road is easy. 99% of driving is easy. Figuring out how to evaluate how safe you are in the other 1% of that time is perhaps an even more challenging problem.
> Google [...] determined that the driver prevented the self-driving car from making contact with another object 13 times.
This phrasing suggests a notably lower threshold of failure than, say, "prevented a crash" or "prevented injury" or "prevented damage".
Thanks to the human driver they managed to avoid the accident. /s
But in all seriousness the damn car was waiting at a traffic light and yet according to you it's still a terrible driver.
There's an additional likelihood that the odd/non-human behavior of Google's cars can make other drivers incorrectly predict their behavior, and also cause more accidents, but I'm not really factoring that into my consideration.
Come to Southern California when it rains and lets see you say that.
The difference is that autonomous safety will continuously improve while human safety has actually been going backwards.
Seriously though, you're also missing the fact that AFAIK, Google doesn't/can't drive these cars in rain. According to a Slate article in 2014, they also can't drive when it's too sunny, because it messes with the sensors. It goes without saying it's never seriously been tested in snow. From my understanding, self-driving cars are mostly tested during the day in fair weather, when humans are also at their safest as drivers. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/...
Also, cars are getting safer, fatalities from cars is actually going down. I managed to find a version of this article that is less blatantly liberal propaganda, because I want to talk about the auto statistic: http://www.lowellsun.com/opinion/ci_29325302/cars-getting-sa...
> Some objects are hard to figure out, though. Heavy rain, for instance, confuses the cars. Google postponed The Bee’s first planned test ride because heavy rain had left puddles in the road, and the cars aren’t sure how to react when the car ahead splashes water into the air. If confused, the cars are programmed to just pull over and stop.
http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/transportation/back-seat-dr...
> “The day I’m very excited about is the day where we are just as safe as human drivers,” he said.
That's a distinct recognition that Google is aware their cars currently are not.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/02/0...
No, I am fine with alligators walking the planet. I admit, my initial response is a bit stupid. The point I am trying to make is that a.) new technology brings new dangers and b.) there will be people who would like to use these as a weapon (for fun, to terrorize, to make a statement ...)
It would be stupid to outright deny new technology because of this. However you should be informed (learn about all the pros and cons) when deciding on whether or not to adapt a technology.
For instance, so many things have become painful (for good or bad reasons) for the sake of countering terrorism. So why go through all the trouble to finally just offer new toys to the bad boys?
I don't mean everything that can be used as a weapon (which is literally everything) should be forbidden but I don't see a serious debate about the benefits and perils of self driving cars and thus I don't think decision makers can make an informed decision.