Edit: grammar
The government appears well aware of this hand waving garbage that companies are trying with "it isn't really autopilot, keep your hands on the wheel wink." This is exactly government's job and is a fabulous example of a government reacting to ongoing events that have proven that so-called autopilot systems are inherently a danger to the public at this stage.
Each computer system will be encountering new, diverse things in the real world without a good understanding of how they'll perform. There are lots of crazy hard problems here that no one has solved yet. So to suggest we just automatically trust it because humans make mistakes is foolish when the consequences are so high. If someone came out with a surgery "autopilot" tomorrow, would you suggest it start giving triple bypass surgeries right away without FDA approval because humans make errors too?
It's a belt-and-suspenders system.
So yeah, I a bit of thorough testing of a completely new hardware running completely new software isn't too much to ask for.
I wonder if they could shut him down on the basis of car insurance requirements and the legal definition of "driver". If "driver" is defined as the "person" inputting control commands, then either you dont consider the computer a person, and then nobody is legally "driving" the car, or else the software somehow meets the definition of a "person" or driver, in which case its an unlicensed driver operating the vehicle and insurance may not have to cover it.
The device would probably be SAE Level 2, and should be regulated as such.
Until autonomous vehicles are subject to the full spectrum of conditions that human drivers face, incidents/mile is not a meaningful measure of comparative safety. And until then, the burden of proof should be on the creators.
The way you compare, is you give a self driving car to a person, and compare actually usage for that person, and see if owning a self driving car increases or reduces accidents for that person.
Being perfect only half the time is still revolutionary.
People still crash every day in good conditions. That's thousands of lives that could be saved with our imperfect, sunny weather on the highway only self driving car.
You underestimate how bad human drivers are even in perfect conditions.
Lets say that Semi-Autonomous Cars are currently tested on about 80% of the tasks that humans currently face in the real world, and that through some feat of engineering and design we don't have to worry about the ridiculously messy transitions between Autonomous Mode and Human Mode.
And let's say that for those 80% of tasks, the Semi-Autonomous Cars have a 0.05% accidents/100k miles incident rate.
And let's also say that Humans on average have a 1% accidents/100k miles incident rate.
What you're telling me is that the Semi-Autonomous car has a much better safety record, so give us Semi-Autonomous RIGHT NOW OR WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!
But what I'm telling you is that you don't know enough to make that decision yet, because you don't know exactly how well humans do on the 80% that Semi-Autonomous cars currently handle, you merely know the average accident rate over the current 100% of scenarios. For all you know, Human drivers could have their average 1% accident rate as a result of a 0.0% accident rate for that 80% subset and a 5% accident rate on the remaining 20% that Semi-Autonomous cars can't handle. And if that were the case, then forcing us all to use Semi-Autonomous cars would actually increase the average accident rate from 1% to 1.004%.
Until you fully understand what Semi-Autonomous Cars are capable of, AND know how well human drivers do on that restricted subset, you can't definitively say that current technology is better than humans.
"Human drivers could have their average 1% accident rate as a result of a 0.0% accident rate for that 80% subset "
No they couldn't, because they don't.
I am asserting that for this specific 80% of perfect conditions, humans are still terrible drivers. And that being better than them is EASY, because of just how terrible humans are at driving (even in "perfect conditions").
The numbers were deliberately exaggerated to make the point. The fact stands though that until you know what the numbers are, the best answer is not easy to come by.
> I am asserting that for this specific 80% of perfect conditions, humans are still terrible drivers. And that being better than them is EASY, because of just how terrible humans are at driving (even in "perfect conditions").
And I am asserting the opposite: that the appearance of safety of autonomous vehicles is the result of highly selective conditions with near laboratory levels of control, the likes of which are so monumentally easy to handle that even humans, as shitty and inattentive as they are at driving, can handle with comparative levels of safety. And I certainly think it's possible that computers will lag behind humans for another 20-50 years while we slowly develop the massive body of fast-heuristics research necessary to make NP-complete planning decisions with the speed and capability of even below-average humans.
Proof?
Just two days ago, driving on a roundabout some lady enters the roundabout right in front of my car. Fortunately it was a two lane roundabout and the left lane was empty so I could swerve to avoid crashing into her left hand side door (I was coming straight at her).
At the traffic light I asked her if she had not seen me and she went 'Seen what? Where?', so apparently she had not seen me at all, which is pretty impressive given that I was less than 5 meters away from her when it happened.
This sort of thing happens with some regularity. All it takes for a situation like that to turn into an accident with possibly a fatality is for me also not to pay attention.
Suddenly the price people will pay for parking is going to be closely related to the price of gas. The maximum value of a parking space in the city is basically the cost to send the car back out to some suburban parking garage during the day and have it come back in later for you. My guess is that the market-clearing price is going to be a lot lower than it is today. Lots of urban parking structures might end up getting repurposed for other uses, if you can't fill them at hundreds of dollars per space per month.
In the short run I could see the average self-driving car's gas usage being higher than a conventional car's, but in the longer run the same self-driving features might make fully electric cars more palatable. Long charging times don't really matter if you can let the car go and charge itself while you're at work, for e.g.
Can you expand on how they are an inherent danger, rather than a possible danger? I only challenge you because Tesla has published several occasions where Autopilot has possibly saved lives by auto-braking.
I do not believe those words (inherent & possible) are in any way mutually exclusive. They might even mean the same thing when describing a latent danger. So I do not quite understand the basis of your challenge. Also, I'm not parent poster.
So what I mean is, the autopilot could turn out to be safer than manual, in my mind, so how is it "inherently" dangerous.
It would nonetheless also be accurate to describe it as a possible danger, because the danger only manifests in certain circumstances.
> So what I mean is, the autopilot could turn out to be safer than manual, in my mind, so how is it "inherently" dangerous.
That could well be the case but I don't think it eliminates the inherent danger. Maybe it's less dangerous, but cars on the road are just kind of dangerous in general.
I think it's also very generous to assume that the early auto pilot car systems we have today are necessarily safer than human drivers. Emergency braking is almost certainly a net gain. Self driving might be or might not be. A self driving add-on cooked up by geohot? I'm doubtful it's yet gone through the kind of engineering rigor we'd expect of a system like this.
Just like a piano suspended from a rope is inherently dangerous. The danger may not manifest at all for that to be the case.
In the same way that the ocean is still inherently dangerous even if you're wearing a life jacket, or how airplanes are still inherently dangerous even though aircraft autopilot systems are effectively mainstream at this point.
Contrary to Tesla's publishing several occasions where Autopilot has possibly saved lives, there have been concrete incidents where people have died while Autopilot is being used. Tesla has backed away from these incidents with the same hand waving that NHTSA has specifically touched on here: that the user is exceeding the system's design purpose.
In this context ("at this stage"), where consumers have historically and will most likely continue to exceed these systems' design purposes and operate them outside of their intended scope, it seems very clear to me that these systems are inherently dangerous to the public. That is, there is no way to make these systems not a danger to the public in their current form.
[1] http://www.autoblog.com/2016/03/17/nhtsa-iihs-20-automakers-...
Can confirm at least though many years ago, the internal NTSB IT staff/programmers/DB were a joke. I guess that's just government though and like much of government, they relied a lot on outside contractors. For years they were a ColdFusion shop, so I'll let your mind start there.
"Describe in detail the features of the comma one"
and
"Provide a detailed description of the conditions under which you believe a vehicle equipped with comma one may operate safely ... [and] a detailed description of the basis for your response to [the previous question] including a description of any testing or analysis..."
and
"Describe in detail any steps you have taken to ensure that the installation of the comma one ... does not have unintended consequences..."
I'm not saying the request is unreasonable, but to say that "the information requested is not that great" isn't really true. To completely answer those questions would take a lot of effort. (Assuming of course that he's done such testing. His canceling the product rather than respond makes you think he realized his answers would not be credible...)
Ironically, if he hasn't done any such testing, the answers would be much easier to generate. "We haven't done any." Not that the NHTSA would take it well....
I've been involved in writing similar descriptions to provide to NASA, and when you get down to exactly how each module works and need to enumerate every branch, it ends up being a lot of work.
It would appear that he didn't have any interest in cooperating at all, though. Which inevitably leads me to wonder if it's not more of a face-saving maneuver; better to blame failure on the pesky regulators than admit your technology isn't up to the investor pitches you might have made.
Also, the documentation being asked for is something the company should be able to put together fairly easily because they ought to have asked and answered these questions along the way to building the product.
Have you ever considered establishing product direction through use cases branded as "stories" and pulling them out of your ass every two weeks?
/s
And it is likely necessary. Meeting regulations is far harder and more expensive than just the feel good that you met the reqs. If there wasn't a stick held up as a credible threat, plants would just trash everything. Not because they're evil, but because plants simply can't care - they aren't people. Thusly these agencies are impersonal and brutal in kind.
It can displace air, causing death.
Here's one example of a death, although here they deliberately put the argon in there: http://maritimeaccident.org/2014/08/safespace-argoninert-gas...
I know argon is denser than air at STP, and so tends to accumulate in enclosed spaces --- but propane is even denser. (Leading cause of catastrophic accident in yachts: gas explosion. It's not like you can have a hole in the bottom to let the gas out in the event of a leak.) And any plant which deals with liquid gasses is going to prioritise ventilation anyway, which should easily deal with any gas buildup.
The parent sounded like there was something specific to do with argon which made the regulators tetchy, and I wouldn't have thought that asphyxiation risk would be enough. Am I wrong?
Which article of the Constitution is that? I don't seem to recall it.
Have you actually read Article I, Section 8? You'll have to squint very, very hard to see any authority to pass laws related to safety in it. That's because it's simply not there. The state governments, of course, do have that power, and the Congress arguably has power to regulate cars used in interstate commerce.
But there's simply no constitutional scope for safety regulation of cars built & used in only one state.
Instead of nitpicking, let's focus on the actual issue. The NHTSA didn't order Hotz to shut it down, it merely asked about the safety of the product, which led to Hotz shutting it down himself.
It also raises the question of what you think the Bill of Right's purpose is.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Keeping its citizens safe would likely fall under general welfare.