Humans 'will bully robot cars', Mercedes chief warns | Hacker News Reader

Humans 'will bully robot cars', Mercedes chief warns

telegraph.co.uk

32 pointsjessaustin16 comments

I think in many ways this could be considered a feature and not a problem. Why does it matter if someone butts in front of you? The passengers in the car can relax and let the computer handle the task. Yes it's important to avoid deadlock while merging during congestion but aggressive drivers will always try to butt in front of likely looking candidates, autonomous or not, and this usually doesn't stop progress of the line in general, just maybe frustrates the non-driver?

The issue then is, again, humans- the rider of an autonomous car will feel slighted and helpless seeing the cars around them take advantage of their nice and polite driver-AI, and this will make owning driverless cars less appealing to a wide swath of the customer base.

You and I might still enjoy passively riding an altruistic vehicle, but an astonishing amount of the public id is absorbed in these sort of anonymous dominance games.

I thought the point of "autonomy" was being able to ignore the whole mess? If I'm constantly worried about how the car is driving, I might as well be a child with my mother driving. How would that be less silly than worrying about the performance of e.g. train engineers and airline pilots?

I love this kind of discussion -- the danger of initial hiccups prejudicing people against the future potential of a tech.

If most cars are autonomous, then it seems pretty reasonable -- people will get used to them and I think we'll figure out standards of politeness. Like elevators: "Don't press all the elevator buttons, but it's okay to request your floor even though it slows down other peoples' trips."

But the tricky part is the transition period, where only a few cars are autonomous -- and I guess that's what this article is talking about. How can we help that transition?

We simply put up with the bullying. Mercedes chief is worried because his passengers are high social status individuals who will be very unhappy at being bullied despite driving powerful expensive cars that denote high status.

Yes exactly. The most expensive car is the one most likely to be self driven. I have no doubt people in my hometown will gladly cut them off at every opportunity. Lol.

I would think that an integrated dash camera and the ability for the driver to automatically upload video for reporting to law enforcement would prevent this from ever becoming an issue.

This has parallels to the situation in Russia where dashcams are more or less considered a necessity for every vehicle. See https://www.wired.com/2013/02/russian-dash-cams/

One way to manage this behavior is by having the automated car report the misbehaving cars to both DMV and insurance, have it affect registered drivers points (with some "give") as well as insurance so overly aggressive behavior results in insurance penalties.

So except for a few chronic offenders, most people would learn how to behave while driving.

We actually have insurance like that already [0], you get a generally low starting monthly rate, and it adjusts if you speed, start and stop suddenly, are shifting lanes fast, etc. You install a little chip in your car and you can see monthly feedback. If you drive "safe" you actually save a decent amount of cash.

0 - https://www.mobiliz.ca/en/

If you just make self-driving cars look like normal cars instead of weird marshmallows than this isn't a very big problem.

They have to train self driving cars to deal with human instincts as bad as they are. It's part of the deal, when you're driving, even if you're human. Humans get bullied every day in traffic.

Many years back a songwriter in the area around Stuttgart wrote a song in local dialect about Mercedes drivers:

    I fahr Daimler, Stroß gehört meer, wer net Platz macht den nehm i aufs Korn und ins Visir....

I drive Mercedes, Street belongs to me, anyone not yielding, that one is going to be taken into my cross-hairs.

E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3nMUm4iy8Q

At the end it becomes clear the bully behind the 500SE Mercedes is just the chauffeur.

That's until they cut off their first car with networked reputation.

Suddenly, say, no cars of the same brand will let you into lanes. Once a particular brand of autonomous vehicle pegs you as an asshole, watch out.

I agree with this sentiment. I live in Mt View and we regularly have Google cars on our roads. The cars drive either slowly, or very slowly, and I always try to pass them. I've seen other drivers do the same. If / when the cars become more common, I expect people to do more advanced tactics like cutting the cars off for merging into lanes.

In some countries this happens so often with regular driver that it would be business as usual, not abuse, when a self driving car was cut in front.

It might even be worse than that -- some people will try to engineer lawsuits using auto-cars as marks.

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