Yeah, because computers never crash right? <pun intended>
I think way too many people are viewing self driving vehicles with rose colored glasses. They underestimate the cost and overestimate the utility to the public.
I think way too many people are viewing self driving vehicles with rose colored glasses. They underestimate the cost and overestimate the utility to the public.
Improving human driving skills collectively is much more difficult. Even if one driver learns from their own mistake, other drivers and the next generation of drivers will still be just as prone as before to make that mistake. Better education can only do so much anyway, since people often don't think rationally and don't necessarily make safety the number one priority (e.g. drunk driving, trying to get to the destination as quickly as possible, or reckless driving for entertainment purposes).
Right. Except that 40 years later computers still crash. The more complex a system the harder it becomes to debug and there is no complex software system without bugs. It's like rocks in a field, you'll never get the last one out even if you think you did.
And that's not a simple thing: it will have to be better than humans in every situation, just being better in some but clearly worse in others will still end up looking bad for self driving cars. People don't deal in statistics, they simply look at the situation and say 'that would never happen to a human' and will keep on driving themselves.
So it's a very fine line to roll this sort of thing out, do it too early and you end up turning off your potential early adopters.
It's just not worth the effort in the vast majority of circumstances -- so you get computer crashes.
In the end it is all economics. But I really would like to see some real life stats on how these self driving cars perform over the longer term in less controlled situations and with an honest accounting of the root cause of any issues. Fat chance that will ever happen but that's the sort of rigor that would get me to switch from driving myself to being driven by a pile of software.
That's the good bit about Google being involved: at least they really 'grok' software and reliability engineering. As opposed to your average car manufacturer where software is a dirty word best outsourced to some contractor.
Being such an important feature (not crashing) it shouldn't be ignored. I am also skeptical but we have examples of reliable systems so I believe they can work.
Bank systems crash with great regularity. Source: worked for a bank, customer of a bank.
Industrial systems and anything related to flight is typically much better from a design point of view than your average bit of firmware. Redundancy is built in from the first day and all failure modes are tested in so much as feasible.
Also, and this is very important, such software is kept as simple as possible to reduce the surface area bugs can hide in.
I don't envy people tasked with balancing the need for self-driving car software to be able to handle a sufficiently large number of possibilities to consider eliminating the driver with the need for it to have a small surface area and sufficient degree of tractability to be able to minimise bugs.
Other computers are more predictable to computers than humans are, especially with automatic communication of acceleration, lane changes, etc.