If all cars were autonomous
volvocars.com
volvocars.com
If all cars were autonomous, society, the economy and the environment would all suffer. Here is how…
* You will be forced to watch non-stop ads in these automotive cars, similar to how some taxi services work today. You can turn these off for a fee of course.
* Hackers or bugs in softawe may easily cause global traffic jams
* Congress will pass laws controlling when, where and how you may travel
* You may be blacklisted from traveling in any autonomous by corporations, governments, police etc.
* The aggregate amount of automotive travel will increase exponentially, causing more carbon emissions and even worse traffic since more people will have access to travel
* Sprawl will get worse, as people move further away from urban areas since they can do other activities in cars.
* Investment in mass transit will diminish, since funds will move towards automatic cars.
To be fair, I won’t even blame the auto industry for having vulnerabilities in their software. At this point I’ve come to accept that any bit of technology has flaws and can be exploited. No matter how great their dev team is. Comical as it was and unrealistic for the time period, the latest fast and furious movie showed a potential scenario of a fully autonomous traffic. It’s going to be the same reason there’s no flying cars. The tech has been around for easily 20 years. But if you watch enough Air Disasters, autopilot and other computer controlled airplane functions still fail catastrophically. To this day. The average person is not capable of flying an airplane. Shit, the average person still isn’t great at driving a car. Sure that brings to argument that then all cars should be self driving. But the added risks, I don’t think so. The current sample data of self driving cars is still small and there aren’t active hackers looking to truly exploit yet. It’s like when people said that Macs were immune from viruses back in the day. No, people made viruses for windows because they can cause more wide spread damage since they were more widespread. Few had macs thus, why bother? But it doesn’t matter. Self driving cars will happen and something bad will happen in that time. There’s too much money to be made. This isn’t being done to save the world. It’s a control scheme as you pointed out. It’s funny how the older you get the more you realize that when someone starts to spout they’re trying to saving the world, they’re covering up some type of scheme to make money and make the world a shittier place.
37 000 people in the US died in vehicle accidents last year and around 2 million were injured. Obviously not all accidents would be preventable by autonomous cars, but I wonder how many of those people would be alive or uninjured if the cars could have been autonomous.
I agree with all the points the OP made for self-driving car downfalls, but I still think that the people working on the tech have the best intentions.
It's just that we as humans do a bad job of having foresight and the critical analysis skills necessary to truly assess the whole of a technology, and not just the good parts. Maybe that reflects well on humans as it hints at an optimistic nature?
I see the potential benefits of self-driving cars, but am worried that the medium-term to long-term negative points will outweigh the positive. There should really be a council of techies, representatives, legal experts, and most importantly average citizens that sit down and heavily critique this technology to address all the negative points before it becomes widespread.
It is said that driving is one of the most dangerous activities we do, but I think it's no coincidence that it's also one of the most liberating. It's a very pleasurable feeling to be able to get into a car and drive, controlling it as if it were an extension of your body.
The phrase "If all cars were autonomous" has a similar feeling to others like "if there was no crime" --- sounds good on the surface, but also has deeply authoritarian and dystopian implications.
Edit: there's also this, which is basically like Stallman's "Right to Read" but for self-driving cars: http://this.deakin.edu.au/lifestyle/car-wars
[1]https://youtu.be/Vrxyr1CjiSM
[2]https://youtu.be/7bXJ_obaiYQ
Not bad for a 2002 film adaptation of a 1956 short story.
I experienced this to an amplified degree the first time I rode a motorcycle. I now commute almost everyday on a motorcycle and my commute has transformed for a soul sucking hell to one of my favorite parts of the day.
On an open highway, sure. In rush hour gridlock, it's awful.
In the USA cars kill a small city every single year: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Motor_ve... This is roughly on par with gun deaths (which are ~2/3 suicides). Cars, not designed to kill people, kill roughly as many people per year in the USA as things designed to kill people.
And if you want that feeling of freedom, ride a bicycle. Not as "powerful", but it surpasses the "extension of body" feeling in every way possible.
That said, granted, the very layout of how people live in the usa is much different than in other countries. You guys have, compared to most of europe, vastly inflated distances between everything outside of city cores, making cars an evil necessity for society to keep functioning.
Such a person might favour the law over you, but they won’t like doing it, because they try to hold your beliefs as their own.
Or, for a simpler comparison: a horse. Your horse, from your personal stable.
And today a lot of cars waste a lot of space on cargo space in situations where you're not carrying any cargo. With hailable fleets they could have a mix of vehicles with and without trunks, the trunkless ones offering more interior space for the passengers.
I don't see those general feature changes to be specific to manufacturer brands, they are more a feature set optimized for sale towards ride hailing services because they might not work as well for individually-owned cars.
Yeah, that's why washing machines have never become popular; after all, we could already hire maids to wash clothes for us, yet most people washed their own clothes.
Well, I mean, you can already be blacklisted from travelling in regular cars: your driver’s license can be revoked.
Or are you referring more to capability than legality? Because even in a world with entirely autonomous cars, I would find it hard to believe that all such cars would be “non-rooted”, for the same reason we don’t live in a world where 100% of computers run iOS. Large companies (e.g. logistics companies) need total control and predictability over their vehicle fleet, just like large enterprises need total control and predictability over their servers. So there would likely always be a category of “dumb autonomous” vehicles like all-terrain pick-up trucks, sold to farmers and loggers and quarry workers et al, that you could buy; just like you can buy a regular PC today. You, as its “OEM” owner, would have complete control over what cloud traffic-control systems it submits to, if any. It might be illegal to configure it in certain ways and then drive it on the road, but that’s not the point here.
That's a nice dream!
Car companies will fight this tooth and nail. For an example, see John Deere who use patent and cyber crime law to prevent their product owners from fixing/modifying their equipment.
Or, look at Tesla and how they have fought releasing service manuals or allowing owners to make any kind of modifications/repairs to their cars. Don't be surprised if you have someone coming into this thread to also tell us how these are "good things".
And you can forget about ever visiting your favorite fishing hole again. You know the one, where you have to drive a mile or two down that tricky dirt road that's not on the GPS. Not allowed.
[Digress: Volvo's pitch to legitimize joining forces with Uber to fully automate driving.]
I don't think car manufacturers are rubbing their hands at the thought of becoming suppliers to be squeezed by Uber et all, rather than sellers of aspirational items to billions of individuals. I see them as resigning themselves to that future.
It has nothing to do with the number of cars being sold.
Or the other way around, you can move "transit" underground and contract cities as there's no need for non-pedestrian surface streets.
Congress already passes laws controlling when, where and how you may travel and you may be effectively blacklisted today by insurance companies, courts or police officers for a range of reasons. Do you honestly think that you are entitled to roads wherever you want and your license can never be revoked and insurers can't charge what they want?
Half of the total lifetime emissions of a car are in the driving of it. Autonomous vehicles open up the opportunity for an Uber-esque experience where you're less likely to buy a car and just rent it for when you need it: most people actively need a car for less than 10% of the total time that they own one for. That means significant environmental gains will come from lower demand for car manufacturing. How is that a problem?
Sprawl "getting worse" is another way of saying housing becomes more affordable as it does not need to be so concentrated. City centres will become more comfortable, communities will become more connected.
And finally, if there is one area that will cause a boon for investment by autonomous cars, it's mass transit: driverless buses, trams and trains, will all allow for more money to be spent on more vehicles and the net price of using these services will drop as the cost of employing, training and managing driving staff is reduced.
We can go around and around on this: it's happening, come to peace with it, and try and make sure we maximise the positives and reduce the negatives.
Note though, I did not counter the advertising thing. Tesla's T&Cs on their cars already suggest the owner does not really own the car. I think that's a problem. RMS in one of his more popular talks says he doesn't want software inside his microwave to Free because he would never want to modify it: I think a good argument can be made that if I buy a car that drives itself, I should be able to see and modify the source code.
Can school children take a self-driving car to school every day? Will this increase traffic significantly? How long until a hacker takes control of a car and abducts the child inside? How safe do parents really feel letting their kids be in this machine on their own? etc.
Maybe we'll get there one day.
No, you start with a short delay because otherwise there is no way to reestablish the safety distance to the car in front of you. Which you still want to have with automated driving because self-driving cars won't solve sudden mechanical failures.
But even if you allow crosswalks and stoplights, cars can use buffer space in traffic (assuming the road is not saturated) to minimize the stops/starts.
It really doesn't. Here in Germany most underpasses built in the car-friendly 60s and 70s are being abolished because pedestrians don't like them.
I find it really disturbing that some people think that non-walkable cities full of speeding robot cars without any regard for pedestrians sound like a bright future.
The safety message will be detected by all nearby autonomous vehicles, giving them a chance to slow down or stop while you cross.
That's the theory, anyway.
That's more or less what ants and bees do -- they exchange information with each other, but each unit is still quasi-independent.
While I take your point, many of the system behaviours of IP networking rely on inferences from failure. Information gathering needs to be a bit more proactive and connected without it. Eg determining a jam shouldn't be a matter of noticing that cars sent through a particular area are getting stuck ("dropped") but something that can estimate viable throughput before triggering phase changes like jams.
Why do you even need traffic lights anymore? Autonomous cars can brake and stop for people who need to go through, and synchronise with one another to organise crossing.
We already have traffic controller systems, but I'd imagine that vehicle communication would allow them to be even more sophisticated.
If you go to Germany, or Belgium, cars generally stop whenever somebody gets close to the border between the sidewalk and the road, at which point the pedestrian just goes across (then wait 5 minutes and crosses back because they weren't actually trying to cross the road, they were just a foreigner not expecting this). And these are human-driven cars.
This can just be universal policy for self-driving cars. It will necessarily be anyway since they will have to deal with people just running across without warning.
> And while there are options (elevated pedestrian walkways, etc.)
That would be very dumb, one of the benefits of self-driving cars is that you can significantly scale back the car-centric infrastructure and especially affordances towards drivers, there is no risk of drivers being bothered or annoyed or taking rash decisions, the cars just follow policy which is whatever you want to be, every merge is now a proper zipper at the very end of the merge lane & all that.
And wherever that's an option you can just bury the road entirely and keep pedestrians in the sun up top as they did for the centre of the planned city of Louvain la Neuve in Belgium:
> one of the main points of the urban design of Louvain-la-Neuve was to make it people rather than automobile centred. As a consequence, the city center is built on a gigantic concrete slab, with all motorized traffic travelling underground. This allows most of the ground level of the city center to be car free.
(when they need new accommodations, they expand the slab and build the buildings at the same time)
> I'd imagine that vehicle communication would allow them to be even more sophisticated.
That's a really sad lack of imagination.
Which of course bring sup the idea of hacking the negotiation so that you always have the favorable outcome. The same way some people try to hack the sensors that turn lights green for emergency vehicles.
Even when car-to-x and vehicle-to-vehicle communications are standardized with widespread use (and they'll both be usable even with non-autonomous vehicles), I doubt we'll see the sort of centralization with hyper-optimized traffic patterning in the animation linked by philrw. Cars will still be able to share information, and make use of it to change their behavior for minimal disruption of traffic flows. They'll talk to infrastructure, and probably even make use of relays well ahead of key infrastructure elements (ramps, bridges, construction zones, etc.). But I wouldn't consider it "centralized" in that situation.
For example, a car is entering an on-ramp. Local infrastructure could communicate that fact, as well as other information about the car to traffic approaching the on-ramp. Is it a heavily-loaded truck, with slower acceleration? Or is the vehicle 'dumb' (maybe it's an older car with no communication abilities)? Approaching cars would leave a greater gap ahead of them, switch lanes, etc. Even without giving control over to a central traffic system, we'd see significant improvements in traffic flow.
The other challenge for highly-centralized control is the sheer amount of data that's collected by autonomous cars. They apparently generate upwards of 25Gb/data an hour[1] from their various sensors. Figuring out what part of that data needs to be kept, normalized, and then sent to a centralized system is going to be tough. And it'll be hell on the wireless spectrum. Of course, that's assuming V2V spectrum isn't carved up and used for internet access.[2] In which case, things will get...trickier.
0. https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/ca...
1. https://hackernoon.com/automated-cars-and-data-786dfb1e3eb4
2. http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-talking-cars-...
If, instead, my brake pads were worn and the car were fully autonomous, I could have scheduled it for service while I am at work and it could have driven itself in, got new brakes and driven itself back to my office. No loaner car, no time off from work, no hassle waiting in line for a service adviser, ....
File under the 'productivity' column, and I expect cars will be better maintained than now, since we procrastinators will be able to simply click a link and forget about it.
If you pay by the drive for a car service operated by a large company that borrows at the prime rate, your cost per mile is liable to be much lower. Given the huge costs of car ownership, it's hard to believe any residual emotional bond of owning a car could trump the economic benefits.
And as for electric: knowing aggregate demand means you never have "range anxiety", and the charging infrastructure can be much less obtrusive.
Social consequences? Well, when you take that Google-operated car to Manresa it will likely detour past MacDonalds and offer you a 2-for-one discount on Big Macs if you go there instead. And there will be no ad blockers...
Oh, and you want to take that car to where there will be an alt-right rally? Oops, no cars allowed to drive there (either by government edict or because the car owners don't want to risk their cars being destroyed).
The self-driving fleets can't arrive soon enough for me, but I am aware of some of the malign risks as well...
No, they're assuming you still own your car - it's just that your car would be autonomous. Only the last section ("More flexible ownership") acknowledges the possibility that you might not own the autonomous car.
Self-driving cars and subscription-ownership cars are two circles on a Venn diagram that don't have to exactly overlap. I'm a great example - I want a self-driving car of my own, but I don't want to share it with anybody else. (I've played the Zipcar game in Chicago and I'm over that.)
That's assuming that you will even be able to buy a self-driving car as an individual. (Or at all.) I find it highly plausible that car companies will expand to fill the entire vertical of car design, manufacturing and as-a-service operation.
The service-oriented model was not really viable until now because the model of individuals buying cars was pretty much the only accepted option. But car companies have already started the vertical integration (many of them all have their own carsharing subsidiaries).
That's transitional and based on the hysteresis of looking at the current system. I remember when PCs started to be introduced; they replaced dedicated word processing systems (and, via Visicalc, some central data processing) but it was pretty well accepted that they would never make it into the corner offices because "executives don't type". In 1982 I worked at a lab where the director had his secretary retype his email onto paper; he would read it, mark it, and give it back for filing, and would dictate responses (she was overjoyed when I showed her how to print the mail out).
I have a longer reply to a different reply to my message which emphasizes the primacy of the economic drivers (and mentions some corner cases where it might be worth buying one)
But although I don't blindly believe in homo economicus, I wasn't kidding when I said that the car is an (or for many the most) enormous expense for most people, and the size of that expense will aggressively drive the adoption rate. The ability to have a box of Kleenex or your gym bag will become a nice to have when the price of that convenience doubles or triples your transportation costs. The difference in price might allow you to afford gym membership in the first place.
It's also a generational thing. My 19 yo kid and his friends are pretty uninterested in cars. A bunch of them don't even have licenses (which is common in some big cities like NYC but uncommon out here in the sub urbs). They care about phones though.
In the case of the toilet and bed, those are typically bundled, but even then some people do make the economic choice to have only a shower rather than a bathtub just like they make such a choice for a normal car vs paying extra for automatic transmission.
(there are also transitional and special cases; it's hard to hail a car where there is no phone service!)
Much lighter. All the people driving alone could be in cars one-quarter the size if they didn't have to worry about being crushed by Canyoneros. Aside from the cost savings, half-width cars can offer a traffic volume / speed improvement by sharing a lane. (Ultimately though lane markings can go away along with traffic lights and signs.)
The car is a relatively reasonable standard for covering an individual's regular use cases for transportation.
> The space that is currently used for car parks could be used for something else.
We should be careful that this space does not uniformly end up being used for yet more skyscrapers and office buildings, but open space and parks instead. I feel like this is a major decision moment for ending up with beautiful cities or dark cyberpunk monstrosities.
2. I don't want to have to travel 30+ minutes to see more than a single tree in one place. Frequent access to nature (or a sufficiently advanced facsimile) is life quality.
3. If a city is sufficiently large, traveling to its outside may be prohibitively expensive for poor people who are thus barred from experiencing nature. (This concern affects developing countries and sci-fi dystopias more than current developed countries.)
The thing is, let's say that autonomous cars are only 0.25% safer than the average human driver. That means switching to them will reduce accidents by 0.25%. That's a significant amount considering how many traffic accidents there are.
Considering that traffic accidents result in the actual death of human beings, it is morally imperative that we require as much autonomous driving and reduce as much human driving as possible. Even the far-from-perfect autonomous cars we have now are safer than continuing to let humans drive.
While it may be arguable that it's morally preferable and safer to adopt self-driving cars if they can be shown to reduce the incidence of accidents by any amount compared to human drivers, it isn't desirable for the corporate entities producing vehicles capable of fully autonomous operation to make them a mass market product until it is remarkably safer to ride in an autonomous vehicle compared to a human-operated vehicle.
One of the biggest boons for automakers in the status quo is that the liabilities associated with operating their products is mostly distributed to the users. From a financial risk perspective this is a massively preferable operating model (and not dissimilar from what you see with 'disruptors' in the consumer space like Uber, Air BnB, etc). When we remove the primary cause of faults while driving from the picture (the human agent operating the vehicle), the distribution of risk that has generally protected automakers in the past disappears. When an autonomous vehicle crashes, the automaker now must fend off claims about vehicle features (sensors, software, etc.) that will in some way be directly responsible for causing traffic accidents.
A lot of things on the list are also almost completely orthogonal to autonomous driving, like electric cars and flexible ownership models
Not to mention all of the people cutting you off because you've left enough space for them to jam their car in front of you. I had to intervene a number of times and reposition myself in traffic to get away from "non-smooth" drivers,
https://www.ted.com/talks/wanis_kabbaj_what_a_driverless_wor...
Wouldn't it be far easier for companies to embrace telecommuting than to have a worldwide network of autonomous vehicles?
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/27/15878900/volvo-nvidia-sel...
You can see why you might want to start practicing with boring machines and hyperloops. These things aren't just for Mars.
The Big Dig in Boston cost what, $20Bn? For less than 4 miles of road tunnel? The maths just doesn't work. What does average road cost per mile?
I don't think that this is obviously true, especially in cities. When the cost of taking an autonomous car from door to door is comparable to the cost of public transport, there would likely be more traffic on the road, not less. We've already started to see this to some extend with Uber in big cities