However, I totally sympathize with him, living in Pittsburgh and driving in proximity to Uber's and a few other company's cars. There have been times when I've been following an autonomous car and it makes a turn onto a completely clear road, then suddenly slams on the brakes for no observable reason. Yes, I should be ready to handle this situation, but it's certainly not expected.
Knowing that Uber safety drivers intervene an average of about once a mile certainly makes me wary of these cars and not enjoy driving around them.
Haven't found a solution, or have found one and haven't implemented it? For example, I've been recently pondering how to resolve tailgating. How about a system like this:
Vehicles will be mandated to have distance sensors in both front and rear (some already have this for sake of back-up cameras and auto-braking), essentially a car sonar system. If your car is moving, it detects the distance between you and those in front and in back. If you are traveling too closely to the car in front of you (tailgating), your vehicle will be mandated to emit a warning buzz sound in the cabin, which intensifies in strength the smaller the gap. For someone tailgating you, perhaps a visual indication behind.
This way the closer one tailgates, the more audible (and possibly visual) feedback a driver gets. Hopefully the audio is annoying enough that most sensible tailgaters (oxymoron?) would back off.
Strengthen this with a visual indicator on the roof of the vehicle, perhaps, so that if someone is tailgating, a light on the roof turns on indicating such. Would make it trivial for police officers and traffic cams to notice. I think part of bad driving behavior is the anonymity cars today offer: with tinted glass and the feeling like you're in a safe, sound-proof cocoon, so this visual indicator may help shatter that in a good way.
Humans employ these driving techniques not because they’re stupid, but because they’re confident that they can pull off these moves safely (even though that is sometimes not true). In the future I’d expect the software to also advance to a state where it can confidently speed and pull off risky moves.
Of course, there are other problems (bugs really) still extant that don't have an upside I can see - such as remaining stationary and letting another vehicle back into you from 20 ft away, out of "caution"; which I think is a rough description Las Vegas crash.
I don't doubt that AI that isn't ethical (say causes others to crash sometimes, but saves you ten seconds) could be create and might appeal to many, but I don't look forward to this development.
Or veer out of the way of an obstacle you can't see, leaving you to either similarly veer or collide with it. IOW, do not assume you only need to account for your own reaction time; rather assume the vehicle in front of you can instantly stop moving and you must account for both your reaction time and your vehicle's stopping distance.
It takes about a 100 yards -- a full football field -- for a normal passenger car to react and come to a complete stop.
https://www.qld.gov.au/transport/safety/road-safety/driving-...
This is equivalent to 4 full seconds of following distance, which is double the typical 2-second-rule recommended by transportation governing bodies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-second_rule
If your suggestion was taken seriously, it would literally halve the carrying capacity of our highways.
Luckily, situations where the vehicle in front of you comes to an instantaneous stop are extraordinarily rare, basically requiring a head-on collision.
On a non-congested road, there's no excuse for putting sufficient distance between you and the car in front.
If you can't see 200 yards ahead, you should not be travelling at a speed which precludes you from stopping within 200 yards.
On a single lane uncongested road, there's no excuse for putting a reasonable (at least 3 second) gap between you and the vehicle in front.
Huh? The whole context of this discussion starting from js2's comment is about exactly how far is should be, and in particular whether 2 seconds or 4 seconds (which at highway speeds is 50 yards vs. 100 yards) is more reasonable as a rule of thumb. As you can see from my link, most government safety organizations recommend 2 or 3 seconds in good weather.
> The two-second rule tells a defensive driver the minimum distance needed to reduce the risk of collision under ideal driving conditions. The allotted two-seconds is a safety buffer, to allow the following driver time to respond. [emphasis mine]
> Some authorities regard two seconds as inadequate, and recommend a three-second rule. […] The United States National Safety Council suggests that a three-second rule—with increases of one second per factor of driving difficulty—is more appropriate. Factors that make driving more difficult include poor lighting conditions (dawn and dusk are the most common); inclement weather (ice, rain, snow, fog, etc.), adverse traffic mix (heavy vehicles, slow vehicles, impaired drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists, etc.), and personal condition (fatigue, sleepiness, drug-related loss of response time, distracting thoughts, etc.). For example, a fatigued driver piloting a car in rainy weather at dusk would do well to observe a six-second following distance, rather than the basic three-second gap.
I've had to veer to avoid accidents. At least three sitautions I can remember on the interstate: a semi truck tire blowout in front of me leaving large parts of the tire in my lane; a bike rack with several bikes falling off the back of a car in front of me; a truck in front of me veering around a obstacle (it appeared to be a pickup truck bed liner) I was blind to because I couldn't see beyond the truck in front of me.
I was lucky to avoid all of these because I had a parallel lane or shoulder I could escape into. When I drive now, if it's congested I leave extra following diatance. If that reduces the road capacity so be it. Compared to drivers who follow much too closely (which itself causes sudden slowdowns since they tend to over brake) or who drive in the wrong lane for their speed, I don't think I'm the person you need to worry about.
FWIW, I haven't been in an accident in over 25 years.
Your strategy to take all possible precautions regardless of large efficiency loss doesn't align with the reasonable tradeoffs that the vast majority of humans make.
Social responsibility be damned.
Really, when it's ego vs several tons at highway speeds it's not ego that wins. Further, 'I thought I saw something' is a blanket exception for sudden breaking.
When I'm driving, I'm constantly scanning for bad (i.e. unsafe or unpredictable) drivers in all directions. Once spotted, the choice is either to be well past them or well behind them. Usually the choice is easy.
PS: Tail gaters are creating a highly dangerous situation so slowing down without jamming the breaks is the correct response.
Pitch this line to your insurance company if you ever end up causing a rear ending. It'll be entertaining for the rest of us at least.
Doesn't matter what the car in front of you is up to or not. If you do not leave enough space to be able to handle them stopping, you are at fault. You should be utilizing defensive driving, and not depending on the driver in front of you ever acting responsibly or rationally.
It's not about intent, it's about behavior.
If I think I see a child in the road I'm sure as hell not going to stop and wonder if I'm just imagining it before I brake.
> "For purposes of insurance and policing, the driver of the car that rear-ends the other car is almost always considered to be at fault due to not leaving enough stopping distance or lack of attention." [1]
I'm glad we have drivers on the road that hope for the best in other drivers, but you need to sink this in your head today:
You should treat everyone on the road as an accident waiting to happen, and should practice defensive driving at all times in response.
(To be clear, I wasn't intentionally provoking anything: in one case I hit my brakes because the car in front of me panic-stopped, in another I was in a right-turn-yield-into-another lane situation and I checked my blindspot and found that there was a car who had right-of-way, so I hit my brakes to keep from encroaching on them.)
It was a good couple of months before they took responsibility for the accident.
It's an even more brilliant way to defend barely-working robot cars. Program them to err toward the letter of the law rather than road safety, then blame other drivers when they slam on their brakes because they mistake plastic bags for pedestrians.
Of course there are exceptions. There are any number of well-established circumstances that, if proven, place responsibility on the driver in front.
It is not legal to suddenly panic-brake to a stop, for instance, without exigent circumstances which make it necessary to do so. If a driver causes a collision by doing so they bear liability. There are any number of insurance scams that are thwarted by such exceptions.
Then clearly you need to get a car with better proximity detection systems. That's easily the simplest collision to detect and avoid for any automated system.
I know that sounds glib, but you need to recognize that if your ability to drive safely is so dependent on the "expected" behavior of other drivers, that maybe driving the way you are (which is to say, in the state of being a human) is the wrong way to solve the problem.
> I do believe that they likely increase the risk of minor collisions.
Pretty sure to the extent that this has been studied, exactly the opposite is true. For every "annoyance glitch" you posit, these things are saving 6-7 "loss of attention" fender benders.
Then it's a good thing I didn't.
I was replying (with a bit of humor) to the upthread posters notion that because these cars behave in a way that s/he personally finds confusing they are more dangerous (they aren't) and by extension shouldn't be on the road. And that's ridiculous. And the proof to the contrary is that exactly the kind of unsafe situation the poster was complaining about is something that automated systems can almost completely eliminate.
Legal != Safe.
That's a $22 backup camera.
I haven't seen it yet, but I don't know why somebody couldn't develop a similar kit to put on the front bumper that could warn about traffic ahead, lane drifting, etc.
A <$100 kit that can retrofit my old beater with some modern features would be money very well spent to protect a multi-thousand dollar asset, personal injury, and liability.
I believe that all manufacturers are required to build in backup cameras now. Why not require all registered vehicles to be retrofitted?
Next up, auto-braking.
>Then clearly you need to get a car with better proximity detection systems.
As it was nearly a rear-end collision but not actually a read-end collision doesn't that mean that sithadmin's current collision detection system (whatever that may be) is adequate and functioning properly?
Back then it might have been perfectly acceptable to throw a bunch of horses and cars together and risk them crashing into each other.
Today it should be unacceptable to throw automated cars in with human drivers and put the onus on the humans to alter their innate understanding of 100 years of traffic flow.
Your comment is cheeky and annoyingly inapplicable.
There's a tipping point where only people who want to drive will still do so which will likely make the insurance costs for those drivers very expensive because they're driving among automated vehicles which increases consequences of bad driving. (Fully automated, machines can talk to each other to avoid collisions).
This increased cost of insurance will encourage more people to switch to automated which will further encourage switching.
That tipping point is probably a relatively small percentage before it starts snowballing. All it takes is to get to a point where automated drivers are safer enough than driver-based that they can be insured significantly cheaper.
It won't take long after 95%+ of people are automated with the remaining 5% causing 90%+ of accidents for manual driving to be banned or shunned as a socially unacceptable risk like smoking.
I predict this will happen within 30 years.
Or very cheap because the people who self select to drive will be the people who care enough about driving to not do things like text and drive and when they do slip up the machines around them will prevent it from causing problems.
>shunned as a socially unacceptable risk like smoking.
Among the middle and upper class in Bubble Valley maybe. Everywhere else it's more of a "you do you" thing.
> Today it should be unacceptable to throw automated cars in with human drivers and put the onus on the humans to alter their innate understanding of 100 years of traffic flow.
No one who drove a car in 1917 is still driving today, and horse behavior had far more than 100 years to become innately understood.
But I think that it's wrong to assume that our modern attitude towards risk is 'advanced'. It's different, for sure. Thousands of people were likely killed or suffered as a result of automobiles mixing with horses. Today, 1.25 million people die annually as a result of automobile accidents - that's more than one person every 30 seconds. And many people also died as a result of taking risks while developing air travel, which is now one of the safest ways to travel. An attitude towards risk which suggests that equivalent risks are unacceptable would not have resulted in the billions of lives that have been improved by and saved by advancements in transportation. The modern economy is completely dependent on automotive transportation, and the world is unimaginably improved because we have cars instead of horses.
If equivalent progress would be made 100 years from now at the cost of thousands of lives lost due to adding automated cars to our existing roads and traffic flows, how could you possibly argue that we should not take this risk?
That is wildly overstating the complexity here. A teenager can learn to drive and pass their test with zero prior experience and maybe 10 hours of practice. "Altering" that intuition to account for the quite a bit simpler behavior of automated cars isn't going to be any harder.
This is just ludditism. The simple truth is that automated cars drive more safely, with fewer mistakes and much less velocity changing (i.e. lane switches, passing attempts, "oops" late braking, missed exit swerves...). They are easier to predict and understand, not harder.
Simple behavior is often more predictable, but not always. And it's predictability that matters.
> The simple truth is that automated cars drive more safely, with fewer mistakes and much less velocity changing (i.e. lane switches, passing attempts, "oops" late braking, missed exit swerves...).
> "oops" late braking
I'm not 100% sure what you mean here, so I'll split apart "oops" and "late".
A self-driving car might be less likely to brake late.
But everything I've heard says that a self-driving car is far more likely to "oops" in the form of sudden hard braking. Are you disagreeing? Can you back it up?
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/distracted_driving/in...
The car will escalate to an operator, the operator will call the police.
Well, they'll need something to do when speed traps become useless and there are far fewer motor vehicle accidents.
If people in the US want to go down that road, it can become standard here too.
Uhh, remind me not to be on a sidewalk near you...
We should not pretend robots are people under any circumstances. If the robot needs me to move for it to continue on, then it better decide to wait.
Maybe you think it should call in a robo cop;)
This should be obvious, but I'll be more verbose, my original comment was in ref to robots with wheels, possessing possibly >MJ of KE, recording their surroundings and uploading it in real time to whatever the skynet equiv is at the time. It's an awful idea, and you are living in a bubble if you think the general population will accept it in the US. Sure, it will happen in more tightly controlled societies.
And there's no need for it to be constantly uploading video to report a lane blockage. Heck, it doesn't need to upload any video to report a lane blockage.
As far as you being in the way: roads are not specifically for humans. A robo car has plenty of right to be there. If you wouldn't stand in the way of a taxi, you shouldn't stand in the way of a robo car.
And there is is. Robots having rights too. As if they are sentient. Next those that don't anthropomorphize machines will be labeled roboist.
Machines are tools. _For_ humans. Nothing more. It's like saying a hammer has rights because I use it.
Making it a autonomous hammer does not change that, in fact it makes it much more important to not pretend it's sentient.
The robo car has no rights, but the person that owns the robo car has roughly the same right to make use of the road whether or not they happen to be seated inside.
Is that wording satisfactory?
Edit: And I mean, it's not because I'm giving robots special treatment. It's colloquial english. I'd say a potted plant has "the right" to be somewhere too.
If you don't mean "right" than don't use that word. As is you have redefined it to be practically meaningless.
I'm not convinced you did re-define it. Your edit makes it more clear:
"it's not because I'm giving robots special treatment"
Yes, you really are. You are arguing that since it's owned by someone it has "plenty of right" to use the road. That's wrong. Par with humans is as special as treatment gets.
F(r) = -F(h)
ma(r) = -ma(h)
a(r) = -a(h)
I mean... oops. Sorry for the hammer malfunction. We sent out a patch and fired someone though.
Admit it, the end solution is to just remove humans from having direct control over their KE and direction? Right? Programmers are always smarter aren't we?
I often wonder if the pre-programmed car proponents realize what side they are on in the war on general purpose computing.
If you so desire, I won't use it, sure.
> A person wielding a hammer is fundamentally different than a pre-programmed hammer some human unleashed on it's own. I consider the latter a serious threat.
> Which a is more important? Should we treat them even remotely the same when one a ends a life and the other a causes a financial loss?
It's more complicated than that. You can drive a car remotely, and you can have a robocar with a human in it.
A car with a human in it deserves more protection, but there's no reason it has to have priority toward getting to use lanes. A car en route to pick up a human might as well have the same priority as one delivering a human.
Whether a car is being controlled by computer or human being shouldn't matter at all. Whether it's carrying a human should matter in some ways but not in others. One case where it shouldn't matter is blocking it; neither should be blocked.
There is human-equivalent software? That's astonishing. Where can I find it? Does it run on ARM?
Edit: Bummer. I called Denso, they were adamant that their human-level code v3.11 is a trade secret.
"A car with a human in it deserves more protection"
We agree. _please_ explain how to accomplish that.
Remember, KE is relative, therefore velocity and mass limits for the pre-programmed machine are not relevant.
Clearly my empty pre-programmed human carrying drone should enjoy the same lanes as a loaded 777. Lets set aside the distraction about remote control which totally ignores the "skin in the physics game" which transportation of life requires.
Did I imply that? I don't see how that's relevant.
> We agree. _please_ explain how to accomplish that.
If you agree with me then why do I have to explain anything?
You're being confusing with all your talk of kinetic energy. Are you trying to imply that robocars inherently make the roads more dangerous? I don't think that's true at all. As an extreme example, even with today's tech you could flood the roads with 20mph robocars and make things safer overall.
> Clearly my empty pre-programmed human carrying drone should enjoy the same lanes as a loaded 777. Lets set aside the distraction about remote control which totally ignores the "skin in the physics game" which transportation of life requires.
If you want to pay the same airport fees, go for it. Seems fair to me.
If you're worried about congestion and road funding when it comes to cars then limit priority to one robocar per person. But when I have exactly one car, my ability to use the roads to drive it to the store shouldn't depend on whether my butt is inside of it.
Why would "skin in the game" be necessary? A taxi with a driver inside can act exactly the same as a taxi without a driver inside.
"A taxi with a driver inside can act exactly the same as a taxi without a driver inside."
Again, where is this software that enables the pre-programmed taxi to "act exactly the same"?
I assume you are making an actual argument, not "it can drive in a line and stop at a stop sign".
And you could remote control a car today if you wanted to. Nobody inside in that case.
Tightly restricted societies that put "safety" over "freedom" will just end up banning non-elite direct human control of KE>nJ. The repercussions of that mistake have ugly ends.
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/road-traffic-history-befo...
How is this possible? I think you may be driving too close to cars.
The interesting thing for me at various demos has been the car/pedestrian relationship thing. Many humans won't slow for pedestrians unless they are clearly coming off the sidewalk and into the traffic lane, and even then some of them won't slow if they feel like they will be past them before the pedestrian would intersect with their car. Robo cars on the other hand immediately slow down when their algorithms suggest that the human might be about to cross the street.
Because of this, another human driver won't expect the car ahead to slow suddenly because of the loitering pedestrian (expected behavior of another human driver) and so will be "surprised" by the braking of the car in front of them. There will be a moment of cognitive dissonance while the human is trying to normalize their perception that slowing down is not 'normal' and the fact that the car ahead is now rapidly approaching their front bumper. At which point the impending collision overrides the dissonance with a self preservation reaction to brake hard and stop.
Have driven plenty in big cities and small towns. You should always leave enough space in front of you in case somebody suddenly stops.How much space you leave in front of you depends on how fast you are going. At least that was drilled to me by more experienced drivers. I think it was even part of the DMV exam. I have not driven in San Francisco. How bad is it? Do they drive bumper to bumper?
In city traffic of any appreciable density the type of following distance that you can discuss on the internet without getting flak from the holier than thou types will quickly fill itself with cars pulling off of side streets or merging in front of you.
"Your safe following distance is my opportunity." -Jeff Bezos
People who think - I"m more important than you, I don't care if I kill you, as long as you don't inconvenience you.
The law (and insurance companies) are pretty clear on this (at least in Australia) - if you rear end somebody, it's nearly always your fault, for being silly enough and not leaving enough gap.
They have educational campaigns on leaving enough gap (it's meant to be 3 seconds). Things happen, and people have to emergency stop.
It's taught to every driver.
I think eventually you'll get into a steady state solution where you'll be limited to 20mph on a 65mph freeway because that's all the room you'll be given - if you follow the rule of law exactly.
Instead, most bay area drivers keep about 40-70ft between cars when going 70mph. Juuuust enough to react in time to an emergency stop. It's a little silly but it's the only way you won't get cut off constantly. Only other way to not get cut off is to go quite slow and be behind traffic speeds.
So based on this you give us your throw-away "3 second gap" comment, helpfully telling us that this is the law and something something emergency stop etc drive safe?
With an average speed of less than 10mph, and a very dense city, your normal traffic "rules" don't apply here. Don't even pretend you can understand how things are here without experiencing them.
This is trivially true! Otherwise cars would not be allowed on public roads.
When it comes to cars, it's always about tradeoffs and acceptable risk.
FTFY
Fortunately, when I was in San Francisco, I was on vacation and therefore content to simply get to my destination a little later, taking back roads and continuously rebuilding the space in front of me, avoiding rush hour like the plague - but wow, those automated cars are getting a stress test. I just hope they're not programmed to drive like the Californians building them!
I see this all the time. I'd like to point out that this is illegal driver behavior. You can be ticked for it. It is also very dangerous for pedestrians, since it encourages people to cut the tolerances closer and closer. I've had people nearly run over my feet doing this.
Good thing is, humans are good at the adaptation bit.
I have never come close to rear-ending anyone... But that may be because I keep a reasonable following distance from the car in front of me.
Tailgating is what adds danger to our roadways.