Imagine how annoying cars would have been to horse riders when they were first introduced. Startling the horses, likely increasing the risk of minor collisions... What a pain!
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.
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?
> 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?
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/road-traffic-history-befo...
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/distracted_driving/in...
The car will escalate to an operator, the operator will call the police.
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".
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.
And you could remote control a car today if you wanted to. Nobody inside in that case.
Well, they'll need something to do when speed traps become useless and there are far fewer motor vehicle accidents.