California to allow testing of self-driving cars without a driver present
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Human emotion in general causes dangerous situations. When we drive now, we're restricted to driving and driving alone. We can listen to the radio but for the most part we are restricted. Because of this, we tend to want to get to our destination as quickly as possible. We drive fast to get the restrictive experience of driving over with.
However if we were free to do other things, like get work done or sleep or watch TV while in our cars, I think we would generally be much more tolerant of travelling at a lower speed. While eventually our self driving systems may be capable of being very safe at very high speeds, I think reduced speeds tolerated by people could offer an extra layer of safety.
2 hours is time for art, digital or pen and paper (I draw while on airplanes and such and have learned to compensate for bumps and things). I could knit. Watch things. Read. My spouse would sometimes make music. Some of these are good even if the commute is shorter, and would be an improvement for anyone commuting a good distance already due to traffic and whatnot.
4-5 hours? Split sleep schedule. (I have no children).
It also means folks can better commute to work from small farming towns that lack jobs. I know that an hour commute each way (by car) is too much for me, but I've had to just to make decent money. This was living in the midwest, mind you, and it might be different other places. It wouldn't have been an issue if I wasn't actively driving.
Yes, I do understand that some of the hope would be that people live closer, but that's the hope and push now and it breaks often enough.
I'd live way out in the country if I didn't have to drive it. There's a ton of things I can do on my laptop. It really sounds nice.
I think it'll be interesting to see society push the Time to arrival vs. general safety balance. I think we'll see a rising speed limit as the risk becomes more and more mathematical.
Risk and speed limits are already mathematical. See the 90th percentile rule. If self driving cars makes obvious the disparity between the letter of the law and actual practice then the law will get changed.
Pretty much the only stakeholders that want the current mismatch between 90th percentile speed and speed limit are the cops who want a pretext to go fishing and the states that want revenue.
Self driving taxis, delivery vehicles, etc that are doing (for example) 55mph "because the law" when the road should really be an 80 is a terrible user experience, especially on roads with mixed human/ai traffic. Insurance, self driving fleet owners, car companies, etc all have a huge incentive for self driving cars to be able to get from A to B just as fast as a human car. Nobody will take your self driving taxi if a human taxi is faster and comparably priced.
We'll see a higher speed limits because the automakers, fleet operators, etc will lean on the states and if that doesn't work they'll lean on the feds (nhtsa, dot and similar) to lean on the states to set limits that are actually consistent with the 90% rule.
Especially if we move sleeping into self-driving cars then that long commute of yours might start before you're awake
I'm more excited about hybrid bikes (allowing even older folks to be more mobile) than self-driving cars.
Whether things get better in American cities is not a matter of technical innovation at all, but politics and economics.
But i can get the train and have 0 motion sickness.
Besides, in the hypothetical self-driving future the transit times will likely be far more predictable than it is today... with AI running and optimizing everything.
Being able to videoconference during my commute would be an enormous boon.
(No, but more seriously: I'm a bit envious that this is working for your teams. It's completely impractical in the East Coast US cities I've frequented).
If your transit system is underground without repeaters though, I agree that you're out of luck. I can't imagine trying to take a call on the T.
In suburbia/regional areas certainly, but most large cities are already heavily congested, how many more people could possibly fit in peak hours? As optimised as we can make it, there's still a predictable one-directional crush every day.
The real optimisation of roads would be incentivising companies to make their employees start/finish outside of work hours.
A self-driving future will likely still heavily involve public transport in the short term at least.
Hopefully fully autonomous vehicles will get far smaller, travelling pods which are both cheap to buy and maintain, much like a motorbike but without the downsides that turn most people off.
Smaller vehicles, especially trucks will quickly be needed to reduce road wear and offset the likely cost of greater road usage. Smaller personal transportation would also be a boon to road efficiency.
Selfing driving + fleet cars will most certainly reduce the average car size. People buy 4-5 seats for the edge cases when they might need to pick up some friends or more than one child at a time, or merely because it's the most common type of vehicle available, which people buy out of habit or whatever social reason.
But looking at car on any highway and you'll only find more then 1-2 drivers a minority of the time.
When we eliminate the need to buy a single car for all general use-cases, and have a high quantity of self-driving Uber style cars available, then 1-2 seater cars with become the most popular size. Which in itself with reduce climate damage and increase capacities on roads.
Especially as self-driving cars can drive at higher speeds and closer together, potentially linking up like trains for long-distance rides.
I once had somebody pull this shtick for being late to a meeting. I put it in the same category as using "traffic" as an excuse. Disasters which make the news are acceptable. Routine inconveniences causing one delays are okay, once in a while, but never if treated as an immunity against criticism. One should have planned better, by leaving earlier or taking another mode of transportation. Then there are the characters who leave the office late and blame it on traffic every time.
But if your train is stuck in the middle of a tunnel for 3 hours because a crazy person ran onto the track and authorities are chasing them, that's a pretty fair excuse.
People who are idling all day to be available for meetings likely aren't part of a high-value organization.
Why would one be idling? The founders and executives who do well have a handle on their schedule. They avoid over-scheduling, keep thing short, show up on time and get shit done. At the larger scale, my friends at Google, Apple or Amazon don't run late for anything, be it a personal brunch or M&A negotiation. Properly functioning as an adult, and fixing problems over making excuses, is simply well internalized.
I hear in Germany if people aren't there when the meeting starts, it gets cancelled. It's definitely part of the culture.
What I never do however is get distracted by being angry while driving one ton of steel...
I take the bus every day to work even though in total it takes exactly twice as long than if I took my motorcycle? Why because I like to read on the bus. It's not actually important to me to get there any quicker. In fact on days I have earlier meetings I just leave my apartment earlier. I think the idea that people wouldn't mind going slower may be real for a lot of people.
That said, I suppose there's every reason to think traffic impacts of self-driving cars (more cars circling, waiting for passengers) would make traffic slower and more unpredictable.
Edit: And, of course, the people in the non-self-driving cars would get the slowness without any direct benefit to themselves.
Yet how many demonstrations of self driving are anything but well lit and well marked roadways? Self driving won't be a thing until regardless of weather and road conditions are person can have a car take them somewhere. Self driving will have to be smart enough to protect people who are actively driving from making a fatal error.
per that last point, if a self driving becomes a thing cars that can do it will have to intervene or have legislation absolving the system from fault if it does not. even the act of letting a self driving car exceed the speed limit raises legal issues. then comes privacy concerns, if you are not doing the driving then you can bet law enforcement is going to push to do a lot more on the grounds a self driving car has no rights
I fully welcome pizza delivery at triple digit speeds.
The cost of travel (time, money, $otherMetric) is basically economic dead weight.
If anything, the fact that humans tend to do things like drive too fast for conditions or leave too little a gap for safety means that properly safe cars will go slower than the average driver.
The experience from the train world is that having to switch trains on a line severely crimps performance: you can get 40tph on an unswitched line, but only about 30tph on a switched line. The limiting factor on trains tends to be ingress and egress.
The biggest problem I see with approaches like this is how it's going to get going while they have to share roads with individual traffic. Street infrastructure isn't designed for long convoys that have to stick together, otherwise something like this would be a good start e.g. for trucking: Lead truck can even be human-driven, and a group of trucks in automatic mode follows as a closed unit while their drivers rest.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16475369
>Surface roads with at-grade intersections can't be sped up meaningfully, and there's no space for relatively high-speed highways, not without spending exorbitant amounts of money on building them.
Every red left or right arrow could be replaced with a blinking yellow or solid green for starters. I think we'll see laws about stop signs being equivalent to yield if turning right.
There's a lot of inefficiency baked into the system as a means to mitigate stupid people at high volume points.
For example, we don't bother stopping cross traffic for someone to take a left on solid green but we do at an intersection with a dedicated left turn lane/arrow because of volume. The volume in the latter case is high so we bother to include redundancy to protect the several people per year that would cause problems if they tried to take the left without cross traffic stopping. It's not worth it to have a lane and an arrow to protect at an intersection with a lower volume of left turns so we use a solid green and left turning traffic yields. As self driving cars decrease the number of people that wouldn't be able to take the left on a solid green or blinking yellow then we'll gradually see more of those and less dedicated turn lanes.
>If anything, the fact that humans tend to do things like drive too fast for conditions or leave too little a gap for safety means that properly safe cars will go slower than the average driver.
What's "too fast" isn't defined by us. It's defined by how people actually drive in the conditions. A self driving vehicle that drives like a student driver and gets from A to B no faster than the letter of the law allows is at a huge disadvantage. Nobody's gonna buy a car that's 20% slower everywhere and frustrating to watch operate. Nobody's gonna recommend it to their friends if they have to press the override button every time they want to pull out into traffic in a timely manner or if they're always getting honked at.
Sure, you can hand wave about it not being a problem with full adoption but you need to get to full adoption first and that requires a product that's better in at least one way and comparable/acceptable in all the rest. Look at electric cars. They didn't exist in the high end until Tesla made one that was better in a few ways and comparable in the rest.
Higher speeds results in lower capacity. At higher speed, you need extra stopping distance for safety.
> Every red left or right arrow could be replaced with a blinking yellow or solid green for starters. I think we'll see laws about stop signs being equivalent to yield if turning right.
Too bad about those pedestrians, then.
The car in front is not going to instantaneously stop. If it could then you can prove by induction why this conversation is irrelevant ;)
The effective road space occupied by a car is the car plus the distance in front of it. The distance in front increases with reaction distance, not stopping distance. Assuming everyone is (on average) always following at the safe minimum following distance for that speed then you get the same capacity and less travel time.
However, at lower speeds people (on average) tend to follow at greater than the theoretical safe minimum so as speed increases the average following distance gets closer to the safe minimum so higher speed = higher capacity. This is basically a long winded way of saying that following distance is determined by reaction time, not stopping distance and high speed traffic negates the outliers who use high speed following distances at low speed.
In normal conditions, no. But there are several circumstances in which cars could come to abrupt halts: sudden failures in road conditions (e.g., pothole), crashing into another cars, etc. There's a reason 100-car pileups are a thing.
> However, at lower speeds people (on average) tend to follow at greater than the theoretical safe minimum
What speeds are you thinking about? On urban highways, it is virtually impossible to travel at a safe driving distance, and this is at both freeflow speeds and congested (but not stop-and-go) speeds.
I'm always surprised people are so accepting of it, to be frank.
Why are you surprised? People are cool with massive metal murder machines flying down roads just because it’s a human driving it and not a computer? I seriously can’t wait for all us flesh drivers to be replaced with computers. The thing is that over time computers become better and better drivers. Humans don’t, actually we just get worse as we age and stay on the road anyway. Our human reflexes and biology also limit how fast we can react and subject us to road rage, stress, fatigue and other problems that can’t be debugged. Why is it worse to have software that we might actually be able to fix?
In the case I need to assume control of the vehicle am I going to be fighting against the autonomous system for control? Not only will I need to understand the current environment and what others are doing around me; I also need to understand how the system is computing the situation and maintain control based on my observations and my observations of what the system is trying to do.
This will perhaps remind all of the Runaway Prius drivers something that people stopped teaching; Remove the key, It's the kill switch.
Maybe the answer will be Uber-like car fleet services that self-insure.
Why do you assume the courts are incapable of handling this, or the law doesn't deal with it? Most likely you won't even own a self driving car, you'll be getting into a car owned by Uber or Google and they'll have to face liability, the same way you aren't liable as a passenger in a taxi if the driver gets into an accident.
On the victim side, you're actually more protected because a self driving car is less likely to be uninsured. If an uninsured driver hits you, you're just out of luck, they may go to jail but nobody is paying your bills. In the near term Uber or Google will have loads of insurance and loads of money to pay out claims.
Well, I think the GP was sketching a scenario where fewer people might be killed until one day when a lot of people are killed by a bug/hack/zero-day that suddenly generates huge crashes.
Is it actually harder to deal with? About 1/6 of fatalities are drunk drivers[2], and they cause another 1/6 of of car accident fatalities[1]. Almost half of all front-seat (driver + front passenger) fatalities aren't wearing seatbelts while on average 90% of Americans do wear seatbelts[2]. There's no way of solving either these problems without identifying people individually and improving their behavior, which is a pretty intractable issue.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa...
2. http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit...
"Welcome to perverse-incentives-R-us, what paradox of this world of plenty can we serve you today?"
Less edge cases to deal with, and since most people are not pilots the drone must be 100% automated, turning it into something more like a horse-drawn carriage from days of old. Since air traffic is more tightly controlled they do not have to compete much with piloted aircraft. No pedestrians to worry about, minimal possibilities for accidents. Flying away and parking somewhere away from your location is not just a feature – it's mandatory since our world has no accommodations for consumer aircraft parking. Since most landings can be done on the rooftops of tall buildings, it's conceivable that we may reduce the amount of time we spend walking on dangerous or dirty streets, and also opens the door for more creative skyward architecture and retail. And of course there's the magnificent views you'll get of a city even in a boring daily commute.
I will probably not own a self driving car given current technology, but I can't wait to see the age of true flying transports for the masses.
First of all I thinkg battery energy density will have to multiply a few times.
Traffic will have to be actively monitored 24/7 to avoid collisions, avoid vehicles going through no-fly zones.
Crashes would also be a lot worse, possibly crashing into houses, schools, hospitals.
Not trying to be overly critical, just a fun thing to think about.
I believe this is wildly inaccurate.
We already have the infrastructure for self-driving vehicles. How do you handle a mechanical failure of your personal flying drone? Does it drop you to the ground or on a group of pedestrians nearby? This surely only increases anxiety of people walking below. What is the recommended height for a self-flying drone? 100's of ft above ground? Not to mention there are no drones (to my knowledge) that can legally transport a human today in 2018, how long until we develop/regulate that technology? (I understand it's the same with self-driving vehicles but we've been working on this for _years_ already and things have improved significantly in that time period)
While I like your outside the box thinking, I disagree with the notion that there are less edge cases than self-driving cars, at minimum it's on par with the same amount of edge cases as self-driving vehicles.
Whirling blades with an engine powerful enough to lift and transport a human plus cargo whizzing through downtown areas, and everyone owns one? It only makes sense in sci-fi movies.
Recommended height? It's already laid out, just look at aeronautical maps.
The technology will come. What we require is more battery density and perhaps better materials. Prototype drones for human transport are already out there.
It is certainly a lot less edge cases. But again, when it comes to aircraft people seem to exaggerate dangers and make it seem like a big deal. Aircraft are safer than cars when you know what you're doing.
Because humans also don't currently fly drones to get around, you don't have to deal with all the human cultural and behavioral quirks that come with traffic. Good luck with your self-driving car on India's streets.
I have come to believe that by the time self-driving tech is truly viable at level 5 autonomy, personal drone transports would have long been viable before that.
Very few tall buildings can accommodate aircraft landing pads. There isn't space due to HVAC machinery and antennas, plus they weren't designed to support extra weight.
Also, if everyone is commuting to work by landing on rooftops, then streets will no longer be dangerous: rooftops will be because they will be crowded with drones dropping off thousands of people.
I really believe the US will get self-driving cars first, as a first form of pervasive public transportation. I call it a second-world technology effect: just like we in Eastern Europe have much better internet and cellular service (not to speak of online banking) because it was built after the first-world countries already heavily invested in obsolete technology, the US can use the latest technology (SDC) in building its first public transportation system.
It wouldn't be as bad if cars become fully electrified and cars become smaller as they shift from individual car ownership (where you buy a 4-5 seater for edge cases but only use 1-2 seats 95% of the time).
When you order your automated fleet car to pick you up you can say I only need one seat, which will massively reduce car sizes and energy expenditures.
Self driving cars can potentially link up like trains on highways to further reduce congestion and reduce energy use.
On the other hand I could see people whose commutes are 30 minutes tolerating a 1 hour self driving commute especially if it means they are paying 1/2 their rent.
I will never understand how people do this... especially so many of them without car pooling, which means they have to focus the whole time.
I'd easily trade those hours for 100% the rent costs and half the living space.
I have to imagine that there are extenuating circumstances that force people into these absurd commutes.
Self driving cars will be life changing. They can’t come soon enough.
Thus the reduced need for car ownership and all that parking that is now on the market for redevelopment should lower the cost of living in cities which is a huge deterrent that keeps people out right now.
I imagine that there will be some flux in both directions, with the less desirable suburbs being the losers in that equation.
If I was a long-term real estate developer I'd be buying up a bunch of urban parking lots and converting them into charging stations. Then selling a stock of them to Tesla/Uber in 5-10yrs at a high mark-up.
Apartment/grocery stores/office/etc buildings with underground parking could technically lease out their land as well.
It would still very likely free up far more land than is needed for charging, as so much parking space is used for far longer than the average charging/waiting-for-fleet-calls would need. Not to mention the AI space optimization they would utilize.
More like every 400-500km. Even current electric cars generally have ranges in the 350km+ range, and they're getting better every generation. Unless my work provides me free charging, I'll be charging at home where my electricity is supplied by my solar panels.
That means in an urban environment they'll be able to drive for quite a long time before charging... that's interesting as it means even less real estate needed for charging.
The implications of this technology on daily life in the next decade will be nearly as interesting as the deployment of consumer internet in the 1990s. There are so many possibilities, it's very exciting...
[0] https://solarchargeddriving.com/2011/05/13/whats-your-gasoli...
Seems like there will be plenty of fungibility in charge locations.
At a certain level of congestion people think it will take too long and avoid the journey. All this will do is move the threshold even higher. Most metro areas need to look at transit as the solution. Self driving vehicles may play a role in feeder routes but the idea suddenly congestion will be solved because of self driving vehicles is crazy; and IMO will actually be the opposite.
There are good reasons people don't want to be crammed on a bus or train with other people all of the time.
The problem is when congestion is so bad it's suppressing trips there is a middle ground when improvements are less obvious. That and city's need to be designated to absorb highway traffic or highways just end up as expensive parking lots.
The other thing missing from remote work tools is collocated workspaces (can’t fit that on your monitor). Existing VR tech solves that problem though.
Instead of working on Google Docs in your office, you’ll work IN Google Docs in VR, and your coworkers will be there nearby, and you’ll be able to talk face to face without leaving your workspace.
Perhaps if there was a dedicated lane where self-driving cars would move slowly like a train that would be more plausible. Or maybe even freeway driving, no stop and go traffic though.
If I own my own self driving car, rather than summoning one, I think you'll see a big shift in designs because it will be your or your family's space.
In an early episode, a character summons a roaming [empty] driverless hover-car taxi [hailed with a transmitting credit-card-sized hailing device no less] to help an injured compatriot on his way. Watching the scene was surreal; when it first aired no doubt it was totally SF, but now it's actually within the grasp of reality.
The entire vehicle's interior was, basically, Limo seating. No room for any driver at all. The car lands, they get in and close the doors, and the car takes off all 5th Element but driverless to their destination -- one character laid out injured, the other consoling and helping whilst sitting upright.
I just have to believe that interior configurations are going to change similar to this.
If self driving cars are individually owned then there may be a trend towards a different experience but that may come much later after we have self driving cars hitting the road, as the cost and risk to operate one makes it unfeasible for the manufacturers to sell them at scale to the general public instead of operating their own ridesharing fleets.
We can see the beginnings of this for those of us who ride transit. Reading, "sleeping", A/V media on tablets/phones... and then to make-up and phone calls... anything reasonable and semi-reasonable in public that's not active driving [and non-reasonable for some of the fringes].
There are two use cases that particularly excite me:
* For commuters, get a ride from your own vehicle to work, and then have it park cheaply outside of town (instead of paying for a parking spot close to work, which is common where I live).
* Have a self-driving van with a bed, have it drive you to a skiing resort while you sleep. Go to sleep in the car Friday night, have it drive at safe speeds using smaller roads, wake up where you wanted to go. Go to bed Sunday evening, wake up back at home. Shower, dress, go to work.
Not sure if I'm excited about that. This would double the traffic during rush hour. I'd sincerely hope they introduce a tax on vehicles driven without driver.
1. self-driving cars make more efficient use of the roadway
2. parking lots could (partially) be converted into roadway, or even better, actual business, so there will be less road to "outside of town".
I sincerely hope they do the exact opposite. Taxes are often added to behaviors the state wants to limit (ie. Sin tax on Alcohol/Cigarettes/etc), it would be in everyone's best interest to convert to driverless cars so the tax should be on people without driverless cars and/or more importantly on people who don't carpool.
The reason being that a car driving itself around with no one in it is essentially wasting resources and spewing out emissions. The example comes up often in what-ifs about self-driving cars.
The only reason we don't tax by usage is because we don't have the data. If cars have that data, it would be by far the superior system. Why tax someone driving 100mi the same as someone driving 100k miles?
Self driving vehicles allow ride-sharing to be far more effective as you won't have to pay for the cost of the driver. Right now bus routes are studied, and are used less often than they could be due to the last mile problem, and should we grow the scale of HOV lanes, ride sharing will be further encouraged. We could take a fleet of minibuses and focus on the real time optimization problem, rather than making car travel more luxurious but also make congestion far worse.
It would mean the car doesn't have to drive off to park somewhere, but to just go pick up the next person. I'd imagine it would be possible to have enough cars on the road so the wait is negligible, but still have markedly less cars on the road. Might this be a realistic future?
Everyone within ten hours of a ski resort has already thought of that. Prepare for ski traffic to get several times worse, and lift lines to stretch up the mountain.
Food, lift tickets, etc will also probably get more expensive if it becomes easier to avoid lodging, which is a critical revenue component of functioning ski towns.
Are the laws in place to determine who is guilty and who will pay the damages in case of accidents?
As a developer I am always worried when I have to put some big update live, I think I personally could not handle the responsibility of doing such an update for self driving cars.
Yes, I'm aware that a computer will statistically be a lot less accident prone than me (even though I'm completely accident free knock on wood). But even so, if my child died in an AI edge case where I know without a doubt I would have avoided the accident, it would matter a hell of a lot to me.
I'm not sure if it's right, but we will expect a lot more of AI drivers (and other) than we do of ourselves. Failing to see a stopped service truck in the middle of the highway isn't something a human does. And any death resulting from that will be highly scrutinized.
"If my child died in a situation where I know without a doubt an AI would have avoided the accident, it would matter a hell of a lot to me."
There are going to be a lot of lawsuits that will sort out the legal frameworks after the first wave of failures by automated conveyances....
I guess I'm suggesting there's bound to be a (n irrational) paradox where everyone wants other drivers to be replaced by AI, so they themselves can drive safely and avoid the edge case accidents.
Even if they managed to decimate the number of fatal accidents, I'm sure that a large portion of people would still be really irrational about it and that worries me a lot
Be careful of the utopia trap: “anything is acceptable now for the rosy future imagined.”
At some point, economics and actuaries come into play. It will be worrying when 'AI is safer than humans!' can be pointed to as a reason to not correct expensive, perhaps intractable, AI failures.
I used to think that. The Tesla AutoPilot accidents have inspired no such reaction, though. The moment might come more when a self-driving car is used by a terrorist or school shooter as a getaway vehicle than because of someone getting mowed down by an errant algorithm, the latter being a cause of death we've been relatively numbed to.
We are speculating here, we need numbers to see if this self driving cars are better, how do we get this numbers though? Is it fair for the citizens of a city to be forced to be part of this tests? Are we sure the correct number of incidents are reported from this tests? are the tests good enough for real world (are they testing in all conditions are avoid some streets or some weather to keep the numbers looking good)
I expect modern AI to recognize every car, pedestrian and physical object. I expect it to recognize all hostile targets and avoid them when feasible. I expect it to predict every possible move for both automated and manually controlled vessels and pedestrians. My AI needs to have an anti-gang mode that will protect the occupants even if that means acting as a weapon against hostiles. After all, people may be sending kids to grandma alone in the car (you know they will).
I expect all of this to occur without the need of network connectivity. My vehicle is to be prohibited from communicating without my express permission until after reviewing the data it wishes to upload.
Than number of car crashes is not the same in all countries,states or regions so I would hate that a safe city will be less safe in the future because of this.
I really really doubt that! The car manufacturers will fight tooth and nail to be seen as the company providing the safest cars
If every company has their own secret suite of test cases then different companies can specialize in different aspects of safety, and different AIs will be tuned to watch for different conditions.
Imagine if instead of that they all worked together to define a rigorous test suite. Then they would all be striving to excel against all of the tests that the best of them could come up with. Wouldn't that result in more rigorous testing than any individual company would do? Especially if the results of all of the tests were public?
To go another step further, imagine an open carAI platform that had the aforementioned test suite and a full simulation platform for testing changes, with different car manufacturers represented on a committee that oversees the carAI platform. Separate the smarts from the base car a bit and have some sort of abstraction layer between the smart bits and the car bits. As long as the abstraction layer is configured properly then different AIs would be interchangeable/upgradeable on the same base hardware. All car companies (and tech companies, and interested individuals) could collaborate on building the best, most efficient, safest car AI possible. People on older hardware would get all the same safety improvements as people on newer hardware (though hardware improvements would obviously improve things like sensor quality and quantity and the like), there wouldn't be fragmentation between ai ecosystems with poorer people trapped on older releases with lower safety standards while the rich get the latests and greatest and safest cars, etc.
Obviously competition is better than nothing, but is it really better than an open, collaborative alternative?
Maybe making the component open source would be the best for the citizens.
We seen competition not working in many sectors, like ISPs is US, operating systems for desktops or mobile phones...
IF the self driving component in the car could be swapped so you can buy say Tesla but get the self driving package from BMW or from Google then that could help competition, but without this if all companies have a similar failure rate then they can concentrate on competing on marketing,horse power, price, efficiency and not adding some extra safety, at least until some important person or a big number or children get killed by a very stupid issue like a car hit a wall because it did not see it because it got confused by some drawings on the wall.
Agreed!
I don't think car manufacturers is one of those sectors. Even if you take into account the periodic scandals (emission test, having to recall cars because they were literally killing people[0], etc) that pop up, cars have gotten massively safer over the past 50 years
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch...
((hey, wait a minute. Doesn't that mean we already have a legal framework for cars killing people?))
Humans cause accidents in certain cases, mostly by carelessness.
AI causes accidents in certain cases, mostly by its stupidity.
These are different cases they fail in. You shouldn't be comparing a driverless AI to a unaided human, but a human aided by the driverless AI acting as a driving aid (you know, like automatic emergency breaking). this way you get the best of both worlds, the attentiveness of the AI to dumb things, and the smartness of humans.
I am sure a driverless AI if good enough won't beat a human aided by the same driverless AI acting as a "autopilot/supervisor"
EG: Driving while very tired or intoxicated, or in a rage.
Though it does lead to interesting questions about whether the deaths that may occur now are acceptable if traffic deaths are reduced in the long term as a result of the testing.
> the DMV will require that those testing autonomous cars without a driver present have a dedicated communications channel that ties the car to a remote operator, who can take over if needed.
If IP based, what happens when the connection drops or lags? Will the car pull over, keep driving, or just stop in the middle of the road?
I did driving school for 4 hours before I got my own full license and car and was allowed to drive on my own. 4 hours.
Growing up in Michigan we had lots training with an instructor (who had his own set of brakes) before getting a permit that allowed us to drive with our parents. Then after a year or so you could get your full license.
What you describe can be the cause of the large number of accidents. Unfortunately the driving lessons won't prevent the young drivers acting out and doing accidents in their first years as a driver, because of those bad young drivers you get very expensive insurance for all young drivers so some young persons would register their cars on the parents name, here the insurance is paid by the owner not by the driver.
Source:[https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sen...]
A human has context where a machine does not. A human automatically knows that a ball being thrown in a yard can end up in the street.
A learner's permit also requires that a licensed driver be present. So there's a built in redundancy for decision making.
Machine learning or not, computers are simply profoundly stupid.
I'm not against autonomous vehicles but I'm fairly skeptical about them. They've improved a lot in a basic way but they don't handle corner cases very well. Unfortunately, driving involves a lot of corner cases due to the complexity of the environment.
I'm not sure how it is now, but according to someone talking to me privately at one company early programmers were SSHing into fucking moving cars with passengers and running commands on them and had it not been for the layers of redundant code would have crashed the car.
We need to regulate autonomous devices and we need to do it before there are billions of them. We need a public effort to get policy makers open source outlines of regulations; otherwise the car companies are going to be writing them and they aren't going to write in protections against black swan events and we're going to get the autonomous equivalent of a BP oil spill or worse one day.
There is also the issue with adversarial inputs to the AI, you could have someone put stickers everywhere that would crash the AI .
That ‘once’ could be One (or many) very bad accidents.
‘Company X fines $750m for incident where they caused 250 car crashes and 478 deaths’ is not a headline I want to see.
https://www.rightstep.com/resources/texas-addiction-informat...
I'll take that headline.
better than telnet!
I'll only have faith in driverless-car technology when, the companies who make the cars, have their own families drive by the cars and walk around in mock-city testing facility for an extended period of time. SITG
1. Companies developing autonomous vehicles have focused much of their efforts on remote piloting
2. Latency won't be a killer, especially if a quick intervention is required
3. From a safety point of view, this regulation seems too earlier as some companies with lagging tech may attempt to offer driverless services without safety driver to generate PR, please investors, etc. - basically "fake it 'til you make it", but playing with people's lives this time.
Probably not controlling them but observing vehicles and steering in case they stop working. E.g. if a car stops on a busy motorway because of a software fault, a remote controller could drive it to the shoulder or next exit to avoid congestion.
If this requirement continues past the trials stage, I guess we'll have some issues to work out.
Nomads 2.0, i.e self-driving car travellers: People who are constantly traveling to new destinations while being able to work from the comfort of their car.
So you need a tow truck to actually take the car into your control where you can do with it what you will (sell it, etc.). But if you had a tow truck, you could just steal any parked car, so how is the self-driving car worse off?
And from engineering perspective, it's absolutely awesome to work on it, I wish everybody could experience the feeling when a self-driving car you programmed makes its first drive on its own (I have experienced it).
Ethical risks are real though, both about who is responsible in case of fatality as well as what if the technology is going to be abused for military purposes (I already rejected to lead self-driving part of an off-road military vehicle in the past).
Except when you get in a situation with 100 vehicles, 12 of which need help, and you have 10 drivers.
Oops. Someone died.
I think the whole self driving thing is an inefficient way to move people tho
How exactly, and who's going to test it?
What happens if a "self driving car" gets a speeding ticket? Who is liable? The owner of the car? The programmer? The manufacturer?
What happens if it gets into a wreck? Same question.
How do self-driving cars respond to police? Do they pull over?
Call me skeptical but it really seems like there are far more issues with this than we realize...
I do not want some manager to think something like "don't worry about that bug, it is very rare so insurance will cover us in case something bad happens, we need to push the update now"
Software automation has already happened in other areas. If the bug was introduced on purpose or if there was insufficient oversight/negligence, people can go to jail. Not not any error automatically is a crime. If you kill someone with your car that doesn't mean that you'll be charged even if the accident was your fault.
That's already how insurance works. You pay by paying for insurance premiums. Why do you think people shouldn't be allowed to use insurance to cover accidents in just this situation?
I am not arguing that a person should pay with his freedom for a mistake, people do mistake, I am afraid that the bad behavior from software industry will apply to self driving cars, the move fast and brake things mentality,ship with known bugs etc.
But the price of the insurance takes into account the risk of a bug costing a life. They know if they make riskier decisions their insurance premiums will go up.
Insurance doesn't magically remove costs. It just amortises them. Loss adjusters have been experts at this for centuries.
The possible problem is who sets this price for a life, it needs to be high enough but not absurd.
It is an interesting point how would an insurance company calculate the risk when there is not that much real data.
If an airplane crashes all similar airplanes won't fly until the cause of the crash will be found and fixed in all the affected airplanes. I want similar responsibility from cars.
I see how easy they get approved to test self driving cars without the citizens having to vote if they should be test subjects and I am worried that this companies have a powerful lobby and that the rules and laws won't be fair for the citizens.
Other thing that worries me is that you allow self driving cars without a radar or any sensor that can detect a front collision, this also feels as letting companies to test their software on the expense of people lives.
This are my opinions, I hope you can understand what some people like me think about this situation and why we think that this is something new that needs good and fair laws and rules for the citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9311_Toyota_vehicle... (TL;DR: spaghetti code also kills people)
If your car's brakes fail and you run the red light because you had no way to stop, you are not at fault. Neither is the engineer that developed the braking system, unless they were criminally negligent.
If the software that runs the red light fails and gives everyone a green light and you run it and get in an accident, you are not at fault, and the person who wrote the code will not be going to jail, again unless they are found to be criminally negligent, or malicious.
If a systemic fault is found at any point, a recall will be done to remedy it.
This isn't some new class of problem here, this is the same old thing we have been dealing with for many years. You already rely on many many people doing their job correctly every day to not die, this is no different.
It would be a strange system which punishes humans for individual serious driving flaws but merely requires them to remedy it for introducing systematic serious driving flaws.
Not all though. For example in Poland you insure the vehicle and anyone with a valid driver licence is allowed to drive it and is fully covered. As a matter of fact it's enshrined in law that insurance companies have to provide cover no matter who drives the car, as long as there is insurance on the car.
I mean, I understand how it works now, but to me it still seems like an excuse to extract a lot more money from British drivers.
E.g. a 65 year old female driver with no claims and a low insurance premium. If she arbitrarily allows her 18 year old male neighbour to drive her car, the insurer would be exposed to a high risk. The only way to offset that would be to raise premiums for everyone.
Tbf - it self regulates to some extent. My dad wouldn't let me drive his car, because he knew that if I crashed it he would lose all of his discounts and pay a lot more. So even though I technically could drive his car and be insured, he wouldn't let me as that was a financial risk to him.
My post is now edited to be clearer.
Do the senior engineers in these firms have professional liability insurance
Operators and owners--negligence for using car without a driver, strict liability for ultra-hazardous activity
Manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, retailers, and anyone who makes products available--are liable under products liability for any manufacturing defect, design defect, or failure to warn of dangers.
Potential criminal penalties for anyone involved (including engineers) if they put out cars knowing they aren't ready yet) or fake results, etc.
One thing that keeps most car accidents from going into full scale massive litigation is that the drivers causing the accidents are usually not worth that much money.
But if I'm a plaintiff lawyer and my client got killed by a Google car? I'm not asking for the 500k dollars the insurance coverage provides. I'm asking for big numbers because juries are going to make Google pay for each death.