"Our love affair with self-driving cars is a form of 'techno-chauvinism,' Prof. Broussard says. 'It's the idea that technology is always the highest and best solution, and is superior to the people-based solution.'"
Other examples of this phenomenon:
Direct atmospheric carbon removal is bad. It encourages emissions!
Contraceptives are bad. They encourage sexual license! (I had to try to avoid the obvious joke here.)
Highways are bad! They encourage driving.
Word processors are bad. They discourage good penmanship!
Fertilizers and farm equipment are bad! They discourage small family farms!
GPS navigation is bad! It discourages map reading and mental direction finding!
Some of these examples look ridiculous to us now, but people really did think these things at some point. I see some opposition to autonomous vehicles falling into the same category.
For example, we could have a device on cars that transmit basic information. Such as licence ID number, speed, location, pedal position etc. It would be ridiculously useful data for a whole host of different things. You could use it to bill parking, catch speeders, sequence traffic lights, and warn of hazards ahead. And maybe even help self driving cars make sense of the world.
From a technological point of view this is a no-brainer. But this is incompatible with the way that we think about cars and roads. Every car has to pretend to be isolated from every other car.
Yeah, it becomes a brainer, though, when you ask “how do you deal with malicious transmitters”, since the answer to that tends to involve developing the systems to monitor the same variables externally without trusting the transmitted values, and once you do that, what is he transmitted data for?
Using transmitted data for less safety-critical things like route intent for efficient holisitc route optimization, with a penalty system for misrepresentation might be useful, though.
Maybe you could have a lower power transponder style technology in addition. This would just broadcast an ID after a fixed amount of time in response to a request. This could be compared against radar,visual, and broadcast information to actively verify data. And critically it could be independent of the rest of the cars systems. Obviously that is not a solution, but it does add another layer of redundancy
To wit: It's not enough to say "Our self-driving cars avoid 14,000 drunk-driving, texting and asleep-at-the-wheel fatalities," if it's also true that: "Our self-driving cars hit and kill 30 errant pedestrians a year that a human driver would have noticed."
I know that 14,000 > 30. But the specter of roadway martyrs being murdered by killing machines needs only a few examples to sustain itself.
Tough problem to solve.
It will be a gradual transition as they learn how to handle more and more situations.
I don't believe a computer will ever be as good a driver as I am in my lifetime in terms of my personal safety, except for when I'm really old and possibly can't see well.
The vast majority of accidents by human drivers are caused by basic neglect, not tricky edge case situations. I think it's hard to really comprehend just how bad humans are at driving. It wouldn't take anything close to a perfect autonomous system to do better--just having "drivers" that actually pay attention to their surroundings all the time would be a massive improvement, even if there were occasional bugs and glitches.
Really? No one knows if we will ever improve on self-driving cars than the current technology today? I'm going to stick my neck out and say "Yes, I know that will move past that."
We've been there before.
After the AI winter, many people argued AI will never come, and many achievements we already have (such as speech recognition) are impossible.
Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die.
Perhaps self-driving cars can be deployed in a limited way, as taxis, for example.
Sure it is, but it's doing a hell of a lot better than many critics thought ever possible.
>Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die.
People will always die. Requiring with certainty that self-driving cars will never cause accidents is a purely emotional instinct with no regard for facts or well-being of people. The only thing that self driving cars need to demonstrate is statistically lower deaths or injuries caused per mile (or hour) of driving than the average human would cause. This would mean that adoption of technology would reduce total deaths if substituted for human drivers, which is what actually matters.
He is right - the problem with your response to this statement is that it doesn't identify the _actual_ reason behind why they need to be better, and it's a problem identified by the article in question: When a human driver swerves randomly and kills someone, we know EXACTLY who is to blame, and something can be done. If a driverless car, or even a car with "driverless technology" that also has a driver in it (like the Tesla driver mentioned in the article) hits someone and god forbid kills them, we still have no idea who is to blame for that problem, because it practically becomes a marketing argument in some cases.
Before we can be okay with driverless cars, ESPECIALLY if we don't plan on them being 100% accident free, we need to solve a lot of ethical and legal battles that don't seem to be even on the minds of the people that tout this as the future, or a necessity.
That strikes me as weird.
Also, the people who will be paying out damages will be exactly the same as the people who are paying out for them today. The insurance companies.
The simple solution to these "ethical" issues is for everyone to have insurance, and for the insurance to pay out.
And I am sure that the insurance companies will be very happy with this arrangement, as reduced accident rates mean that they make more money.
Insurance only works if the insuree bears the risk (and it has to be an actual risk with nonzero probability times cost, i'll leave why as an exercise to the reader) and in the case of car accidents, that risk is liability, which people have and computers don't. Can TSLA or Uber be charged and convicted of vehicular manslaughter?
Lower rate of accidents will just lower the market rate of insurance contracts.
Sure they will. People pay for insurance now, and the insurance companies will give you a discounted price for your self driving car insurance.
Why wouldn't I want to accept liability in exchange for a cheaper policy? I would win as well as the insurance company.
The benefit is clear. And this is an exchange that many many people would be willing to make if it meant that their insurance prices were cut in half. It's free money to the consumers.
You are treating this as if this is some new problem. Your car can already have the wheel fall off, due to no fault of your own, and you'll crash, and the insurance company will pay for it.
Car manufacturers already, in the US, bear strict liability for damages resulting from manufacturing defects in perpetuity, and bear the cost of that liability either by self-insurance or some form of liability insurance contract.
> Can TSLA or Uber be charged and convicted of vehicular manslaughter?
Irrelevant to the insurance issue, since criminal penalties are uninsurable; more relevant is can they be held civilly liable for wrongful death resulting from a defect in a vehicle they make, to which the answer is clearly “yes”.
* Humans and computers can make mistakes on both.
But, my wife and I can teach our kid everything we have learned over the years, to prevent 1, and try to reduce 2. I consider ourselves better than average drivers, if I get my kid a self driving car that is not as good as us, I won't care that it drives better than my neighbor or someone in California.
And in a tragic scenario, it's one thing to say, my kid made a fatal mistake vs, some random QA didn't do a good job and now my family is minus 1
And now my phone can beat the world champion.
I will, at the same time, support self-driving car research.
Speech recognition can be good, but sometimes it seems to go haywire. It did nail this post though.