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Comment by Buldak | Hacker News Reader

We like the idea of technological solutions that don't require us to change our lifestyle or make hard choices. Driverless cars are appealing because they would allow us to largely maintain the status quo (as opposed to, say, reorienting toward public transportation). It's like an obese person who says, "I don't want to eat healthy and exercise. Why can't scientists just invent low-calorie versions of the food I like?"

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Really? I don't like to fetch water from a lake every day to my house. Instead of using technology to bring water to my house, what lifestyle changes or hard choices should I rather make?

The great invention for dealing with this is a public utility that provides water to everyone. A mass transit system for water.

But why not a fully-autonomous robot that employs machine learning to detect nearby lakes and streams that can hand-deliver the water?

Tuche!

The bigger problem, IMHO, is the attitude that it's some kind of moral quandry if technology allows us to solve a problem without effort. For example, I've heard people really say that an obesity-preventing drug would be a bad thing because it would discourage exercise. This fetishization of hardship does a lot of harm, because in reality, the kind of progress we can make as a civilization essentially amounts to refocusing exertion on increasingly impactful things.

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.

Okay, what is the allegedly obvious joke about contraceptives?

They too encourage emissions.

We like the idea of technology improving our quality of life because as a civilization it's worked for us spectacularly so far. Driverless cars are appealing because they build on top of a transportation solution that already works, reducing the problems and externalities of it, without requiring us to completely overhaul the way we build cities and live which could take decades. When half of the world lives in remote or insecure areas, driving vs public transport is not a lazy lifestlye choice like eating poorly. Autonomous cars will also bring about a lot of new use cases which could improve public transport design, reach and usage, like driving you to a metro station which has no parking in the morning and picking you up in the afternoon.

And as a society we reject a lot of possible technology out of hand.

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.

> From a technological point of view this is a no-brainer.

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.

I think that safety critical systems need to deal with bad data anyway. Adding an extra level of redundancy makes sense.

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

Sounds preferable in both cases to me What is the non tech solution for automobiles, better designed cities?

Sounds to me like driverless cars are easier than redesigning existing cities.

Redesigning cities to be less reliant on cars is pretty much a solved problem. It just needs a few decades of focused policies. Check out for example how the Netherlands became bike friendly by relentless improvement since the seventies.

And being completely flat and never getting very hot/cold. Bikes aren't really workable in most cities as a primary form of transit.

Ebikes make most cities flat, and the Netherlands only relies on bikes for last mile transport. Medium and long-haul routes in the Netherlands have great transit options.

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