Did anyone in Tesla's Legal Department review the rolling stop feature? This should have screamed illegal. Heck, I'm no legal expert but it screams illegal to me.
Ideally the traffic laws should be updated to be more realistic.
...much safer than human-driven cars, because they never tire and they never break traffic rules and thus never cause accidents
and
...supposed to bend and break traffic rules like humans quite often do in order to be efficient drivers
How should that be possible? Ah yeah, by having self-driving cars which are so extremely intelligent that they don't just follow the legal rules, but some idealistic set of rules deviating from the written laws that no human has ever been able to write down concisely, let alone bring into algorithmic form, but that is at the same time 100% safe and very efficient at allowing a maximum number of vehicles to reach their individual destinations in the shortest time possible.
Anyone not convinced that L5 self-driving cars are impossible without first developing a strong AGI way above human intelligence levels should have a really good solution for this obvious contradiction.
This isn't surprising either. The process of making laws is political and politics are clearly not an ideal way to decide on a perfect and exhaustive and precisely detailed set of rules for anything. The laws do not constitute an algorithm for driving. They are necessarily simplified. And yes, a self driving car is going to need a set of driving rules that are much more detailed than anything humans have written down before.
Absolutely not, at least in the context of speed limits. Where I live, most of the speed limits are at least 15mph lower than they should be (why is a 6 lane road 30mph???), so you get:
* people who follow the speed limit exactly: 30mph
* people who follow the speed limit the road was designed for: 45mph
* people who see the limit as a "limit:" 25mph
It's a mess. Roads need to be designed to the desired speed limit. Don't make a 6-lane straight road 30mph; people unfamiliar with the area will assume the speed limit's 50% higher than it is, and people from the area will feel like they're going incredibly slow.
In short, it should be uncomfortable to go >= 20mph over by design if you want people to follow your speed limits.
I hate this so much. Selective enforcement only serves to enable overzealous enforcement against unpopular and disenfranchised groups.
One does one small thing wrong and they can then tack a large handful of other charges that would never otherwise be enforced. It's disgusting.
Make the rules things that should actually be rules. Enforce them as written. The end.
The fact that you start your post about how an AI can make such a determination with the words "it's not complicated" discredits you.
The assertion that a significant difference exists is not complicated and is easy to prove.
1) they have to be simple enough to fit in an AVERAGE DRIVER's head (it is a miracle to me that highways in cities are as functional and low-error as they are yes I know the death statistics on driving)
2) the law makers know the laws will be bent, so they set a baseline of VERY VERY SAFE and hope that most people only bend the law to VERY SAFE or at worst MOSTLY SAFE.
It seems weird given how "bad" self-driving algs are right now, but with a detailed database of locations and context, I absolutely believe the "rolling stop" logic in the car would be safer and more effective than a human observing complete stops.
I definitely do not agree with Tesla's vision-only no-location-context algorithm approach. Such a thing is a baseline, but if you know the location to where you are going, then route-specific data should be downloaded that has been optimized with multiple specific AI computation passes.
That's how humans work: we are slow and dumb when we are driving in unfamiliar locations and routes, but for our commute routes we know where potholes are, cracks in the road, which lane to be in, dangerous sidestreets and intersections and congestion points, etc.
So I disagree that L5 is impossible. Well, it depends on "way above human intelligence". I think what you are trying to say is you need a supersapient intellect with IQ 195.
But AIs can be "dumb" but have access to a far larger memory space and database and respond to a far wider bandwidth of sensor information. The AI programs may not be solving Fermat's Last Theorem in the margin of a book, but they can be smarter in the sense that it's like having a million gnomes watching at once.
I'd say even "normal human intelligence" would suffice for at least getting L5 to work (maybe not with perfect safety and efficiency, but working at all). But you cannot remove the need for actual "intelligence" from the equation, and that's the problem: our AIs are not "intelligent" at all. They are idiot savants, and driving a car isn't exactly a problem where you need savant-like capabilities. It is a very general, broad-range problem, which is much more applicable for the broad mental capabilities of even the not-so-smart part of humanity.
Case in point: there are human savants in areas like playing chess or Go or recognizing text in many different spoken languages, but there are no human savants in the area of driving cars on public roads.
Or possibly they just know that real world driving involves so many context-dependent decisions that trying to cover it all with laws is about as reasonable as making a self driving car.
I think it's the nerds that are delusional.
Not really. You can fail to see a pedestrian and cripple them and you won't see a whole lot of consequences for your "accident" (negligence).
Breaking rules on a case-by-case basis is also how the normalization of deviance occurs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o
If you break rules when you think you don't need to follow them you'll find that you're not 99.9% perfect and you will inevitably cause a crash.
If you follow the rules all the time you won't make that error.
The reason why computers should ultimately replace human drivers is precisely because we're dangerously incompetent and overconfident and shouldn't be breaking any rules.
Their legal department works studiously to handwave away every marketing statement.
"The driver is only in the seat for legal purposes. The car is driving itself." - "You are entirely responsible for driving the vehicle."
"Use Summon to bring your car to you while dealing with a fussy child." - "Pay attention to vehicle at all times."
Computers cannot "think" at any speed.
No, because they never tire and almost never break traffic rules in dangerous ways, and thus cause accidents much less frequently than humans. Realistically, this means that instead of following the speed limit they'd follow speed limit + X, instead of keeping the prescribed distance they'd keep whatever distance human drivers typically maintain (while still keeping enough distance to react and stop), and it also means rolling through 4-way stops when they have sufficient confidence that it is safe to do so.
Which, last I checked for the state of WA, is also illegal. Just because there isn’t a cop ticketing every rolling stop at the intersection next to the elementary school by my house doesn’t make it “kind of okay because a lot of people do it”. It just means the municipality sucks at enforcement.
If the speed limit is 60 mph, but everybody is going 75 mph, then the safest speed for you as an individual is going to be 75 mph. Otherwise, you're a rolling road block, likely to get rear-ended, forcing tons of cars to change lanes to get around you.
I state the above entirely on its own merits, not as a judgment of "should I or should I not travel at speed X on this road".
On surface streets, speed limits are usually quite reasonable. In all the streets I drive regularly, I think the limits are good, except for one stretch where it has two lanes in each direction, and so I often want to go 45 mph, but the limit is 35, likely because there are some houses that directly face the street.
It's highways that often have unreasonably slow speed limits, at least here in Oregon.
When it's 35 vs. 40 it's a lot safer to sit at the speed limit.
And in a 25 zone there's not really a flow of traffic to worry about.
(The joke here is that OR’s speed limit on highways is typically 10mph below that of other PNW states, even in the “least populated county in the U. S.)
It makes no sense when all you have to do is not use self driving.
In the longer term - I suspect we will develop two different sets of laws as we understand what things robots do well and what things they do not. For example: I suspect that robots might be allowed to drive slightly faster on highways because they are better at maintaining the proper following distance, but always drive at the lowest speed limit for roads with variable conditions because they struggle to evaluate the environment.
Erring towards 100% cautious at all times isn't always better, it needs to be a balance between controlling the risk of accidents with the costs: time taken for individual drivers, general congestion of roads, even things like fuel consumption.
Risks vary according to weather conditions, traffic levels, times of day, etc etc. A prescriptive approach (e.g. always drive at X speed) isn't usually optimal.
are you joking? The risk of driving is injuries and death, primarily born by those _not_ in a car. How somebody weighs this with speeding or rolling stops, or any other form of acting like a careless driver is beyond me.
Most importantly, safe driving is good form. Speeding is trashy.
There are some states where it was found illegal to have someone slow down too fast, i.e. you can't have a 70 mph zone followed by a 30 mph zone. That would in fact constitute a speed trap of kinds, since no one can safely slow down 50 mph in an instant. The practical effect of this is 3 or 4 series of signs spaced exactly 100 ft or so, each one lowering the speed limit no more than 15 mph. It's the equivalent of a 'braking zone' on a race track, but on the street.
In some countries, it's not clear if you don't read the local language(Morocco, i'm looking at you!), but if the inverted red triangle exist, just do full stop.
Perhaps a better example is stop lines at intersections; sometimes stop lines are so poorly painted that you cannot see any oncoming traffic unless you pull forward another 5-6 feet. The letter of the law says you still must completely stop at the stop line, pull forward and completely stop again, then continue. Does anybody actually do that?
Because you're operating heavy machinery that regularly kills people.
----------
>The comment you are replying to said nothing about the law.
>> Why bother?
>Because you're operating heavy machinery that regularly kills people.
The context of the quote by globular-toast is from this paragraph:
>When driving I follow the spirit of the law, not necessarily the letter. If I'm approaching a stop sign and I can see clearly there are no other vehicles, bikes, people, etc, I slow down to very near a stop, but not a full stop. Why bother? The spirit of the law is to make sure I'm correctly yielding to other vehicles.
There's no doubt there was reference to law.
One of those things will get better as technology advances and more R&D is done on it, the other thing will not and hasn't for a very long time. Unless I misunderstood your comment and you are actually referring to some form of transhumanity?
"Roundabout vs. 4-way stop, which one is superior?" - Interesting Engineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brkrYdlMCsg
Who cares how much carbon it saves when people get horrific injuries from it? If you want to save the planet, build intersections designed for rolling like roundabouts, crosswalks with signaling, and yield signs.
There are loads of stop signs at intersections where pedestrians would rarely if ever cross, maybe it would be possible to differentiate those intersections from crosswalks.
FTFY.
If you increase the speed limit by 10mph, humans will just adjust up too.
I do agree that interstate speed laws need to be updated. The most dangerous spot I drive on an interstate is crossing a state line that drops from 70mph to 55mph. The slower zone is so dangerous because some people are then going 55mph and some still want to go 80mph.
I don't see how self driving can be anything other than the most perfect letter of the law driver though.
I'm not a "nuisance" for not going faster and breaking the speed limit. Everyone else is the "nuisance" and I vote for stronger enforcement where possible.
Too many people seem to believe that the only thing that matters is the road in front of them, they don't consider the side roads at all. The city is talking about narrowing the lanes on the main street to reduce speed and add bike lanes, and it can't happen soon enough.
So if you are being passed like crazy and going the speed limit, the speed limit is set incorrectly, and you are, in fact, the nuisance.
They are absolutely, for breaking the law, the nuisance in these situations. The number of people breaking the law does not change what the law is or, even necessarily, what the law should be.
Can you substantiate that assertion somehow? People drive the speed that they feel safe with, but that is not necessarily true. It may be safe most of the time, but change due to external circumstances. It’s safe most of the time to drive 50km/h in a residential zone, except that one time when a child jumps out from behind a car.
Deliberately going the speed limit when it results in other drivers constantly passing you increases the danger to to everyone else around you significantly.
Please give this some thought.
Ideally, the German model would be enforced. Slower traffic keeps right, left lanes are for overtaking. And many places are unrestricted, meaning there's no speed limit. The system works quite well, and the flow of traffic is _vastly_ more predictable, and feels a lot safer than the US interstate system.
It's a bad law that endangers people and should be changed. Going an unsafe speed is another law, and its entirely possible that there is no speed that does not violate one of those laws. The law is a relic of when cars were less safe, and the same safety can be achieved with much higher speeds.
There is also the issue of meatspace. Maybe your modern car can exceed the speed limit of the road surface and safely handle itself. Meanwhile, we still have our biology to deal with, which has not hardened itself to survive an impact at a high speed with a car. Only after millions of years of pedestrian deaths will that evolution be possible. When you find yourself driving 45-50mph on a road signed for 35mph, just know that if a pedestrian were to step out and appear in front of you, you are virtually guaranteed to kill them at this speed, and if you respected the signage, they have a better chance of surviving this impact.
> When you find yourself driving 45-50mph on a road signed for 35mph, just know that if a pedestrian
Change the road to be a 35mph road. It'll be cheaper too.
I suggest that this will in practice feel like you are being "passed like crazy".
Just like you will find people complain about taking their manual shift away when none of the US drivers ever knew what they are even missing.
At least when I grew up in Australia, part of the road laws was a statement, very close to this effect:
"You are required to drive at the maximum speed that is 1) within the speed limit, 2) is appropriate for the conditions, and 3) within your ability to control the vehicle".
And that was the rationale for ticketing 'too slow' drivers. Within those constraints, there was no reason for you to go more slowly, and posed unnecessary risk to those who were within those criteria.
In high school there was only a handful of things I learned that were actually useful, outside of social experiences. One of them was a teacher who taught business and law classes. In a business class he shared with us, first saying he could probably get fired for telling us this, but that if we had good ideas, new we had a good idea for a business, then instead of going to university and getting $40,000+ into debt over 4 years - get a job and/or apprenticeship and work on your idea. At the end of that 4 years he suggested you'd be in a much better position than those who went into higher education; of course it depends on what someone's goals are. In law class he gave an example: in some states in the US there are very long stretches of road where you won't see anyone for awhile, and sometimes there are traffic lights on a straight road - with no intersection. He put forward to the question of what do you do if that traffic light is red when you come up to it? There's zero vehicles near you in either direction, there's no intersection to worry about cross-traffic, and so do you stop and wait for the light to go green, or do you go again even though it's red? I think every reasonable person would answer that they would go. E.g. A rolling stop in some circumstances isn't dangerous for anyone; and I also see police doing it all the time.
Of course AI deciding when to do it when it may not yet be accounting for the whole or an adequate enough of environment does add questions, and because it's not critical to self-driving, I believe it's a good idea to not allow it until that conversation can be thoroughly hashed out, as well as the technology much more thoroughly tested and evolved.
Edit: Lazy people downvote - find something better to do with your time, or some other form of entertainment.
That's why rolling stop laws don't always end up with you getting a ticket. I was pulled over a year or two after first getting my license for executing a rolling stop. The cop reminded me what I'd done, recognized that I was a dumb kid and a relatively new driver, told me to cross my heart and promise I'd never do it again, and let me go. Enforcement is circumstantial and nobody's going to follow that rule if they're not aware that they could get in trouble for it.
>In law class he gave an email: in some states in the US there are very long stretches of road where you won't see anyone for awhile, and sometimes there are traffic lights on a straight road - with no intersection. He put forward to the question of what do you do if that traffic light is red when you come up to it? There's zero vehicles near you in either direction, there's no intersection to worry about cross-traffic, and so do you stop and wait for the light to go green, or do you go again even though it's red? I think every reasonable person would answer that they would go. E.g. A rolling stop in some circumstances isn't dangerous for anyone; and I also see police doing it all the time.
Many such stop lights exist because they provide a safe space to cross the road for pedestrians. In fact there are a few such lights near me in long stretches of road, among woods, that allow people walking through trails in the woods to cross the road. I stop at those lights every single time. Why? Because I don't know if someone has crossed yet. Could be that it's a family trying to cross the street, and they had to go back to the trail to corral a kid that wandered the other way and they'll be crossing the street in a second. Or, it could be a group of people - some of them have crossed, others are shortly behind and will be coming out in a second.
The point is that, often, I don't know what is or isn't there. And unless I know, I'm going to stop.
>Edit: Lazy people downvote - find something better to do with your time, or some other form of entertainment.
Happy now?
Morale has improved, the beatings can stop.
You're right, and it's the same with jaywalking - it's usually only enforced or a fine or charge laid if the action causes a collision or harm.
In the example I gave there wasn't pedestrian crossing as part of the example, and in it you also stop at the light first. In your scenario it sounds like there are blind spots too, whereas I guess I left out some language, like the road was in a desert with full visibility everywhere. Of course, you need to always fully stop or be rolling slowly enough, say if you're making a right-hand turn at a red light [where legal], so that you can stop quickly enough if you see past the blind spot that traffic is coming.
I'd guess that's a speed deterrent. Long stretches of flat, open road with nothing around to crash into are very inviting for people looking to race. Get going fast enough and you risk losing control of your vehicle and crashing into other people, say an oncoming car. Those red lights, assuming I'm understanding your scenario correctly, encourage people to maintain a safer pace of travel.
>Of course, you need to always fully stop or be rolling slowly enough, say if you're making a right-hand turn at a red light...
... no. There is no "or be rolling slowly enough". Stop.
Sure, or perhaps it makes people who maybe zoned out give them an opportunity to see how fast they're going - and slow down, and they get an opportunity to see if they slowed down fast enough to stop at the red light - before reaching the next red light which maybe is in a little town up ahead a bit, so if they didn't stop in time for the first red light then they've kind of been notified to be more careful next time. But the exercise was to ask: if it's 100% safe to go at a red light [once you've stopped at it], with zero potential for anyone getting hurt, do you go through the red light, or do you wait until it turns green?
It makes for quite the interesting psychological test seeing how different people answer, similar I suppose to the whole train track scenario - where your train is going to crash - and you have a few options; Will Smith in iRobot has related trauma as well, the robot's AI determined to save him - an adult - over the young girl, even though he was trying to command the robot to save the little girl.
> ... no. There is no "or be rolling slowly enough". Stop.
If you're at a stop sign or red traffic light, and if it's legal in your jurisdiction to turn right on, you have to start rolling forward - and are allowed to even if there's a blindspot and can't see any traffic coming yet [the road could be clear or not] - so if you're going slowly enough and there's no traffic then you continue, if you all of a sudden can see past the blindspot and there's enough time to safely go then you continue, if there isn't enough time to pull out then you stop.
Stop and wait. Keep those good habits a part of your second nature.
>If you're at a stop sign or red traffic light, and if it's legal in your jurisdiction to turn right on, you have to start rolling forward - and are allowed to even if there's a blindspot and can't see any traffic coming yet [the road could be clear or not...
This is true, but you are missing one very important caveat; you pull up to the stop sign, THEN YOU STOP, and then you slowly inch forward to see past the blind spot and continue on per the rest of your comment.
I think the law as-is is already ambiguous enough (due to its complex nature) that our society waste huge amount of energy and resources arguing about its meanings. Anything that can be "rigidly" defined (and therefore enforced) with little downside* is a win in my book, purely from a practical perspective.
* Just like in this particular case (rolling stop), the "downside" of enforcing full stop compared to a subjective "safe rolling stop" is close to none.
And about the spirit of the law, to me it's pretty simple: if an illegal practice works better in this regard than the "legal" alternative, sure, we should seriously consider if we need to punish people doing so.
But in most of cases people bringing this in, both practices are perfectly aligning with the spirit of the law. Paired with the practicality argument above, there isn't much point to allow rolling stop as it doesn't make the road "safer" than full-stop.
Also, as someone coming from a country that doesn't have stop sign, people are spoiled and don't know how genius this idea is.
In an ideal world where everyone follows traffic law and pay full attention to the road all the time, stop sign isn't really needed. However, people are not machine. The whole points of stop sign is to force these distracted drivers to pay attention at intersections, even if only out of fear of getting a ticket. This kind of "foolproof" safety technique is not as excessive as it may look like at the first glance. Therefore, I'd argue having people full stopping is exactly the spirit of stop sign.
Simple, binding, easy to follow rules are important when the cost of mistakes is death or significant damage
There is nuance. Pilots are the final authority when it comes to the safety of the craft, and you're in the clear if your actions were justified. With self driving cars, we're discussing where the boundaries are and when the vehicle's decision can take precedence over coarse legal code (as occurs with human drivers every day).
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.3 (14 CFR § 91.3 - Responsibility and authority of the pilot in command.)
(private pilot who has deviated from ATC commands in GA aircraft and had to fill out a written report over a cup of coffee)
That's the only justification we have here for making rolling stops.
If you must know, I downvoted you because you whines about downvotes. Sure, I'm lazy, but at least I don't cry about internet points.
Maybe brainstorm as to what the actual implications of the dopamine hit/easy reward to downvote/suppress content is vs. simply having an upvote mechanism, and then share your thoughts and I'd be happy to get into a conversation with you. It doesn't sound like you've spent the time to actually extrapolate to the full consequences of the downvote mechanism.
Your response here though is one prime example as to why downvotes for most content types shouldn't exist. That you spent the tiny effort to click downvote to react to what you perceived as my "whining" - that that was a strong enough trigger or annoyance for you emotionally says more about your emotional regulation than the content of what I said, likewise by actually commenting you outed yourself or rather shared your actual qualitative reaction/response - so now there's an opportunity for a conversation, to broaden or enhance your understand or perhaps get educated by seeing things more from my perspective.
Don't you think having a qualitative response vs. a single quantitative digit changing to suppress content in an algorithm is more valuable to you, to society?
P.S. Upvoted you for commenting. Now maybe your comment won't be at the bottom, interesting how the "worst" or less valuable or lowest quality [qualitative] comments naturally make their way to the bottom - without requiring the downvote mechanism, isn't it?
P.P.S It'd be neat if HN/dang would offer a parallel view of posts, and then in the actual thread view, have 2 columns of comments - one not influenced by downvotes, and the other as the status quo - so people can start to experience and contrast; because AFAIK downvotes/upvotes aren't available in the API, so a third-party can't develop this? I'd certainly develop this system if HN's API could facilitate it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljzj9Msli5o
You can get away with it a hundred times, or a thousand times, but eventually you'll be tired and do it and clobber a pedestrian you didn't see because "you were tired" (so its not your fault, even though it 100% is).
Stop thinking the way you do and stop being one of the 88% of American drivers who think they're above average. Follow the goddamn rules because you're not 99.99% perfect and its the .01% that is going to hurt someone else.
And "I see the police doing it all the time" clearly isn't the right moral barometer, if you haven't been paying attention.
You're making assumptions too, it seems, of what scenarios I believe it's safe for rolling stops to occur - or what state a person will be in when they're doing it. For example, I don't drive when I'm very tired, and whether I am tired at all or not, if weather conditions or if traffic conditions
Maybe we shouldn't allow airplanes to been flown anymore because "you can get away with it a hundred times, or a thousand times, but eventually you'll" crash?
I wonder if you're convoluting different rules, like your assumptions, and not differentiating that different rules are more serious than others - giving the same weight to less serious rules than those that are more serious. E.g. Speeding through a red light during rush hour is different than a pedestrian jaywalking - yet both are illegal.
And before someone comes in to say a jaywalker can't do the same damage as a vehicle, here's my personal story: I was riding my bicycle, going a normal speed, vehicles parked along the side as they were allowed to - and the perfect scenario for a collision occurred: a tall, strong man walked out into the street - looking the opposite direction first - from behind a box van with no windows, and stepped right into my path with no time for me to put my breaks on. I crashed into him - he didn't actually move - and I had whiplash, my jaw slammed shut, I bite the right side tip of my tongue 80% off in a deep cut, and multiple teeth were split and chipped; him and his girlfriend didn't stay around, they actually laughed about it as they walked away, and I was in shock - and in pain - and so I didn't realize I should have called the police.
> I think every reasonable person would answer that they would [run the red light in the middle of nowhere].
I tend not to do it. Not because I have some overinflated worship of the letter of the law, but simply because it doesn't matter to me. If I'm in a hurry, I'll probably blow through it, but by default, probably not.
Edit: I also agree that you're being downvoted simply because people disagree with you or your style. It's something I'm getting somewhat tired of on HN. I think they need some concrete guidance on what's acceptable to downvote and try to keep it as much to "rules violations" as possible, because it's increasingly being used as a disagreement flag lately, in my observation, which is just unhealthy.
If I'm responsible, then I can choose to have the car break the law on my behalf, and accept the consequences.
I always wonder how this plays out on a granular level. Some folks have to be thinking / asking if this is a good idea or not.