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.
Computers cannot "think" at any speed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
It makes no sense when all you have to do is not use self driving.
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.
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.
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.
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".
(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.)
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.
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.
"Roundabout vs. 4-way stop, which one is superior?" - Interesting Engineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brkrYdlMCsg
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.