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Comment by aeturnum | Hacker News Reader

I do think this is a little unfair, but I think it points to a real issue "around" driverless cars (that is not the cars' fault exactly): everyone is trained to deal only with human agents.

It does seem like the car "acted reasonably" (so to speak) - but it still did not act like a person which is what the emergency workers were trained for. The challenge of integrating non-human actors into a previously human-only space is, I think, going to be more difficult and wide-ranging than we imagine. It will probably require a substantial commitment that goes beyond the self-driving car companies.

It's worth saying that a lot of the critique of self-driving cars is that...they were sold on the premise that they would integrate into "existing infrastructure" without big changes and critics have always felt that would not really happen. We've had self driving cars in special environments for...50 years now?

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> It does seem like the car "acted reasonably"

I would firmly say that it did not act reasonably. Blocking the other lane of traffic is the second worst action I can think of, only behind ramming into the emergency vehicle. It would have been better to ignore the emergency vehicle and continue driving, which would have at least cleared the jam.

I worked in the space at one point, and I would put the issue down to autonomous vehicles being trained entirely to keep themselves safe. E.g. they know to stay a certain distance from other cars, but they have no concept of "could another get around me?". A similar example would be parking. On a street without lines to mark spaces, I would not be surprised to see an autonomous vehicle park in the middle of a space large enough for 2 cars, preventing someone from using the rest of the space. Another would be opening space for someone to merge. I don't think that's something they ever do on purpose.

We're teaching them to not hit things or get hit by things, rather than teaching them how to drive, which is a far more nuanced skill. The same thing would have happened with 2 autonomous vehicles, because neither even attempts to understand what the other is trying to do. They would just deadlock until the garbage truck moved.

> It would have been better to ignore the emergency vehicle and continue driving, which would have at least cleared the jam.

With the fire truck using the oncoming lane to overtake the garbage truck, and with the articles saying a human could have reversed back into the intersection to clear the lane, it sounds like the fire truck would be in the way of the autonomous car just driving forwards.

> The same thing would have happened with 2 autonomous vehicles, because neither even attempts to understand what the other is trying to do

I don't think this is true in general - they seem to rely heavily on judging the intent/target of other vehicles to predict future path and react to those possibilities.

Likely that the autonomous car A (in the position of the fire truck) would not overtake the garbage truck when it can see car B oncoming in that lane in the first place, but in the event that it does occur, car B would likely slow to prevent a potential accident (understanding car A is attempting an overtake and may continue forward) and car A would probably pull back in behind the garbage truck (understanding that it'd be in the way of car B continuing forwards).

> I do think this is a little unfair, but I think it points to a real issue "around" driverless cars (that is not the cars' fault exactly): everyone is trained to deal only with human agents.

> It does seem like the car "acted reasonably" (so to speak) - but it still did not act like a person which is what the emergency workers were trained for.

I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree.

There's no reason to expect self-driving cars to play by a looser set of rules than human drivers in the same arena.

If a self-driving car fails to behave properly on the road, that's a fault of the self-driving car.

Blaming everyone else for expecting a car on the road to behave like any other car on the road feels like victim blaming. We shouldn't have to drive around guessing which cars are human-driven or self-driven and change our behavior accordingly. There's no way that's going to work.

if a reckless driver would just abandon the car in the middle of the road the situation would be the same. (eg. double parking)

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