Driverless Cars Get Green Light in California
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And that's just from ~20 seconds off the top of my head. I'm glad lawmakers are allowing the future to happen and I hope this puts pressure on other states to join in.
It remains to be seen if those savings can actually be realized of course.
But robotic drivers don't care. You can dick them around as much as you want (tell them you'll be home at 6, then tell them 7, then tell them 2am). It doesn't bug them having to wait around for you.
Consequently the vast majority of the time deliveries will happen around your availability. That is probably good enough 99% of the time. As to what happens when you are out of town, the delivery can just wait till you get back.
The exception to this will be autonomous taxis, of course.
There is a difference between what "is" and how the system responds to what "is". In this case I don't doubt for a moment that drivers of self driving cars would use this technique to economic advantage, and yes if it got too bad it would invoke a response (much like the $5 parking meters with credit card readers in them was a response to cars in general).
(Too bad it'll probably be a while before robot cars can legally operate without a human in the driver's seat and paying attention, though)
The cars won't orbit though, they will go park themselves or pick up someone else for an errand.
This does mean we don't need the huge car parks around places of interest as everyone can be dropped off and picked up at the front door.
(And when the car is going to self park, it can use speeds and routes that avoid adding congestion to the people trying to get somewhere.)
That alone limits the potential "disruptiveness" quite a bit.
Commercial planes have had autopilot for years, but they still require at least the pilot or co-pilot to sit behind the yoke.
When driverless cars have had a few million or billion hours without statistically significant incidents, I think we'll see the laws adapt to not even requiring a human fail-safe.
If an airliner is flown with less than two crew in the cockpit, even for a short period of time, the remaining pilot/co-pilot must wear a mask when flying above 25,000ft.
No licensed driver, car encounters situation it's not programmed for.
Now what?
So, if the car is proven to be absolutely safe, then why do we need a driver? To pull it off the road after it shuts off or stops?
I don't know if the rest of the quote is accurate.
For that matter, shared, scheduled cars on a neighbourhood scale would be pretty great.
- 7 year old kids can now own and "drive" a car.
- Need a lift? Ask your dad/friend to send his car to pick you up.
- Forgot your laptop at home? Send your car back and ask your flatmate to put your laptop in the car.
- Leaving New York for some vacations in Miami? Take the plane and pick up your car whenever it arrives.
- Want to take a nap? Pull down the windows and windshield curtains.
- Traveling abroad for a few weeks and don't know what to do with your car? Set it to taxi mode and profit.
Numbers from:
I say, leave it for a year to lull the companies into a false sense of security, then tax the hell out of companies using them for a few years to pay for some re-education for the old employees.
If I had become a fax machine expert would it be fair to charge a tax on those that began to use email to support me?
People should take responsibility for themselves and their own actions.
Social safety nets exist for a reason. You may opt out by moving somewhere else if you would prefer not to participate in a society with said safety nets.
I say this as someone in a $200K/year+ household. People who preach personal responsibility are oblivious to the realities of the world.
Get made redundant due to unforeseen shifts in the job market? Educate yourself, get a better job, work harder. Innovate, invent, think, mow your neighbors lawns. Use your brain and don't embark on a dead end career.
I agree that some social safety nets are needed for a civilized society (No one that is ill should go without out treatment if they don't have any money etc) but at the same time there are limits and I think paying for people who lose their jobs because of new technology is way past that line. We need to encourage people to be smarter, not dumber.
"People who preach personal responsibility are oblivious to the realities of the world." I live in South Africa and government handouts do nothing but keep the poor oppressed and uneducated. They are used as a tool for control by populist politicians. People will have more children just for another R250/month from the government instead of creating value. Socialism is a huge threat to everyone everywhere. It keeps the populous dumb and gives governments way too much power. Please don't preach about the realities of the world from your $200K/year+ household pedestal. Socialism is obviously working out great for you.
I live in Australia, one of the best examples of how government handouts can ruin a race, and I'm saying this as someone coming from a low-income family with poor education and working+educating myself to a $100k/y job before I'm 30.
>I think paying for people who lose their jobs because of new technology is way past that line.
I think completely supporting them would be a bad idea, but as said in my original post, assistance in re-education should be partially paid for. I am always of the opinion that education should be at least partially subsidised - full subsidy encourages a poorer quality of education.
Example: You're 26 and have just spent $80k and 8 years of toil studying furiously for a degree, and the market for your chosen field evaporates. Sure, you've got the rest of your life ahead of you, but now you're significantly in debt because of something you had no control over.
This is a difficult analogy to compare with taxi drivers, but I hope you see the point - and over the next 10-40 years we will see this happen more and more as machine intelligence replaces more and more jobs.
Lest you think I have no experience with the US situation and system, I've never lived in a 6-figure income/year household, I have a family member who was unemployed for over a year, who broke her arm only months after losing her job and medical insurance (all the years of medical insurance payments wasted, she having never been injured or seriously ill during that time--but that's a risk one takes when deciding (when one has a choice) to pay for insurance), finally getting a job that paid less than half of what she used to make--she's just trying to make it to retirement because all the money the government has forced her to "save" is effectively untouchable until then. I have a cousin who recently got knee cancer (but he'll be fine because it hasn't spread, his dad's an attorney, and a lot of cancers are curable), and I have another family member with a mental illness who without medical treatment could not function. He has paid the (often brutal) consequences of going off the medication enough times, fortunately he's been stable now for some years. (And mental illness is far worse than cancer, from the underfunded and incomplete medical understanding and treatments to government systems for aid to the social stigmas that make making friends, getting family support, getting a job, and a whole bunch of other things incredibly difficult.) I'm not oblivious to realities of the world. I see the causes deserving of aid as well as the crappiness of institutionalized aid systems.
Maybe it's because I'm Australian and have got used to the free ride of healthcare and education, but I'd gladly take a minor tax increase if it means a significant portion of the population gets into an entirely new career quicker, instead of remaining unemployed and being MORE of a strain on the economy.
Career is a strong word, though. The sorts of people we're talking about usually have no other option, and education can change that.
Alternatively, in say 20 years or so, going to Miami which would take 21 hours (at 65-70 mph), could probably be done on an overnight sleeper-car (at probably something more like 120-130mph).
Even a cross country trip would only take a day or so at such a rate, and with a few strategically placed stops, you could have a nice week long cross country trip at a fraction of the normal cost.
Here's a few negative thoughts though:
These driverless cars might significantly increase road usage and wear since driving becomes less of a burden.
Suburban sprawl could grow out of control since it's no longer necessary to either have public transit options or be attentive to have a long commute.
Some people might even choose to buy automated RVs instead of homes, decreasing a sense of community and investment in place.
Think 100% electric high speed trains that let cars 'board' at highway speeds. Evacuated underground tunnels for low drag long distance high speed trips. Hybrid Maglev cars that rocket down the highway on a cushion of air while being inductively charged. Even things as simple as highways without road signs of any kind.
That's interesting because while I've heard of and thought about the concept of a vacuum tube train that could go ridiculously fast, I didn't think of a merely low-pressure tunnel that ordinary cars (with pressurized compartments, anyway) could use in flexible manner. You wouldn't go 15,000 mph, but you could do several hundred pretty easily.
Believe it or not we already have this. It's an Amtrak train between DC and central Florida. You are a passenger aboard the train but your car comes with you! http://www.amtrak.com/auto-train
This is not a cheap stab at US rail, I looked into this on the similar service that the German railways offer - and it did not make financial sense over flight+rental.
CarBnB
my car? Like I own the car? Why would you own a car? Who takes care of the maintenance?
Just kidding. But seriously, if self-driving cars were a thing, I can think of very few reasons why any normal people would own cars.
If the cars could drive themselves, they would probably be more like taxis without the drivers. We no longer need parking lots because the cars are constantly in use, that will free up a lot of space and mirror what already happens in dense urban areas (which depend on taxis, public transit, parking is very $$$). The cars will wear out in a couple of years from constant use (or maybe not if electric?), but we won't need as many of them. Rush hour commutes are a problem, but road capacity is limited anyways and peak pricing + mass transit + car pooling can lead to a workable solution.
Eventually, since all cars are automated, safe highway speeds could be increased dramatically (reduce space between cars, more predictability, reroute and reduce speeds to prevent full stop bottlenecks). Accordingly, you won't even be able to enter the highway in manual mode.
I guess that can still be maintained, with various levels of luxury in taxis/rentals/however it works.
But then where will all that social signalling money go? I guess since it's mostly financed money anyway, that capital will have to seek other venues? Will consumer debt drop due to this? Or will something else pick up the slack?
Many, many cars get customized for one reason or another. You can't do that with a taxi.
My dad has a pontoon boat that he has to twice yearly haul around. It might make more sense to get something specialized for those two days than drive something sufficiently powerful and fuel inefficient year round.
What I'm getting at is while your argument seems sound, and may in fact prevail, when you change one piece of the puzzle sometimes other solutions become possible.
Where am I going to put these containers when I don't have a rental car?
Lugging them back and forth to the house is not a practical option.
I propose we call this component the garage.
Lots of folks don't have driveways, garages, and so on.
More to the point, they may not be at a "personal storage location" when they're dropping off the rental car.
In fact, folks who don't have dedicated/owned spaces are probably the best audience for rentals.
Moreover, even if I'm willing to take said stuff into my residence, I may need said stuff on my way to the drop-off.
In fact, even today, people who don't have a dedicated space (even if that space shifts around a bit, ie. is a "pool" space on the street) can't own a car: Where would they leave it? People who are renters today already have to deal with not leaving stuff in the car, so this discussion doesn't apply to them.
Long story short: Your original argument was that not owning your own car will not be be an option for you, because you leave a lot of stuff for your kids in your car. My argument is that, with a bit of fantasy, maybe this isn't an insurmountable obstacle.
> I may need said stuff on my way to the drop-off.
Why would you drive your self-driving vehicle to the drop-off?
When more people begin to use public cars for personal use/hire people will begin leaving phones, strollers, jackets, wallets in these vehicles. Unless the cars are to have omnidirectional cameras or electronic trackers to monitor everything, people are going to lose things. This is going to be a pain point. It might be just becoming aware -as people do in taxicabs but at least honest cabbies will return items as its in their interest to maintain good reputation --a stranger is only bound by altruism.
Where I used to live in 2003, in China, taxis were really cheap, and public transportation was functioning OK. Yet, after some economic boom, people started to buy more and more cars. It was very provable that cars were a negative in every possible way. More expensive, PITA to maintain, inconvenient to park, incompatible with drinking alcohol or being tired, but still, people preferred to own and drive their own cars!
I know a self driving car is not exactly like a Taxi driver (or even like a private driver), but the parallel is close enough for me to wonder about the consequences.
7 year old kids can be kidnapped in hacked vehicles.
Statewide gridlock due to DDOS.
Just looking at the flip side.
I rather doubt a self driving car in the hands of a 7 year old could possibly be more dangerous than a manual car in the hands of a 7 year old. It's fairly trivial to keep kids from using an iPhone inappropriately. A simple password would easily stop it, or we can keep using physical keys.
7 year old kids can be kidnapped in non hacked vehicles. It's considerably easier to track down a stolen car from 2012 with OnStar than one from 1992 without.
Relavant HN article from today: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19660765. I don't see why DDOS would be the attack of choice for vehicles, but say it were to happen. DDOS attacks happen. They can be defended against (see http://blog.cloudflare.com/65gbps-ddos-no-problem).
For the foreseeable future cars will have manual overrides, and I can't see any attack or series of attacks, no matter how horrifying, resulting in 32,885 deaths over the course of a year.
Certainly there are many scenarios and details to consider, but the typical objections seem to be red herrings, strawmen, or just totally bogus.
Modern cars are 100% dependent on computers, yet this doesn't happen. Why would it begin happening in the future? Note that the Google car is designed to be autonomous, it has no dependencies on external systems - there is nothing to DDOS. Yes, you can blind/obstruct it's sensors in a variety of ways, but it's much easier to just aim a laserpointer to a driver's eyes today.
- come back to a completely trashed car that you just paid $50k for.
The technology pundits are ignoring the human factor, giving up control, trusting your kid's lives to a computer, the same technology that crashes on the desktop, and on our smartphones. What happens when the first car has a BOSD and the backup human driver isn't paying any attention and the accident happens within seconds of the crash? These things will likely kill a bunch of people and will go the same way that the C-5 or the Segway did.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but until we have HA computers that exist outside of a datacenter, I doubt a proof-of-concept by Google will go anywhere in this or the next decade, let alone disrupt anything. The idealism and flying cars optimism is well placed and I'd love to see it happen, but the future nearly always takes much longer to happen than people predict...
But given the conditionals of my first sentence, the conversion may not start in earnest for a decade or more.
This is all math here. If a computer is statistically better at driving than a human you can ask the same question as "Would you give up control to decrease the chance of an accident? Or would you risk your kid's life just to feel in control?"
>What happens when the first car has a BOSD and the backup human driver isn't paying any attention and the accident happens within seconds of the crash?
People will probably die. The the same thing that happens when a human crash a car which is already happening everyday.
You know they actually have a physical car? That car was able to drive itself from Mountain View to Tahoe.
As of August 2012, it has logged 300,000 miles.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/google...
We do, in many places - your car is one such place. Another is every single hospital in the civilized world. You know, there's a continuum of world between HA datacenters and your smartphone.
This already happens every time you hit the brakes in a modern vehicle.
Still seems worth it.
I for one can't wait until we see car fatalities drop to the hundreds per year if not 0.
Heck, you could sleep during your drive in to work.
The 'irrational constituents' are always a disproportionately powerful minority. That's one difference between free market and politics.
Though, even a 'minority' (< 50%) of people considering these cars are safe enough to own would likely be enough to sustain the industry.
Unless they deploy to multiple regions, maybe? I imagine some cultures will be much more forgiving of and reasonable about the occasional accident than American culture. If even a single city in the world successfully deployed autoautomobiles, the impact would be so swift, obvious, and desirable that most other societies would follow suit in spite of the loud, irrationally fearful minority.
I hope. :)
Both Ford and Bridgestone companies were able to "compartmentalize" the fallout and stay in business.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009–2010_Toyota_vehicle_recall...
There is also the human factor. People aren't going to give up their livelihood quietly, and people won't be willing to trust their life to a computer.
Also, who's going to control these vehicles, government? Does that mean that the government has the power to redirect a car to anywhere they please, depending on the passenger, who has been identified by facial recognition?
Trains/trams/buses are proven, already exist, and are a much better solution for public transport.
As a quick example of the sort of thinking in this book: more cars on the road means that there will be fewer people willing to risk being outdoors anywhere near a road (i.e. most residential areas in this day and age), resulting in higher levels of obesity. As more people become obese, fewer people are willing to walk or cycle ever-decreasing distances, so they get a car -- increasing the number of cars on the road. After that, we enter a rather vicious circle. The average weight of the world population will increase rather quickly, and we will end up like the people in Wall-E. I'd rather ride my bike, but thanks for the offer.
That said, I would be interested in seeing how driverless cars perform at stopping in the case of sudden and unexpected obstacles compared to human drivers?
And isn't obesity more about diet than it is exercise anyway?
Given the current state of the technology, this makes sense. And in the future, we may yet have fully driverless cars, instead of merely autonomous ones.
Edit: The way google has been testing these cars, AFAIK, is through a special "experimental vehicle" permit.
Also, what's the benefit to the owner/operator? Are you allowed to pay less attention to the road so you can be doing something else 99% of the time? Are you allowed to talk on the phone? If neither of these is true, then the legislation might put the cars' developers on more sure legal footing, but would appear to negate the primary utility of an autonomous vehicle.
I have a few concerns about the short term ramifications.
1) The person behind the wheel can't do work, read, eat, or apply make-up if their primary responsibility is to second-guess the computer. So the most tantalizing benefit of being driven wherever you want is going to have to wait until some future day.
2) A vehicle that obeys the speed limit and makes a full stop at stop signs is going to infuriate some drivers. They should probably avoid matching the speed of adjacent cars when possible, to prevent blocking aggressive drivers that want to pass. These cars are probably going to avoid the fast lane.
3) I can see plenty of scenarios where an autonomous vehicle acts safely but still gets in an accident. Slowing to avoid a collision could result in being rear-ended, or a human driver might merge into the car because he failed to check his blind spot. So there will be accidents. I assume the cars will have to be rigged with video cameras and telemetry to prove that the car's programming was not at fault.
More thoughts on speed-matching the car in your blind-spot: there are many, many things that can go wrong, even if a car has omnidirectional visual information. If a tire blows, you have to compensate. I wonder how much sway-room a computer needs to retake-control/move the car off the road.
Actually I remember hearing somewhere that Japan uses a 50/50 split for all accidents, without working out who's to blame, to encourage everyone to be more responsible. They'll definitely have to tweak the cars driving styles per region. I'm now actually pessimistic that this will ever leave the USA any time soon, given how long it seems for even simple things to make it out.
As a sibling comment said, this is unsafe. The Google car actively avoids being in another car's blind spot as much as it can.
Keeping the left lane moving faster is probably wisest, but it's going to infuriate the drivers behind the autonomous vehicle, even though they're in the slow lane.
How far would a car go to avoid being rear-ended? Would a tailgater be able to cause the car to accelerate? At what point would the car stop trying to avoid an accident because it's safer to get rear ended than continue avoiding? When you put these things on the road, human drivers are going to start messing with them.
Oh right, except for this: "The regulations would allow vehicles to operate autonomously, but a licensed driver would still need to sit behind the wheel to serve as a backup operator in case of emergency."
Public transit with these installed would be fabulous as well. You'd still need someone behind the wheel as backup, but it would be great to have a potentially tireless public transit system.
It's hard to imagine that this tech won't be available for all classes of cars once it is sufficiently well tested.
But does it affect the average human? It just strikes me how many anecdotes I read in connection with selfdriving cars ala' "calling the car to pick me up from work".
Assuming that most HN users are from the US I can just conclude that public transport is really bad and people do not use their bike there. E.g. most people here (Europe) just do not need the service of a car in their daily life. So in the end it's a logic step, but I do not think that it makes sense to actually buy a self-driving car for yourself.
I don't think we'll see truly robotic cars anytime soon.
I suppose race-track memberships and racetracks will become more common --- or perhaps they'll be like a horseman's club - a hobby for select members.
Maybe the USA could even get a Nürburgring ... or one per region.
I expect that once a drivers license is not a requirement to exist in much of the US that the standards for being allowed to drive will be tightened significantly though.
Docklands light railway, in London, is driverless.
Although these are short-range, urban trains.
(Though if you don't need drivers, why do you care about the union? I guess the problem is that it will take maybe 50 years to convert the other lines to automatic operation. And you still need someone on the train to answer rider questions and handle medical/police issues.)
It will be revolutionary, and Google is only going to get a plurality of the profit that comes from it.
Personal local delivery. Your car drives to a lot next to a grocery/department/whatever store. A grocery clerk walks to your car, presses a button on a smartphone app, and loads up your car with your online purchases then your car drives itself home.
Same as above except your car/truck is rented out for overnight local deliveries / short-distance freight hauling while you sleep.
Use of sensor streams from driverless cars for surveillance, mapping, etc.
Installing high-speed municipal wireless data or cellular infrastructure on fleets of roving cars without the necessity of securing right-of-way for fixed structures or ground data lines (e.g. using microwave or open air laser comms for high-bandwidth links to aerial drone stations which then eventually link down to base stations or just form a completely wireless mesh across an entire country/continent).
Because the car will stop if someone jumps in front of it right?
So it's a sitting target for a gang to vandalize it.
Where do you live, Rio de Janeiro? I don't think there's a city in the U.S. where "random disabling car vandalization for fun by gangs" is actually a thing.