Comment by nakedrobot2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nakedrobot2 | Hacker News Reader

There is a hint of what a full society of self-driven cars will be like in Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge: there are no traffic lights. The cars all weave through an intersection much like pedestrians do while walking.

The future, at least in terms of the dangers of driving, is bright.

I look forward to the day when every car is a taxi, and the only cars parked on the side of the road are the ones owned by the very few people who can still be bothered at all to own a car full-time, which will hopefully be very few people.

I happened to use an open source traffic simulator which is capable of simulating both purely autonomous and human/autonomous traffic scenarios. It is possible to still support traffic lights for the humans who, for whatever reason, still desire to drive (I bet there will be always be reasons for you to want to drive manually.) The team at the University of Texas at Austin has done a great job developing this simulator, AIM4. You can check out the videos and the source code here: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~aim/

Once autonomous cars have saturated the marketplace, I can only think of two reasons to still drive manually:

1. As with people who row or sail, just for the enjoyment. Such usage could be restricted to specific places like racetracks.

2. Because I'm going somewhere I "shouldn't" and I don't want to tell my car (and have it record my journey for someone else to review, or refuse to take me). This may also be the case with emergency vehicles, an ambulance may need to drive along a pedestrian-only street, for example.

Now, there will be a need to mix human vs autonomous traffic on the run-up to that. Obviously, until sufficiently many cars are autonomous to warrant the removal of human-controlled cars, that will need to be the case. Furthermore, early production Autonomous cars may have routefinding flaws, or the computer may break down, meaning that someone may need to drive a normally autonomous car themselves.

Is the implication here that pedestrians will simply walk into the street at random and the AIs will handle that? I find myself a little uncomfortable at the thought, and I'm fairly enthusiastic about driverless cars for most of the reasons you stated.

Yes, that's precisely what happens. You'll be given a safe berth, with cars stopping or avoiding you by at least the distance you could conceivably fall over.

Personally that's already how I cross the street, and my confidence in human drivers isn't anywhere near so great.

Hm. There is a thing currently where it's socially unacceptable not to cross at a crosswalk, and also to stop in the middle of the road. Some people are still jerks, but they're rare.

I could easily see a bunch of kids deciding they'll go challenge the AI by dancing in the middle of a crowded street. Admittedly a millionth chance occurrence though. "Computer, take a picture, get me facial recognition, and report them to their parents."

civil disobedience will be met with ruthless violence. other than that, i have no concerns.

With human drivers you're given a notion of whether or not they've seen you (they're looking in your direction, the vehicle is slowing, they're motioning at you to cross or get out of the way, or honking at you). The situation is somewhat deterministic.

Not perfect by a long shot, but unless automatic vehicles offer some similar pedestrian signaling capability, there will be issues.

There's also the question of what happens, say, when a vehicle is surrounded by a crowd of people with ill intent. This happens:

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Motorcycle-Gang-Attack-...

>unless automatic vehicles offer some similar pedestrian signaling capability, there will be issues.

Working on it. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/427743/how-do-you-know-...

Or what happens if the vehicle is operating with malicious intent.

It is frightening to watch, but the math seems to be somewhat straighforward. http://vimeo.com/37751380

That's an interesting video. I'd quite like to know if it's being coordinated "from above", or whether the cars are making their own decisions - the latter would be rather more impressive, since I think a fully managed road system is much further off, if not an impossibility.

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