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Comment by arikrak | Hacker News Reader

It won't be able to drive around New York if it follows the rules so strictly. It will never be able to turn. They'll have to add a setting for aggression...

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That's funny, but probably a very real challenge. As a (human) driver, it happens that we come across ambiguous, contradictory or just plain impossible constraints and we overcome them by deliberately breaking the rules. I wonder how they would cope with that?

This is part of the larger problem of roboethics—prioritizing and balancing a set of conflicting objectives and requirements. There's a neat introductory article with some video of example scenarios here:

http://footnote1.com/what-should-a-robot-do-designing-robots...

There was a report some time ago about making the cars be somewhat aggressive. If I recall, they had a lot of trouble with left turns until they programmed in some lurching forward behavior.

A video from 2011 shows it crossing an intersection (on its turn) while other cars were still crossing perpendicularly: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel...

Will a cyclist be able to troll you by continuing to signal in front of your car, stopping it from ever overtaking?

This is my concern. If we treat cyclists as the sacred cow of the roads, they'll more or less have the root password to my car and be able to dictate where it stops and for how long.

I find cyclists to be much more disingenuous and reckless than any driver, at least here in Chicago where they'll put up next to your car on the right, on the shoulder to make a dangerous and illegal right, and pound on the side of your car with their fists to let you know they're there.

I don't see how empowering that group and its "cars suck, rules don't apply to me" attitudes can help.

Haha, I knew as soon as I saw that you think respecting people's lives is treating them as "sacred cows" that you must be a Chicago driver.

Safety goes both ways. If your going to act like an entitled snot who takes chances with your life because you can't be bothered to follow the rules of the road and respect cars, other cyclists, and pedestrians then you kinda deserve what happens to you. Heaven forbid we all play by the rules.

Nope. Even entitled snots don't deserve to be killed when it can be avoided. Not going to debate that point.

Passing on the right by cyclists is legal in Chicago, BTW, when done so with care (the law was clarified last year). It's not clear if that's the behavior you're referring to.

Not killed, but fined. We need to regulate bikes like we do cars and monetize bike violations. Oh I can hear the critical mass whining from here. Pedestrians should also consider bikes on the sidewalk a form of assault and it should be a criminal violation. If I can't drive on the sidewalk then you can't ride on it.

/Guy who cycles and drives in Chicago.

Google cars sometimes got stuck at four-way stop sign intersections if they literally obeyed the rules on the book. They had to be a little aggressive to get their turn.

That is a flaw I noticed with four-way stops when I drove in the US. The only way to break a stand-off once the first arrivals had moved through (and no one could remember the order of arrival) was to be the aggressive one that just went.

I'm from Australia and roundabouts solve this problem very easily. Even during reasonable traffic, I barely need to slow down at the roundabouts near my house as they're so effective. And this is at intersections about the same size as those with the four-way stops I encountered in LA.

Robotic cars can probably pass through gaps like lines of ants crossing each other if roundabouts are too difficult to introduce.

If I remember correctly, they already have one.

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