The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car, Chapter 2

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/22/google-ventures-puts-258m-i...

Longer term, a majority of people have self-driving cars. If I live in the suburbs, I either keep it all to myself, or loan it out when I'm not using it. If I live in the city, then I likely don't own a car - but instead call on a car as I need to. These probably come from both individual lending their car, and from groups/companies that are setup as a service.

Either way, these cars are likely to be network agnostic - meaning they'll lend themselves out to Uber, Lyft - whoever. So while costs will go down, it could lead to a big margin compression. Meanwhile, the arms seller (Google, whoever) makes money on each car being sold.

Makes sense, therefore, for Uber to continue to focus on capturing the market - their installed consumer base (and their brand) is their strongest asset going forward.

I don't know that the traffic would be much worse, because if you assume that a significant number of cars are self driving, then you eliminate many of the problems in terms of traffic flow that come from a human driver: maintaining a constant speed and distance from the car in front, aggressive driving, counter-productive driving habits, tragedy of the commons issues. It is possible to use the roads far more efficiently than we currently are capable of as humans.

There's also the point that it doesn't really matter how bad the traffic on the roads is if the only majority of the things suffering that bad traffic don't have any people in them.

Gas and polution:

If you can tell your car to go somewhere else when you are not in it, then electric cars and out of city parking lots - things like that - become a lot more feasible. You no longer need the infrastructure to be right next to your office to make effective use of it.

It knows the distance to the car in front and has a good idea of the rear car's speed. The only real variable is the weight of the approaching car but a pessimistic estimate could leave more margin to avoid touching the car in front.

When stopped in a place other drivers might not expect, just flashing the brake lights does wonders. Probably because human eyes and brains notice change much more readily than a solid light.

Deer vs little girl does not really matter, that is just an emotional ploy.

That said, there are certainly circumstances where swerving is the right decision and a vehicle with 360 degree sensors is potentially in a better position to make an optimal decision than a human making a snap judgement based on mostly what they see in front of them. Probably the closest I ever came to being in a really serious accident happened on a highway when someone slammed on their brakes to avoid rear-ending the car in front, ended up drifting into the next lane where another car had to swerve to avoid them. I ended up swerving into the breakdown lane. Amazingly with cars swerving and braking all over the road at 70 mph, no one collided but it was a very near thing.

I strongly suspect that, however many decades away true self-driving is, good assistive driving and collision avoidance systems especially on highways are going to be a pretty big near-term win.

Unless the AI behind these cars are so advanced that we cannot know ahead of time what it would do and it cannot be put in a simulation to test it, there is a vast difference between a self driving car and a human. Namely, we don't (and with the current level of knowledge can't) know what a human will do til after the situation occurs. And in general, in snap judgment cases like this, we do not punish a person for making a bad choice unless it is outright malicious.

Contrary to this, a self driving car is in a system who we can attempt to simulate (though not at perfect fidelity) and one where we know the underlying algorithms enough to answer the question and even change the algorithms to change the answer before the situation ever occurs.

>Not to mention that the car will already see the girl crossing the highway before she ever does get out there because of how sophisticated the sensors are.

This is attacking the situation instead of answering it. All I would have to do is modify the situation slightly and the question would remain just as valid and thus the response does nothing but postpone.

I don't know if Google's cars do these things or not - but those are the kinds of avoidance techniques I would hope for, even if an accident would not have been their fault.