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Will Our Cars Become Our Chauffeurs?
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to this long article from EE Times about the 'Self-Navigating Vehicle,' the answer is a resounding yes. Many car experts think that autonomous vehicles which avoid collisions and communicate wirelessly with other cars will be the norm in two to three decades. In the meantime, the enabling technologies for self-navigating cars are emerging, from sensors embedded in the brake or accelerator pedals to more powerful computers. Already, partial solutions exist for adaptive cruise control or for staying in a highway lane. One day, we'll be able to do something else than driving our cars through traffic jams, saving us about two hours per working day. This is the future that engineers are building, but will you accept to be driven by your car? So many people like driving that the concept of a completely autonomous car might be delayed for psychological reasons, not technical ones. This summary contains selected details of the original article."
Public transport, this is America.
Have a nice day.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Having automated transport systems removing the human (idiot) factor will be essential to prevent utter gridlock in the future. The only other alternative is to stop immigrating people faster than we can expand the infrastructure they use. Yes this ultimately is the problem - highway construction cannot keep pace with US population growth.
Take an '83 Monte Carlo on a snowy/icy road, and pretty soon the car will be going all by itself, ignoring all user input "suggestions"...
Not that bad once you get used to it, really.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
This is one of the few areas where I see the legal barriers as nearly insurmountable. What happens when the automatic driving system screws up? Whose insurance kicks in? Who assumes responsibility? It seems like the liability to automobile manufacturers who installed such systems would be huge. Would an insurance company really be willing to underwrite a system like this? Are you willing to assume responsibility yourself for the failure of an automated driving system?
Furthermore, you need black boxes and monitoring/recording systems - how do you know who was driving in an accident, the autopilot or the human driver?
Sure, planes have "autopilots" but there's very little stuff in the air to avoid, and lots of air traffic controllers and rules to basically make flying in a straight line in your own empty area of airspace possible.
Technical and psychological issues aside (and those issues are still huge), unless the system was flawless and perfect (which it won't be) I see the legal morass here as nearly insurmountable.
It was a good sandwhich too. Too bad the rescue crew pulled me out before I could eat the second half.
Hurricane Ivan: A 17th century prison collapsed. All of the inmates escaped.
Yeah, and you know that the first time there's a significant crash that can be blamed on the computer (whether it's true or not), safety folks will raise holy hell, and who knows what'll happen then to the whole concept then?
Although this argument never held much water with me. Consider all the tired drivers, drunk drivers, old people, teenagers, and in general crappy drivers on the roads. There's like, what, 60,000 deaths a year due to car crashes, and that's nearly all human error. Can't imagine computers doing worse job than we're doing already.
Hi... I'm Larry... the shivering chipmunk... brrrrr!... I'm cold... I need a sweater...
I suspect it'll be some time before the cars are completely automated. I expect that cruise control will be expanded to essentially become an autopilot. The driver will have to turn the system on and will be able to retake control at any time.
I'd imagine that the first fully automated cars will be airport shuttles and similar vehicles which make a repeated circuit of stops. City buses and taxi cabs will come next, other commercial vehicles such as delivery vans and trucks, then finally personal automobiles. How much would a long haul semi-truck operation save if they could run their trucks 24/7 and didn't have to pay for drivers? That's a lot of profit to be had and profit drives innovation.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
If autonomous vehicles save 60,000 lives per year, and result in 6 wrongful death lawsuits per year, do you really think we will ever see an autonomous car on the road? I really, really doubt it. Americans would rather let 60,000 die than forgo those 6 lawsuits, and companies would rather let 60,000 die than pay out on those 6 lawsuits.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
The problem I see with this isn't so much the loss of fun associated with driving, but the loss of freedom. I would ONLY favor an automated driving system if it did not do any of the following things:
1 - Require a centralized control or regularly downloaded from some centralized source in order to work properly (i.e. map data from a city's traffic management server, or something like that).
2 - Allow the government to effectively disable the car by remote (which would be easy if #1 was true - just mandate that only authorized vehicles could access the server).
3 - Become mandatory (or effectively mandatory by raising insurance rates to punitive levels for those who don't use it).
4 - Become a means of legistlated vendor lock-in for the previously established auto makers. (In much the same way that the DMCA is a legistlated vendor lock-in for previously established movie and music companies.) If cars that don't have these features are not allowed on main roads anymore, and to get the features approved requires a lot of red tape and is tied to some Intellectual Property of some sort, that effectively prevents any small competitor from trying to get started in the auto-industry, or any hobbiest trying to customize a car.
I like the technology, but given the government's unwillingness to consider the needs of the little guy, or the importance of a level playing field in business (and hobbies, dammit!), I say there is an extremely high likelyhood that this would be implemented in a way that will stifle freedom more than is minimally neccessary (I do understand that some small stifling of freedom is a natural unavoidable consequence of a denser population, but this will be implemented in such a way that it stifles it a lot more than it has to, I can guarantee it.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
By breaking them out of the normal traffic situations the navigation computers will be able to avoid having to deal with the random actions of normal drivers and be easier to trust during the roll-out. Once you get into the city autopilot will go off and you'll be asked to start driving. Over time when the system is perfected and the market is more fully penetrated you'll see autopilot everywhere, but it will probably start on dedicated for pay lanes first.
My $0.02
There are hundreds of activities you do to drive your car, it's a complex machine that has thousands of parts that have to work. Its maintenance is up to the user, and not carefully controlled and checked by the FAA.
Autonomy in software is EXTREMELY hard to test. Every combination of action, fault, and surroundings has to have an experiment to show the software works. This software will need to deal with every possible reality that can exist on the US freeways, city and town roads.
This software can't be fully tested in a lab, either, since in a lab you can only test what you can think of. Real life causes problems that nobody ever anticipates. If you can't anticipate it, you certainly can't expect a programmer to plan for that eventuality.
This problem is FAR more complex than people realize and will take time to solve. Even then, if a majority of people don't trust it, it will not come to be--since it will increase the price of vehicles, it will take legislation to make it happen, and that takes at least a majority vote.
- All drivers are human: Acceptably efficient and safe. "Good enough" for most purposes, accidents do occur but not that often.
- Some drivers are human and some are computers: Confusion and unpredictable responses on both sides, terrible traffic conditions and accidents much more likely.
- All drivers are computers: Very efficient and safe. accidents rare.
The second stage is an unavoidable part of the transition to the third, but no one wants to move from the first stage to the second. Until we have a good process for that, we won't get self-driving cars anytime soon.The article focused only on the technology, but think about owning a self-driving car. When you get to work, why should it sit out in the parking lot all day when it could drive itself home and ferry the rest of the family around, then come pick you up? Most families could get rid of one of their cars. Leased auto-driving cars could take themselves out at night for fueling and scheduled maintenance. Taking it a step further, why I foresee a time when few people will actually own cars. Most of us will subscribe to services that maintain fleets of robo-cars, which we flag one down with our cell phones like cabs. If you take the paid driver out of the picture the scheme might be feasible. Especially if the rate of accidents goes way down and insurance rates plummet. The biggest losers from this technology could be the car companies themselves, selling fewer cars, and insurance companies charging lower premiums.
One of the key aspects of the automobile, in contrast to other forms of transportation, is that it is more deadly to anyone getting in the way or disobeying the unwritten rules of the road. It's like the Mafia - they don't have to kill everybody, just enough to send a message.
Now, if suddenly we have cars which don't run red lights, and which stop every time for pedestrians or dogs, cats, etc. which appear in front of the vehicle, chaos will ensue.
Imagine walking down a crowded sidewalk. You're constantly being blocked, jostled, and otherwise impeded by people who show little concern for your presence, because you're not a threat.
If the motor-death equation is suddenly removed, the same situation will occur on our sacred highways - walking, bicycling, and other un-American forms of transportation will take over the streets!
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger