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Google's Driverless Car and the Logic of Safety
mikejuk writes "Google's driverless car could save more than 1 million deaths per year and tens of millions of injuries. It is an impressive achievement, but will we allow it to take over the wheel? Sebastian Thrun puts the case for it in a persuasive TED Talk video. However it may be OK for human drivers to kill millions of people each year but one human fatality might be enough to finish the driverless car project — in fact it might not even take a death as an injury might cause the same backlash. Robot drivers might kill far fewer people than a human driver but it remains to be seen if we can be logical enough to accept the occasional failure of algorithm or hardware. Put simply we might have all seen too many 'evil robot' movies."
Put simply we might have all seen too many 'evil robot' movies.
I do not know what these movies you speak about are, but we have all read Sally.
Brings into the light the numbers on just how dangerous automobiles are. Few activities have these huge numbers of deaths, accidents, and property loss and damages.
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As I don't live in a country that's very sue-happy (yet, we're heading that way), yes! Please take the wheel! A snooze on the way to/from work would be excellent, thanks.
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"save more than 1 million deaths per year"
Wouldn't it be much better to save 1 million LIVES per year?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. You can't take revenge against a computer. A human being killed is a-ok with most people as long as you can take revenge.
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People are obviously much more tolerant of human error than machine error. Machines in life safety areas are expected to be perfect.
Also who is liable in a fatal accident caused by a machine? People want a human scapegoat.
Humans, while all built from the same base materials, rarely share the same OS and app software. The driverless cars [most likely, in the beginning at least] would. Which means that if widely deployed before the bug(s) is/are discovered, they're statistically more likely to kill a whole bunch of people in a short time. Which is why the robot driver scenario is so frightening.
At least, when people die in cars that they drive, the argument can be made that they were in control, and were therefore responsible for their own fate. The notion that you can die through no fault of your own is unsettling, to say the least. It's not a logical argument, of course, as people routinely place their fate in the hands of others on the road in mass transit, but the car has always been associated with independence, and by extension control over one's life.
Obviously the base programming of these cars will be to have them follow the local rules and being computers will be very good at this. Which means that government types will feel free to keep adding more and more rules to satisfy every voter. Thus these cars will quickly stop following the most efficient routes and going the fastest speed that is safe but will end up following routes that take them away from schools, parks, politicians' houses, and whatever whim they want. Even though these cars will soon be able to scream around at full speed safer than cars now they will end up going slower.
Also how are the morality police going to get their rocks off if now you can be passed out drunk in your car?
If the cars are all carefully following the rules and in theory you need far fewer traffic cops then who will catch people who jailbreak their cars into ignoring speed limits?
Lastly in this litigious society who will you sue if an empty car has an accident? The owner, the coder, or the local government who probably designed a crappy intersection or whatnot that induces the cars to crash at that spot.
I would venture to say the self driving car is simply inevitable, as the economic forces behind it are huge. Millions of people will buy additional cars, to replace theirs as well as to get extra ones to take their kids to work without them, create truck and taxi fleets with no drivers, etc. After cars become self-driving, they will become smaller, as they will really almost always carry one person and be used within city limits. That will be basically the same as PRT systems, which exist already. --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit --- Personal rapid transit (PRT), also called personal automated transport (PAT) or podcar, is a public transportation mode featuring small automated vehicles operating on a network of specially-built guide ways. PRT is a type of automated guideway transit (AGT), which also includes systems with larger vehicles, all the way to small subway systems.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Sadly, safety is something that is not handled rationally by the masses. It is mostly an emotional judgement.
Until it becomes mandated and I can't drive. I enjoy driving. I also understand most people would take the alternative to having to do it themselves if given the chance. Which is good, because a lot of them suck at driving. Of course, I'll die, and this generation will be fine with it because they grew up with it.
There is no -1 Disagree.
I like the idea of a robot-driven car, but I think the difficult thing is that in the case of a death or an injury, people want to be able to hold a person responsible. It's difficult to know exactly how that would pan out with a robot car. However, I guess one advantage is that you would probably have a 'black box' that could give you a much better idea of exactly what happened.
To be honest, people probably worry about this more than they should. We already have the situation where injuring or killing people with a car is very lightly punished. It's exceptionally rare (at least in the UK) for anybody to do jail time for killing people. You can do all sorts of idiotic things in your car, kill someone and get away with a fine of a few hundred pounds.
It's all marketing. They'll go "ban them ban them" ... until Apple makes the iCar and then it will be just fine and dandy!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I used to work for a company building a machine that screened pap smears. Of course it was not perfect - but it was much less imperfect that human screeners. But the FDA approval criteria seemed to be that the evil machines had to beat the best human screeners in every category of disease, no matter if the category was fished for post facto.
I for one welcome our robot overlords.
If a human with a net worth of negative $10^5 to positive $10^5 is behind the wheel when something happens, maybe one or two lawyers will take notice. But if a machine that was built by corporation X, which is worth $10^9, get out of the way of the lawyer stampede towards the courthouse that will look something like the running of the bulls in Pamplona. Just look at the unintended acceleration claims so far.
I think the real selling point for driverless cars isn't going to be safety, but efficiency. Road maintenance is very expensive. Adding more roads costs a lot of money, and widening existing roads often means tearing down whatever homes or businesses are built alongside them. Driverless cars could use cooperative algorithms to better handle things like lane closures and overall congestion. You wouldn't have free-rider problems (no pun intended) like people cutting in at the front of a line, slowing everyone else down. When a stoplight turns green, every car could start moving simultaneously, getting more people through the light. I bet a huge reduction in rush hour traffic would be a selling point for a lot of people (and regulators).
It would take a long time to implement. And there would be a backlash from people who want to do (possibly selfish) things the algorithms won't. But it's still a neat idea.
Visit the
Evil robots in movies is one thing in a world of fiction. Windows misbehaving, bluescreening and doing strange things, in the other hand, is something usual in this world. And the plenty of malware for it doesnt help exactly. Adding to that scenario the capability of harming people in big scale as isolated drunks do from time to time is not good.
I think the reasoning in this story is stupid. Drivers could get killed many times more when they're driving themself, but at least it's their own fault (or some drunk driver). But I sure as hell don't want to be the one guy in the statistics whos dieing is okay just because the system usually works. At least let me cause my own death, or be in control of avoiding getting hit by a drunk driver so it's at least my own fault!
I just threw up in my mouth a little. But then I imagined Microsoft's response:
You have successfully changed your radio station.
You must restart your car for the changes to take effect.
Do you want to restart your car now?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The iCar will have two settings: Destination and an option of "Get me there as soon as possible" or "I want to enjoy the sights".
The competitor will have an option for "GT mode", "Super Sport", "Cruise launch", "Eco-boost" and "Rally" that no one understands.
In spite of how complex the notion of cause is in a situation like this, in spite of how completely illogical it is, without someone to blame or punish people will feel very cheated if a robot driver kills or injures a human. At least when a human driver does it we can punish them to appease our human desire for blame.
but to really foul things up beyond your worst nightmares, you need a computer driving a car.
Well fuck, there's an original and insightful thought(!)
Can't you just not be a tiresome idiot and accept that "automobiles are dangerous" contains an implicit "because of human error"?
Note that human error is always going to be a problem as long as humans are able to interact with the driverless cars. There will be programming/logic shortfalls, kids and drinks running in front of the cars, people shooting from the cars and people purposely throwing themselves under them to commit suicide.
Trains are like driverless cars. They need no steering, and the speed is essentially standard throughout the trip. Just like a driverless car going at 50MPH, they can't stop on the spot when an obstacle appears directly in front of them. Many people are killed by trains. In fact, I've been on driverless trains. Many people are killed by those as well, and they only go very slowly.
With vaccines ,i fully agree - the spock mentality is spot on with those as herd immunity is one of the key reasons why we do them.
With guns i don't.
It's totally old, but guns don't kill people by themselves. If someone wants to off a family member and doesn't have a gun, he'll go for an axe or a boning knife (in fact those tend to be usual family murder tools in my country where guns between people aren't too common) - should we ban those too?
And with home invasions... i consider it wrong taking from people the ability to defend themselves and force them to be at mercy of some *expletive redacted*.
who will tend to get a gun anyways - there are far too many even illegal ones at present for a ban to be meaningful. Besides, even if they didn't - use of "cold weapons" tends to give someone like that an advantage - not everyone is physically fit enough to defeat an invader in such a way, while almost anyone can use a shotgun.
Now to the main topic.
One of the reasons why i wouldn't go in a car like this ever is similar to what overreliance of new pilots on hardware sometimes produces in airplanes - so called CFIT - controlled flight into terrain. It might be somewhat better at handling common situations, sure, but once something is off usual, a trained person will adapt to what happens, while a machine tends to mess up really badly in such circumstances.
However, the biggest, though rather emotional argument of giving your safety away from your hands while driving - something which i personally don't really like.
In other words, the problem is not so much safety, which after all people ignore quite often - go to any workshop or anywhere and see how folk work, but control, being in charge of your own safety.
As such, i'd say that the best way to begin using these is to automate things like small transport vehicles - while there still may be an outcry if one crashes, they will produce some savings for the companies using them which will add to the pressure to continue development and improve
Perhaps move onto trucks then - tired truck drivers tend to cause accidents, never mind robberies and hijacking often perpetrated on truckers sleeping at vehicle rest places. (I dislike the technology potentially putting them out of work, but it's the logical next step.
I agree completely. People won't take the time to notice the statistics or numbers showing how many more live every year. They will get too caught up in having something to blame and many will rally behind it. The problem I see is if 1 drunk driver causes an accident he gets put in jail. If 1 robot causes an accident all the robot systems will take the heat.
Unlike the drunk , who is just one erroneous biological machine out of billions, the failure of software in one robotic car means it would most likely fail in any other such car in such circumstances.
I drive manual transmission cars, I ride motorcycles, and I love going to the racetrack and testing the limits of both myself and my vehicles. Never had an at fault accident, but in the interest of disclosure I was rear-ended while waiting at red lights TWICE.
So while I have a personal problem relinquishing control of my car to a computer because I enjoy driving it myself, I can see the benefits of computer aided driving especially on public roads. But I believe an in between system would vastly improve safety while leaving people in control. Instead of the computer having absolute control, have it perform the same analysis and assist in collision avoidance.
Approaching a red light at a speed beyond safety margins? Apply the brakes. Start fishtailing on the highway? Apply corrective steering measures. Changing lanes into another vehicle, cyclist or turning into the path of another vehicle? Sound warnings, apply brakes, etc.
The trick is setting the thresholds to a level where people are completely in control up to the point where they are somewhat close to having an accident. Because if you believe computer driven cars will remove ALL collisions, you're deluded. All it takes if for a child to run out between two parked cars in the path of another car, and all the computer systems in the world will not counter its kinetic energy.
And it would be VERY important for the vehicle to be usable with the computer systems disabled, for several reasons.
First, because many people enjoy driving. Short of banning every single existing car on the road, people like me will always be able to purchase and drive a non-computerized vehicle. Even today I can buy a functioning Ford Model T. Think about that for a second, and you'll realize it could take a hundred years before the last current car stops being available, short of outlawing them. But just like with cigarettes and alcohol, I doubt that will ever happen. Can you imagine the lobby all the wealthy car collectors will mount?
Second, because computer systems fail and sometimes they cannot be inexpensively repaired. A current car can still run with many of its electrical systems disabled (power seats, windows, navigation system, even alternator and starter) for a while. Having worked with cars and motorcycles for a long time, I can tell you I'd rather rebuild an engine than diagnose an electrical problem. A cold solder on a PCB can ruin a while weekend trying to figure out why your car will not start in hot weather, but works fine in cold (I'm looking at you Honda Main Relay!!!) The complexity of a computer that can drive a car is beyond anything we have available today ANYWHERE, and it has thousands of failure points. Sensors, cameras, gps, servo motors, switches, wires, PCBs and only lastly the main CPU. The fact it runs in testing is great, but these systems have to last 10+ years of abuse WITHOUT FAILURE.
Lastly, having fully computer driven cars will make people even more dependent on technology, which is NOT a good thing. I've had my GPS tell me to go down a railway track once. I looked at it, smiled, and found the real route myself. But people HAVE driven on railway tracks, into lakes or in remote areas where they died of hypothermia. Imagine if you program your car to drive you, without any input, and it makes such a mistake?
It's science fiction, until we can program a creative and reasoning mind.
Yes, we can build warning systems, or even systems that delivers fault free driving in most conditions,
but exceptions happens, and our technology is far from beeing able to handle the unknown.
The margins for errors when driving is frightfully small - we are travelling inches from death, and
even small errors are potentially fatal.
The human mind is excellent at doing fast intuitive reactions, and there is nothing that makes you gain respect
for the brain, than trying to program something that is dead simple for a human to do, like formatting a graph in a nice looking way.
Unfortunately, games that are just playing simple tricks are fooling us to believe that AI is simple and near.
I wont let anything drive me, unless it can also talk about something funny and relevant during the drive...
It's ok for coal to have killed and maimed thousands directly and more than a million indirectly, but a nuclear incident that gives a few workers a dose over limit.....
There are concerns have already stopped thinking for themselves but this "complaint" seem a bit overboard. One of the most monotonous, most error prone, and rarely deadly common activities people in the US do is drive to and from work. Its boring but requires our focused attention. This means the 30 to hour minute drive is often a lost time activity that we do twice a day. A repetitious activity that can easily bore a human and has to be done to time and safety tolerances? These are all of the hallmarks of something that a machine should be able to handle better than humans.
I'm not sure I'd want all cars to be self driving but as a "work car" then why not? Complaining how people abducted their choice to a nanny state because cars drive them to work belies the fact that most people don't seriously or rigorously plan their drive to work anyway.
It seems pretty obvious that the cost of this system will see it installed in high-end vehicles first: lorries and vans (and possibly luxury cars) before it trickles down to the ordinary domestic car. Personally I'd be far happier knowing that the articulated behind me was being controlled by a machine than by a sleep--deprived driver, who may or may not speak the language and is probably more concerned with finding the motorway exit sign, than observing the stopping distance to my vehicle - which is only 2% of its weight.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
To troll, asinine.
Judging from the number of cars I see with drivers blabbing on cells phones while drifting around on the road, people stuffing their faces, digging around the passenger seat, etc I'd say we've had driverless cars for some time now.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Quick we need a car analogy... oh wait...
I remember a plot point from the Shadowrun games being the GridGuide system, something like this but additionally using a "routing system" using transceivers placed in/by the road. I assume you could use a peer-to-peer system of some sort where the individual nodes sort out the shortest path for any given vehicle and then transmit that route to the vehicles, recalculating it every so often to make up for the changing conditions. People would probably accept a system with some measure of central control easier, especially if there where human operators monitoring the system from a birds-eye view.
It wouldn't do anything for the safety or control of the vehicle versus its immediate surroundings of course, but traffic routing of some sort would have to come into play if you wanted to, say, just hop into the car skunk drunk with an assault rifle and an ork and tell the car to take you to the local warzone-ghetto-clinic in order to put the ork's guts back into the ork.
Emotions! In your brain!
"I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that. There's a 'No Left Turn' sign there. To do so could only be the result of human error."
Will computer steered cars be able to dodge other dingbats on the road who are: twittering, spilling their coffee on themselves and putting on makeup? That is the real danger on the road. And those are the types of folks who will refuse a computer chauffeur.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
As soon as it is proven that computers cause fewer accidents than people do, the rates for manual insurance will rocket. Just like it's now impossible for a teenage man (and when the non sex discrimination rules kick in, teenage women, too) to get any insured for less than several thousand £££'s, so it will be for drivers who wish to be in control, themselves. SO while the law may allow people to drive, it will soon be impractical for reasons of cost. Shortly after that it will become socially irresponsible and after that people will start to wonder why anyone would ever want to. It'll take a decade ot two, but sooner or later the only place people will be allowed to control cars themselves will be on private race-tracks next door to hospitals - provided you can afford the medical care.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
A million deaths per year sounds inflated. Last year, the us had "only" 42k deaths. I can't believe the rest of the world accounts for 660k deaths, ESP when the US has a disproportionate amount of vehicles.
Stipulating "1m deaths" as fact makes me suspect the rest of this analysis.
--
$tar -xvf
Very right. However, there's one correction - i believe the corrective measures it would take would have to be somewhat passive... the problem i see is changing response to the same input ... the switch perhaps being another foot pedal.
A lot of what you know about driving is to do with the response of the car being predictable. I can imagine a situation where the car corrects the course of drive, such as autobraking or restricting your "gas" even though you are stepping at it full. Once it hands control back, you accelerate due to the above... it tries to counter it by braking, perhaps goes too much, and in effect you drive jerkily and the car behind rear-ends you
Especially if the back car is computer driven too... error propagation in control systems like that is something vicious
A safer way would be to sound a warning and ask for control
Modern cars could easily be programmed to never exceed 80, the current top speed limit in the USA, but there are no regulations forcing this and no cars do this. We could in theory get rid of a lot of invasive search laws if there were no DUI excuses. I don't own a car or drive, so it makes it very difficult for me to be unreasonably searched as I'm not capable of endangering those around me with 40,000kg*m/s of momentum.
(Oops, this is me posting, don't wish to be anonymous. And sorry for typo in the last sentence above.)
Well, the trouble with the anti-gun lobby is that legislating against guns seems unlikely to have a noticeable positive impact on the rate of gun crimes, and might even create a black market for illegal guns with all the organized crime, cartels, and violence that that implies. But we're getting off topic here, and I should probably be modded down.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Right, the logic expressed in TFS was reasonable, but only from the collectivist POV. That is, a system where some people are sacrificed for The Greater Good(TM), in this case for likely a significant increase in highway safety, vs. a system where the individual has a large amount (albeit not complete) control over his or her own life. This is just one particular case in the timeless struggle between two conflicting general philosophies.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
). But I sure as hell don't want to be the one guy in the statistics whos dieing is okay just because the system usually works. At least let me cause my own death, or be in control of avoiding getting hit by a drunk driver so it's at least my own fault!
Yep, and when you are driving, your genes get to play a greater part in the "selection" process. So it has a higher chance of "improving" humans in the long run.
With the robot controlled cars, it's more "hit or miss".
Cyborg post-humans on the other hand might take a different evolutionary approach.
I don't think people realize just how automated their vehicles already are. Sure, it's nice to be able to point to something and go "It parks itself! Ohmigawd!" but if you dig deeper you'll realize that the beginning of the "cars driving themselves" era has already passed us by. Thirty years ago when you mashed the brakes in your car, it pushed on a hydraulic, vacuum-assisted cylinder, and forced a fluid down to the brakes. That's it.
Now when you nail the brakes, a computer is deciding that the "rapid engagement of the brakes" is really a request for 100% braking power and fully actuates the master cylinder by itself regardless of your exact input. Some cars will even adjust your steering inputs for you. Meanwhile another computer is looking at the rotating speed of each wheel, comparing them, and reducing and/or modulating the pressure to keep them from locking up. Another computer (or maybe the same one) is checking the speed of all four wheels versus the angle of the steering wheel versus roll/pitch/yaw sensors, and further adjusting the brakes and engine torque split to ensure that the vehicle isn't spinning or attempting to roll. Yet another computer is seeing that a massive load is being placed on the front suspension and actuates a set of valves or magnets to firm up the front shocks to reduce braking dive. Meanwhile a front facing sensor is comparing your rate of deceleration with the speed at which you're approaching an object, and when the check fails it weighs each occupant and primes a series of airbags for them, fires the seatbelt pretensioners, unlocks the doors, brings the seats upright, rolls up the windows, closes the sunroof, disables non-essential electrical systems, and basically does it's best to prepare the cabin for a crash. Some cars even have microphones tuned to listen for the sound of impact as a queue for firing the airbags! And how many cars these days phone home (OnStar, etc) when you're in an accident? You smash into a tree and before the fog clears from your eyes there's a friendly sounding lady on the phone going "We've detected a crash. Sir, are you alright?"
Cars already drive themselves. We just point them in the direction we want to go. One day we won't even have to do that, we'll just say "take me home" and it will figure out the rest. Why that is so much more terrifying than our present state is largely a matter of perception.
In Hell when I trust my life and the lives of my loved ones to an algorithm, no matter how well written or secure. Humans may be flawed and dangerous operators, but unless this system can operate under all conditions and in all environments, human intuition will trump predetermined logic every time. I'd love to see how this system handles a one ton moose jumping out in front of your car while you're traveling at 100km/hour.
You can call it sheer ignorance, but honestly, if driving is such a drag, DON'T DRIVE. Walk. Bike. Take transit. Carpool. Telecommute. I know you want your own personal gas guzzling chariot - who doesn't - but there are already much more cost effective and safer ways to get from Point A to Point B in most urban centres.
Working on it... Just look at Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya... Some countries are even good at it by themselves...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
But Apple would want to take 30% of the charges any time you pay for parking/toll/etc.
think about it. countries like Japan are full of trains. RIGHT NOW they are saving tens of thousands of people from death, per miles traveled, just by choosing to use trains instead of automobiles.
as for the 'million saved', its a bit misleading. there are 30,000 deaths in auto accidents in the US each year. even assuming google thinks it can prevent all of these with its magic car, which is crazy, that still leaves 970,000 other fatal crashes in other places on the planet. like, say, the middle of india, where rikshaws and 2 cylinder cars from the 60s and cows all share the roadway.
is google going to magically donate its technology to hundreds of millions of people so they can upgrade their cars? you realize of course that the auto-driving technology google wants to put in these cars will cost more than the cars themselves? and be instantly stolen and sold for scrap? there are many, many cars here in the US driving around that are worth, say, 500 to a thousand dollars, on a good day. is google going to stick $5,000 worth of technology into these cars? no.
they are not going to 'save a million people from dying in car crashes', because a million people are dying in car crashes in cars that are 30 years old and that google will never upgrade, ever.
what about new cars? fine. google will save one million people, thirty years from now, after all the old cars have been phased out. way to go google!
meanwhile if we had put that money into high speed passenger trains, we could have saved many more lives.
not only from preventing crashes, but from the massive amounts of pollution that are caused by automobiles, the massive amount of wasted public money that could go into health care that instead goes to transport, the obesity epidemic as 'walkable cities' are paved over in favor of the automobile, the increased rates of health problems caused by the stress of driving, the noise and the ugliness caused by the highway system, and so forth and so on.
See subject.
A drunk driver could just as easily hit a brain surgeon and kill him.
If a bug in your driving system causes an accident who is at fault? Is it you or the vehicle manufacturer? Currently if you a passenger in the car then the driver is at fault. In this case, you aren't driving. What insurance company is going to insure your car if you are not the driver? One possible model might be automated trains but that is a special form of transportation. In the past, if it is a manufacturing defect that causes an accident and it can be proven in court (such as sticking acceleration pedal) then the driver is at fault but those harmed (both the driver and the one hit) will presumably sue the manufacturing company for huge sums of money. If the manufacturer knew of problems but didn't disclose then that make the settlement value even higher. I don't see how this is going to be resolved without special liability limitations for the makers of these systems and that might not be in the best interested of anyone but the manufacturers. In addition, I don't see how insurance companies are going to be able to rate the risk of these systems as drivers but perhaps over time enough data will be accumulated. Insurance works with regards to insurable risks and probabilities based on past risk experiences. With a new technology like this there is going to be some insurance and liability issues to resolve.
Nice list of automated systems, but the reality is that these are all optional -- disable every single one of the systems mentioned, and the car would still work.
You could list the things in the engine that automatically control it -- at least the car would stop if those failed -- but ultimately, when people talk about automatic cars, you know what they're talking about -- the important stuff. Computer control of the steering, brakes, throttle. Three analog channels. Everything else pales in comparison to those things.
Until the car can control those three variables on it's own (and I'm not talking about self parking cars, but that's getting close) -- the car will not "drive itself". That "pointing it in the direction we want to go" thing, that's called driving.
In order to understand our reactions to deaths attributable to machines/computers/robots, we should notice the different reactions in different cases. Several killings by industrial robots were reported in the news although they were in many ways more like accidents with chainsaws and snowblowers and other dangerous power tools than the "robot kills human" sort of headline suggests. On the other hand, the Therac 25 delivered therapeutic radiation controlled by very badly designed and constructed software, and it killed at least 6 patients in a rather gruesome way. These incidents seem much more like automated manslaughter than the accidents with industrial robots, but I never found any mention in the newspapers. The killings went on for more than a year, and early investigations focused on hardware problems, mostly ignoring the software. We need a few good dissertations and more careful studies of more incidents before drawing conclusions. But, it seems that our irrational reactions to machine/computer/robot killings are driven by something more subtle and complicated than a mere autophobia. I would hazard a guess that we prefer to get excited about relatively unimportant incidents with a nice dramatic presentation, while ignoring the rationally scarier incidents that expose real systematic safety problems.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
But I sure as hell don't want to be the one guy in the statistics whos dieing is okay just because the system usually works.
What happens when the system works better than you do?
At least let me cause my own death, or be in control of avoiding getting hit by a drunk driver so it's at least my own fault!
You also are asking for permission to cause the deaths of others. And a drunk isn't going to hit you with a car, if they aren't driving.
As I see it, I don't believe we should ever get rid of human drivers altogether. The need for human freedom outweighs the slightly greater death rate from having human drivers on the road. But at the same time, I think you should understand the trade offs of being a human driver.
When you get behind the wheel, you are putting other people at risk of being hit by you. I think that the risk to these other people are outweighed by your needs and wants (driving is pretty safe when done by a skilled driver who is aware of and respects the risks of driving.
But the iCar would only have 1 pedal.
Makes driving a bit trickier, no?
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on the given circumstances), no. They're programmed to sacrifice some braking power to try to maintain some steering control. But your point that cars are already making decisions for us and taking choices out of our hands remains. Unfortunately I think one of those decisions cost me getting into an accident (i.e. not being able to stop in time) and losing my car (an older car that ins. decided to just total out). Then again, that same decision might save my life some day.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
Imagine a logic bomb, or rootkit which one morning, during rush hour, causes everyone to accelereate to top speed, and steers randomly. Entire productive population of a country wiped out just like that. It would take decades for that country to recover
The iCar will only be able to drive on iRoads, sadly there aren't many iRoads but those few that exist look really sleek.
At least let me cause my own death, or be in control of avoiding getting hit by a drunk driver so it's at least my own fault!
Are you the guy who apologized to Dick Cheney after he shot you in the face? Man, you have some serious self esteem issues.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
It is the driver behind the wheel which makes it dangerous.
And here's the problem with robotic drivers... They are all identical. Every one on a particular model will be byte for byte identical. Which means a fault in one is a fault in all.
Humans on the other hand are all different. Just because one causes an accident under certain circumstance doesn't mean another would.
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Problem is, this is more likely to kill pedestrians, OAPs and cyclists. Car drivers currently kill other drivers the most, not vulnerable people. So this would move the balance the other way.
Will computer steered cars be able to dodge other dingbats on the road who are: twittering, spilling their coffee on themselves and putting on makeup? That is the real danger on the road. And those are the types of folks who will refuse a computer chauffeur.
Will computers be able to handle the dingbats better or less good than a human driver? _That_ is the question.
Yup, even educated people are really stupid about understanding probabilities and risk. But I do think that it's an analogous problem.
The competitor will have an option for "GT mode", "Super Sport", "Cruise launch", "Eco-boost" and "Rally" that no one understands.
It'll also let you plot your own course, which apple wouldn't let you do.
I think you're talking about ABS (reducing braking power to avoid wheel lockups, so that steering input still has an effect) but what you've quoted is a long-winded way of saying Emergency Braking Assist, which is becoming fairly common. ABS will override EBA, but EBA is more about the speedy application of brakes than finding the upper limit of available traction (ABS' job).
You're exactly right, which is sad, because I don't really see much courage in our government to do any of this stuff. So yeah, we'll keep increasing the amount of coal we burn, waste more fuel stuck in traffic jams, etc., and think that shit smells like freedom.
I imagine the government would have to set up a strict requirements and tests, and then once licensed the vendor would be immune from suits unless gross incompetence or malice could be proven and that they would also then benefit from an insurance pool to compensate/benefit those injured due to the system with some sort of cap or limit to the payouts.
After that was in place, I'd think government and businesses would jump on it to avoid being sued for their employee's driving errors or for simply having their logo on the vehicle, not to mention long term cost savings of not having a human driver (no more wage, insurance, or tax costs) and therefor not needing a cabin and add 24/7 driving and better fuel economy (from no a/c and fuel saving driving patterns). Heck, UPS, FedEx, and the USPS could all redesign their vehicles to carry more while making it easier and even faster for the employee to deliver the mail or packages.
I'd also think those that can't or shouldn't be driving would also be quick to jump on it. For instance, once you had a system like this in place, I'm sure you'd see laws sprout up prohibiting anybody ever guilty of DUI from using a human-driven vehicle. Seniors that can't drive or would rather not will love these cars as they would give them freedom to go anywhere any time, and the people will love that they aren't driving, perhaps leading to lower maximum driving ages. I'd imagine minivans that had no "front seats", designed more like a limo, would be extremely popular with families. Make a sedan designed like that, with rear facing front seats with a built in table and power outlet, and I'm sure most commuters would jump on it. New drivers would simply be used to it by the time they could even apply for a license, so the number of people against the concept would naturally lower every year.
So those that wouldn't want to give up the control could hold out, at least until you end up with such a huge portion of cars driving themselves, that the population starts limiting human driving (more expensive and difficult to obtain licenses, automated-only rules for freeways, tolls, etc) or driving around them becomes too annoying (I enjoy driving, but if every car was going the posted speed limit, and I imagine those limits would only go down, it would get old very fast!).
No no you use both feet on the pedal at the same time to brake.
driving is pretty safe when done by a skilled driver who is aware of and respects the risks of driving.
Sure, but how many people fit into that category? Not a lot. It's not (usually) those drivers that are causing the accidents.
There are many weird issues that would have to be considered with car AI though. I probably wouldn't want to develop such software, because a bug really could be life threatening, even if lives are being saved most of the time.. it's a difficult one. Also, drivers are legally responsible when they make a stupid mistake, but who is responsible when the car makes a mistake? The driver that didn't patch up to the latest software? The developer that didn't realise the code he wrote doesn't work in all scenarios? The driver that didn't keep their tyres properly inflated, causing their car to aquaplane into another?
which is totally what she said
If slashdot keeps coming up with more car articles, someday we have to come up with our anti-car-analogy comments.
Democracy is for the people; you only vote once per season and we'll do the rest of the work for you don't have to.
What will happen to all of the Barney Fife's of the world if this is implemented. With no more speed traps to generate income for local governments, the cops will have to find something else to do or be laid off.
I'm saddened by how common this error is. We are constantly faced with "what's best on a population basis" Vs "what I want for me" questions. Logic has nothing to do with it. It's about values.
Otherwise thoughtful people seem to like to think that they have a "rational perspective", whatever that means. You might be better than "the masses" (whoever they are) at logically solving problems once you have a *goal*, but you can't reason your way to ends. You will end up chasing your ends to a plurality of mutually defensible and mutually assailable assumptions. If that weren't the case, moral philosophy would actually be useful, and used.
Actually, considering that there's too many of us on our little ball of sand and iron already, the Greater Good &trade might be better served if we keep driving like we're used to. Reconcile that with "Do no evil", Google!
May the source be with you.
"But I sure as hell don't want to be the one guy in the statistics whos dieing is okay just because the system usually works. "
>I don't care if it can save millions of lives, I'm a selfish asshole who would rather risk my own life and the lives of everyone around me cause I don't understand technology or probability.
Fixed that for you
Damn, I just spent my last mod point, too. +1 in spirit, at least.
Bah. You aren't driving, you're just riding in a box. You don't even need to own it -- you can just rent it for you trip.
We already have that. We call them "cabs".
And they're sometimes useful.
Which may be the way to sell this, more than "it's a car you don't have to drive!". Why bother? The *point* of owning a car is to drive it. Driving is *fun*.
(And if it isn't, please, please, please take the bus, train, or trolley. If you don't enjoy driving, you're not going to be paying attention, which, frankly, makes you part of the problem.)
The problem with driverless cars is not that they're going to be unsafe, but that they're basically useless. We HAVE means of transporting people so that they don't have to pay attention already.
And yet we still own cars. Why? Because they're _fun_. Who's going to drop US$50,000 on a car that they don't get to drive?
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
Hold the fuck on. What you've just said is that you're okay with more deaths and/or injuries, so long as it's a humans fault. If that is correct, that decision is a source of danger to others - but you're still okay with it, because it'll be your own fault. In other words, you're presenting the exact same illogical reasoning that this article is addressing. Is it better to have more accidents and a human at fault, or less accidents and robotics at fault? POV regardless, it is absurd to cling to the former option. Uncanny Valley indeed.
Humans are terrible replicators of Godly things.
I love driving too, but I'd jump into an automated car without hesitation. I'd even pay _more_ to NOT have a wheel or driver fallback in the car, with the front two seats facing back like a small limo. I'd much rather have a fully automated car than one that includes a built-in backseat driver.
I don't agree about them having to work without failure or handle every single possible situation possible. If the car can't handle it or if something happens, then a secondary system would surely be in place for the car to pull over, while I use an OnStar style service to talk to somebody about it while they diagnose the problem and if needed wait for a replacement loaner car from my insurance company to drive up on its own to get me. I'd also enjoy paying those lower premiums because they essentially just cover roadside assistance and car replacement/repair, instead of liability (would resent still having to insure against uninsured human drivers though!).
And on top of all that, no more worries about my kids (or their friends) getting into accidents from joy riding, being too cocky, getting distracted (from passengers, phones, etc), or worse. Not to mention, once in college I'd know they always had a dedicated "driver" when out. I can't imagine many parents would buy (or allow their dependents to buy) human-driver cars anymore. Goes the opposite direction too, suddenly the grandparents have complete freedom to go anywhere whenever they want, safely and without the fear of all the aggressive drivers. Correct me if I'm wrong, but right there you have the two most dangerous driving age groups no longer driving, so even if I was driving manually, I'd be safer too.
Stop trying to shove Ayn Rand into everything.
If this technology existed, was accepted, and is viable I would love it. But only if it had an off switch. Yes, you'd perhaps sacfifice a bit of freedom on highways (though you could just look at it like any other form of public transportation), but you could switch it off in other places and be entirely free to drive about on your own power.
I don't see the big deal. Nor do see it as an exemplar of some grand cosmic battle of ideologies.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
So you like a system where your death will be your fault or somebody else's (the bad driver who slams into you), but not a system where it can only be somebody else's (the system designer)? If you are concerned that it's taking away your right to kill yourself, there would still be plenty of other ways to exercise that right.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
you're already sacrificing people for your own greater good.
You're just ignoring it.
You could also point at the poor smuck who gets hit by a drunk driver or by someone who just isn't paying attention.
their lives count just as much.
Do not ignore those who are killed by no fault of their own. How many are killed in accidents caused by someone else?
Unfortunately, this is precisely the point. People are illogical. 600k die every year to heart disease and no one flinches, but it a one-time, ~3000 death event caused a massive response. 24k deaths each year can be attributed to coal power plants, but clearly it's nuclear power that's the major threat. After all, you never know when your local nuclear reactor might be hit by a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Hell coal generation in the US releases more radioactive minerals (mostly uranium and thorium) than is contained in all the nuclear plants in the US! If you live near a coal plant you get a higher average dose then living next to a nuke plant!
And the effects of coal related radiation is secondary to the respiratory illness caused by coal particulates released from mining and power generation.
If the coal industry was held to the same standards as the nuclear industry it wouldn't be profitable.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
an off switch would be essential, yes, if only as a backup for is they're something wrong with the automatic systems.
I'd view it as a boon in terms of personal freedom, to be able to sit back and read a book while going to work without the hassle of public transport.
To be able to get out a the door of my office and tell the car to go find somewhere to park and pick me up at the end of the day: with perhaps some algorithms to balance cost of parking vs fuel to get to the spaces etc.
the evil, ambulance-chasing lawyers and the politicians who accept corporate bribes (a.k.a. "campaign donations") to make ridiculous laws which have cultivated such a large disrespect for all laws in this country, even though the politicians attempt to bribe voters with "ear marks".
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I think the reasoning in this story is stupid. Drivers could get killed many times more when they're driving themself, but at least it's their own fault (or some drunk driver). But I sure as hell don't want to be the one guy in the statistics whos dieing is okay just because the system usually works. At least let me cause my own death, or be in control of avoiding getting hit by a drunk driver so it's at least my own fault!
So, you fly your own airplane too?
who's liable when a part in your car fails and you skid across the road into another car?
it doesn't happen much but lets ignore the software aspect and assume that a wheel just fell of the car.
it could be the mechanic if you just got it serviced a few days before and they either didn't spot it or make a mistake while working on the wheel.
It could be the car company if there's a systematic problem with all their cars.
it could be you if you've failed to keep the car in a good safe condition.
Your insurance company may insist that to be covered you get your car serviced regularly if you want to be covered.
so lets now apply the same logic to the software.
it could be the mechanic if you just got it serviced a few days before and they damaged a sensor or screwed up the computer somehow.
It could be the car company or software vendor if there's a systematic problem with all their cars/software.
it could be you if you've failed to keep the car in a good safe condition and the software up to date.
Your insurance company may insist that to be covered you keep your software up to date.
no big leaps really.
The iRoads will get you everywhere you need to go, easily and safely. There are other roads for other cars that lead into swamps and off cliffs, and the iCar users will be more than happy they aren't part of the iCar network.
The big thing though is that the vast majority of people aren't psycho killers. It's much harder to kill someone with an axe or a knife ( have to chase them around, you might not kill them immediately, they can see you coming, etc...), so odds are you'll change your mind somewhat in the course of your murder. Grabbing your gun and shooting is quick, and deadly. That's what causes the most manslaughters.
it'll still be humans at fault. If your autodrive system fails it would be no different than if your wheel failed and fell off.
you, your mechanic, the company who made the car or the company which made what failed could be liable depending on why it failed.
if you don't keep it patched and up to date it might be you, if your mechanic misconfigures it it could be him, if the company which made it made a mistake then they could end up paying.
it doesn't really change anything.
it's just another part of the car.
Funny. We seem to want robotic nannies to "save labor" (for what, one might ask?), but invade the grapefruit-sized domain of "pure thought" with a few AI functions and everyone goes ape from the sheer soul-less-ness of it all. When Skynet takes over, I hope they put high voltage collars on stupidity and install invisible fences around our anoetic living spaces.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Who's going to drop US$50,000 on a car that they don't get to drive?
The same people who drop $50K to keep a horse to ride.
Hey, horses are fun, we just don't need random horse riders creating a hazard for the rest of us. You want to drive your car for fun? Go to a track and go wild.
there are these concepts called "less" and "more".
they can be used like this:
Some people are killed by A
Some people are killed by B
but less people are(or could be) killed by B if we replaced B with A.
...which is exactly why it will be hard to accept them if they cause even one death or injury. If I am driving and I make a mistake it is my fault and I have to deal with the consequences. If a robot is driving I have no control over whether it makes a mistake and yet I will still have to deal with the consequences.
The problem is therefore one of trust. I trust (most) people I know to drive me safely - after all there lives are on the line too. However with a robot I have to trust that some random programmer has not made a mistake somewhere in the code and that the sensors and other hardware it relies on will not fail. We already have aeroplanes which can fly themselves and I see nobody is suggesting that we have computer controlled passenger jets...so why should cars be different?
What I really mean is, can we run a train before we drive a car in traffic? Trains have a pretty predictable path, and their only traffic problem is the pretty clear case of obstructions (moving or not) on the track.
In Calgary, we just had our local light rail "C-Train" system fire a driver because he was doing crosswords while driving: ...that suggests to me it is easier to automate. Why do you get a 3-car LRT or subway train every fifteen minutes (when all the cars are separately electrically-powered), rather than a single car every five minutes? Cost of drivers.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2011/03/14/calgary-transit-ctrain-driver-crossword-puzzle.html
Next up: buses. One "problem" with robot cars is that they would scrupulously obey every speed law and light and make conservative safety decisions (and save all those lives) but would cost time. People in a hurry cut those corners and would continue to do so. But bus drivers already drive like that NOW, so its not a "service reduction" like it would be perceived with a car. Automating them would again allow smaller buses that run much more frequently. The more-convenient mass transit systems would lure people away from cars - and thereby also save lives.
Lastly, only when those easier automations are proven successful, will you be able to build a market for driverless cars.
Taxi. Taxi. Taxitaxitaxitaxitaxitaxitaxitaxitaxitaxitaxitaxi. You are wrong and I'm sick of hearing this severely mistaken idea. I want a car to:
--Let me choose my own cost/benefits.
--Make a personal statement and stylistic preferences.
--Keep more stuff than I can carry with me, including from errand to errand, from day to day, and things for emergencies that others may not think is worth the cost of hauling around.
--Have immediately (not within 5 minutes) and closely (not within a block) available, almost certainly, almost all the time.
--Let me be familiar with its quirks and needs so caring for it is cheaper.
--Fit my individual needs whether it's low milage, the ability to haul a certain amount of gear, tow a certain sized trailer, or whatever.
I suppose you could have a fleet of taxis built to the most stringent requirements 99% of people will need, each pulling a cart of gear as needed (and kept by) the individual but the cost of that would more than outweigh the savings of having the cars as group property and it still wouldn't address individual preferences.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
...and before the grammar nazis strike - yes that should be 'their' not 'there' - sorry for the typo!
I imagine that the autopilot would be mostly for highway use, as that is the most predictable use-case.
I think the reasoning in this story is stupid. Drivers could get killed many times more when they're driving themself, but at least it's their own fault (or some drunk driver). But I sure as hell don't want to be the one guy in the statistics whos dieing is okay just because the system usually works. At least let me cause my own death, or be in control of avoiding getting hit by a drunk driver so it's at least my own fault!
Reasoning is similar to flying vs. driving. It is a lot more probable that you will die driving, but few people have panic attacks on the highway.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Do you plot your own course when catching a plane or train? No. The train follows the fixed route, the plane'a route is decided by experts - the pilot and air traffic control having considered the weather and other traffic. And does any passenger give a damn what precise route they take? No,
What's your objective in a car? To get to your destination as soon as possible, or perhaps most economically. Sat Nav together with traffic information systems are far more capable of achieving those objectives than a human's gut feel. If you're actually driving, then there might be more pleasure taking one route than another, but if a computer is driving, the last remaining reason for a human to make the choice of route is gone. The human i going to be reading a newspaper or watching a video or passing time with fellow passengers.
For sure there's some rare situations where you might want to choose some via points. But the human plotting the entire route is pointless.
Why not? We let drunks, non-licensed, non-insured, aggressive, douchbags, etc drive. I'd rather have a robot control their car instead of them.
driving is fun when you're driving for fun.
but most of what people have to use cars for is serious and boring. sitting in rush hour traffic isn't fun, driving to and from the same place every day for a decade isn't fun.
the bus is useful but it has the problem that it gets you to and from not quite where you are to not quite where you want to go and there's nothing more frustrating than being on a deadline and watching that bus sail on past because it's full... and then watching the next one sail past as well.
Taxis do part of the job but again, they're expensive and at peak times they can fail to be available.
I'd buy the fuck out of a car which drove itself.
We're not all set on cars as recreation.
some of us just want them as tools which do something useful.
Robot driven cars will only exist on special roads that do not allow on human driven cars.
The machines will line up in a specials lane and enter one at at a time. There will be a fence to keep out other cars. See the movie, Minority Report for the idea.
It will replace the HOV lanes that exist today.
Mixing human driven cars and machine driven cars would be a disaster, but with all the cars talking to each other and the road bed, everything would be be great.
Imagine driving 6 hours and not having to watch the road. Turn your chair to talk to the passengers, check your emails, etc.
I hope that's not your personal argument, because it's completely irrational. Oh my, people might die, but at least when it's people killing people we have someone to blame! What a bunch of bollocks. Deaths are deaths, the exact cause, whether human or algorithm makes absolutely no difference. But of course the same creatures who are happy to attribute their creation to an imaginary sky fairy will be more than happy to subscribe to the exact same faulty logic. Yay for humans, the most intelligent species on our planet, and the most willing treat utter fantasy as the absolute truth.
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
If it's not too expensive, I'd love to have a robot driving my car. But it has to be optional, I've got to be able to take over and drive how I want.
I *love* driving, when I'm not tired or drunk or on the phone.
To me, this is just like cruise control. I set it to the speed limit when I'm just cruising down an empty road. But I don't touch it when I'm enjoying my drive.
The best part of his "argument" is the failure to appreciate the qualitative differences between "human error" when say, walking down the street and "human error" when piloting a 1.5 ton vehicle traveling at 65 MPH. While the first may cause an old lady to fall over when you accidently bump into her, the second will cause that same old lady to be crushed and killed when you accidently bump your high velocity death wagon into her. This propensity to try and put these same "human errors" into different categories just because one involves an automobile is completely stupid. Any opportunity to reduce "human error" should be taken just as soon as the solution is shown to be statistically safer. Just because a few control-freak whiners cry about not having enough control doesn't mean we should stop progress just to shut them up!!!
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision
Complete with references.
I can't believe there's so much conversation above about "individual freedom" with respect to your cars: People willing to trade more deaths for the right to be irresponsible and people willing to actually try to have a measured conversation with them on that topic.
You can't drive a rocket car on a city street. Why not? Why can't you mount knives on your bumper? If you don't hit anything, it's safe, right?
Screw 'em. Nowhere in the constitution are they granted the right to risk the lives of others. If the autonomous cars are much, much safer than you driving, then hitting someone will quickly get you sued completely into oblivion for negligence and endangering others. The autonomous cars will dominate due to the insurance costs of non-autonomous ones.
And that's good. People in non-autonomous cars will cost us vast quantities of money due to gas costs, time delays and health issues due to exhausts and accidents. They deserve no support at all.
BTW; auto pilot does not use any of those things you mentioned. For an automated landing, the good old ILS is still used. I system which uses two separate tones riding on a carrier and phased just so that you get an equal balance of the two tones when you are on the glide slope. When you stray up for down, you get more 90Hz tone than 150 Hz and so the system know..oops, I am to high. Left and right uses different tones, but the same principle. Phasing that is hard though, 14 different antennas as opposed to 3 max for the up/down.
Are you suggesting that Apple folks have only enough brain capacity to choose between two options?
This is similar to the fate of automated trains in New York City during the 1960s. GE and Westinghouse rolled out a two-car consist and demoed the technology on the 42nd Street shuttle. It worked for about four years (with passengers not noticing much difference other than harder braking), but a fire near a switch on the line (that wasn't caused by the cars) caused a huge uproar against the project, forcing the MTA to scrap the idea completely. The closest concepts we have to this today are one-person train operation, which the elevated's in Chicago have been doing for years. See here for a better read.
I would imagine that the same issues apply here, even more so considering that cars cause way more deaths than trains/planes/etc do.
Also, drivers are legally responsible when they make a stupid mistake, but who is responsible when the car makes a mistake?
Who cares? it's not like the other guy being found guilty of your death will reverse it, you're dead either way.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
To me, it's all a question of liability. Who is liable when something goes wrong? How hard is going to be to hold them to it?
I look at the utter chaos of trying to debug and repair rare errors in existing car software or faulty sensors, and all I can see is a chain of denial, evasion and presure to cover up. Of course an accident may sink an automated driver project - it will be the test of the manufacturer's willingness to accept full liability for the damages. The moment they attempt to say "can't be my fault", it's over.
I know plenty of people who drive for "fun" but do it dangerously and don't pay the necessary attention. I also know plenty of people who have no interest in driving for the sake of driving, but are careful and attentive because they understand that's how you should act with a couple of tons of metal under your control.
Except they're more expensive and less convenient. Your same line of reasoning concludes: why have cabs when we already have buses and trains ?
The vast majority of people for whom cars are a tool to get from A to B, and not a leisure pursuit ? I drive for fun on weekends. All the other trips involve wasting my valuable time sitting on roads full of other cars. A car that drove itself to work and back every day would be _awesome_.
I like technology as much as the next guy, but do we always have to do something just because it's possible?
If we go with this system, we're totally dependent on Google's software to keep our cars on the straight and narrow, right?
Okay. What happens if somebody (Google, government or both) puts a backdoor in the system so that, at their whim, they could cause you and your car to drive off a cliff or into a tree? Or maybe somebody in power decides that you should be arrested for what you're thinking or posting online, and next time you try to go somewhere, your car takes you straight to the authorities?
Given that recently corporations and government seem to be merging into one entity, I'm not about to trust my life to them.
I'm suggesting that most Slashdotters (and most manufacturers) don't realise that it's better for a consumer item to have less options. It's better for the designers to consider every option and see if it's actually necessary, and whether it improves or degrades the user experience.
For example, Garmin Sat Navs have 3 options on routing: Fastest, Shortest and Cheapest. That' a pretty good consolidation of all the possible routing options into just 3 bottom line choices. And yet it's still one more than necessary. You know all the stories about vehicles getting stuck down roads that are unsuitable for them because the Sat Nav routed them down there. I'm pretty sure that most of these cases are people choosing the pointless "shortest" routing option.
If you don't see the whole idea that options aren't necessarily a good thing, I suggest you take a look at the preferences in Vuze (formally known as Azureus).
...aside from a computer's faster reflexes, direct control, and never being drunk, senile, or obnoxious:
A: You're about to be in my way!
B: Sorry, my breaks are shot. I'm going that way. (pointing)
A: Okay so I'll try to edge in behind you. Can you speed up a tad?
B: Okay I'll speed up. I don't have anyone in my back seat so you can fishtail into me on the way if you have to to get by.
A: Thanks.
C: Hey what's going on over there?
A: We're in a risky situation. You should try to avoid us. We think we'll be in these places at these times. (send chart)
C: Okay, I'm moving this way at this speed if I can. I'll keep you posted.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Remarkably good.
In US the 2008 fatality rate was 1.25 per 100 million "vehicle miles of travel". That's not one fatal error in 80m miles; 2 deaths in one accident is being counted as 2 so the fatal error rate can only be lower.
A few tons of machinery whizzing around at up to (and sometimes over) 80mph, in all sorts of changeable weather conditions and innumerable other unpredictable variables, and still 1.25 per 100m miles.
1 death is one too many, but the main reason there are a lot of car-related deaths is there is a lot of car-related activity. Certainly, a computer is not prone to the human factors in car crashes, but that is to forget how astonishingly good we are when not being a complete asshat and driving when fatigued, drunk or using a cellphone.
And yet we still own cars. Why? Because they're _fun_. Who's going to drop US$50,000 on a car that they don't get to drive?
The same people that drop $2-3k on a computer whose OS they don't get to compile, most likely.
This is much like the GUI vs CLI debate of the computing world except when an instruction fails to compile here people die, often some that didn't have anything to do with the guilty party's computer in the first place other than being nearby.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
All this brings back memories of some movies where the world one day would be taken over by machines, because some greedy business man wants us to believe that machines are better then humans, well i say a big no to any such attempt, our lives has already become slave to technology and in some cases its good but not every where, so for now google can try and find some new ideas and not this one.
Agreed, but the immediate association in the mind of someone who holds the above AC's opinion is "machines/robots/computers".
Humans are terrible replicators of Godly things.
I hope you never use any form of public transportation. If you've ever flown, you've put your life in the pilot's hands (and chances are that you were not the pilot). Sure - we could all get our pilots licenses and take cessnas everywhere for our longer-range travel, but I'd trust the two highly-trained professionals in the cockpit to fly much safer than a bunch of random people with extra cash that spent a few months learning to fly. In the same way that commercial pilots are paid to know all of the safety precautions to take and the emergency procedures in the event that something goes wrong, so are the people designing software for self-driving cars.
As someone that designs and builds complicated software that needs to handle tons of bizarre edge cases and unexpected conditions I know this is no small undertaking, but it's my job to handle those situations and design everything in a way that it can fail safely in the event of a new unexpected condition. And because it's my full-time job rather than something I do a few hours every week, I'm going to do it much better than the majority of people. The only difference here is that what I build won't put people's lives in danger if it screws up, but the principles are still the same.
That said, I'd still wait for v2.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
From an old British Sci-Fi show.
In the modern world people as individuals are increasingly de-humanized. In many ways we really have become the drones that a lot of science fiction has depicted future humans to be.
This is called "progress."
Forcing people to buy cars that drive themselves would be yet another nail in the coffin that human individuality is being buried in and a sad thing.
If you want to be able to read the paper on the way into work ride the train or bus. Get into a carpool where you only have to drive once a week or so. Move to a place where you CAN take a train or a bus, whatever.
The world is NOT a safe place and the effort to make it 100% safe for everyone all the time is dehumanizing- and wrecking the planet. We build into nature reserves for more land to make ourselves more comfortable and displace wildlife which has lived there for thousands of years- and kill off the "dangerous" animals. And put a few in zoos so we can feel good about our species.
Yes, I believe strongly that auto-piloted cars are a bad thing and that the drawbacks outweigh the benefits immensely, incalculably.
Nobody is FORCING you to drive and don't spout that BS where if you don't drive you can't get where you need to go. That just means you live in the wrong place, fool.
I drive because I ENJOY driving. I LIKE to drive.
I am a huge fan of the idea posted earlier of having far tougher driver licensing requirements. In the US, for one, the exam is a joke. A reasonable and intelligent driver licensing program would likely remove at least 1/3 of the drivers from the roads and maybe even half of them.
Good- they drive like manure anyway.
And here is another argument against self-driven cars: there would be zero benefit to reducing oil/coal dependency: people who drive like crap would still have their own cars to waste fuel, just a computer program driving them.
Put the people who want to have a robot car on the bus whether they like it or not and we reduce reduce driving accidents and pollution in one fell swoop.
Now THERE is a win-win solution, folks!
Linux computers, watercooled, photography
If automated cars came about it goes without saying that people will moan about the smallest thing that goes wrong even if the automated cars are much safer. I think it's because people won't want a safe automated car. They want to take stupid risks and risk everyone's life to get home a few minutes earlier.
I rather see more trains and and a return of street cars in cities and other ways where we can move a lot of people through means that don't use petrol and instead use electricity. It will move any potential pollution out of the cities and it certainly has to be easier to make power generation more efficient if it's centralised. Likewise if the main mode of transportation is run by companies rather than individuals then we'll see upgraded more efficient transportation happen sooner.
Could this be seen as the natural progression past cruise control? As far as the human-machine interface is concerned, when I run on cruise control, I keep my foot hovered above the brake in the case of an emergency. Wouldn't automated driving also require constant user attention in the case of a rejection to manual control?
Sex sells, right?
So how to use sex to promote driverless cars?
One good thing driverless cars could be good for...sex on the motorway!
Have my car drop me off, go park itself and when I'm ready I'll call it on the cell phone and it'll pick me up.
Now I could go for that!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
there are these concepts called "less" and "more".
they can be used like this:
Some people are killed by A
Some people are killed by B
but less people are(or could be) killed by B if we replaced B with A.
There's also that concept called "fewer" ... :-)
Oh, and if we replaced B by A, no people would be killed by B, because there would be no B, only A. However most likely more people would be killed by A (because there are both the original As and those which replace the Bs).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Google's driverless car could save more than 1 million deaths per year
What curious wording. Most safety inventions would strive to "save more tan a million lives, but this one wants to save more than a million deaths. I guess now you can just use any words in a sentence and expect people to figure out what you intended.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
How about if we make all DUI drivers ride in driverless cars? That would get rid of the majority of accident victims right there, without killing anyone.
And if the car did crash, it would just be a drunk driver who was killed anyways. Who needs them.
The best thing google could do is drive these cars for lots of miles without an injury.
Does anyone know the accident rate per mile driven? The death rate per mile driven?
If google could better that by a factor of ten, that would help.
Better yet, they need to do driverless buses in all the big cities.
Bus drivers falling asleep, having heart attacks, texting would be a thing of the past.
wake up and hold your nose
I've been picturing the day when this becomes a reality. I see myself in a RV, get off work, hop in the RV, go to sleep, and wake up at the beach/mountains. When vacation is over, none of this drive all day/lose a day mess. you have a casual dinner, go to sleep, and wake up in the driveway ready to go to work.
Who's going to drop US$50,000 on a car that they don't get to drive?
Movie stars, sports figures, corporate executives...
Like cell phones, this strikes me as just another example of a technology trickling down to the masses after being developed as an expensive luxury for the few.
It probably won't happen, though, because the worst thing we could do is mix human and AI drivers on the same roads. Drivers need to be 100% human or 100% networked machines; there's no middle path that won't lead to disaster. And I don't think you'll get 100% of drivers to give up their cars anytime soon.
"If there's something wrong with the automatic systems?" Well,ave you used a sat-nav recently? These people have:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12360687
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_west/8254387.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/6483383.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-11180476
Who's gonna save us from overpopulation? We need to kill people to avoid the Malthusian catastrophe, that's why cars were invented.
The biggest advantage for self-driving cars is for those who can't or aren't legally allowed to drive cars now. Large numbers of old people can't drive for a variety of health reasons. Youngsters can't drive for reasons of lack of good judgement and driving skills. This would greatly enhance the lives of oldsters and free up the time of people who now have to drive them around. A lot of ambulance and taxi drivers are going to have to find new lines of work.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
It is highly unlikely that there is any car on the road today that has a fundamental flaw which would intentionally CAUSE an injury, death, or accident. Of course, that doesn't mean that the driver can't manipulate the vehicle into causing one, intentionally or accidentally, but if the vehicle is driverless, then ANY accident would be entirely the fault of the vehicle itself.
Fictional movies to the contrary, cars don't have a tendancy to just blow up, or otherwise perform in unexpected ways. The recent hoopla over toyota's acceleration problems were a big indication of just how unlikely these things really are. Extensive measures are taken to ensure that everything works as expected and nothing abnormal is going to happen. It's going to take a human driver to screw something up. The car won't be the problem.
However, one accident caused by the Google car will be entirely the fault of a faulty design of the vehicle or the artificial intelligence driving it. The sad fact is, no matter how many years...decades of testing we put such vehicles through, there will be no way to absolutely ensure that the vehicle as a whole will not cause an accident, even though, in theory, that SHOULD be possible. What makes this matter worse is the fact that the accidents that the vehicle is likely to be involved in won't be the dramatic 40+ car pileups that occur as the result of 3 fuel trucks suddenly colliding into each other at 90 mph on a busy highway... No, the car will handle THAT situation perfectly fine. However, while travelling at 2mph, a toddler will stroll out into the street and get run over and the car won't register the obstacle or the impact, thereby causing a severe injury where normally it would either be completely avoidable or severely minimized. Trust me, running over a toddler will definitely go a long way toward killing the project. Even the POSSIBILITY of running over the toddler will kill it.
The thing about the toddler example, if you, as a human who's paying attention to his surrounding, spots a yard with a toddler in it, you're likely to slow down a bit and be more cautious JUST BECAUSE you will be wary of the fact that the toddler might run out into the street, and you want to be ready and able to stop in time. The google car won't easily be able to distinguish between the toddler and a fire hydrant. One could jump out in the street, the other one likely won't. The car therefore needs to be observant of EVERY possible potential obstacle and take preemptive preventative measures to avoid them. It's going to have to be ready for that fire hydrant to jump out in front of it, and slow down for each and every one of them JUST IN CASE. This action will likely not make the vehicle desirable in any way, especially if you're the one driving behind it.
So, not only do you have to be able to show, in advance, that the vehicle will actively avoid all possible accidents as well as not cause any, it will also have to behave in a way that is efficient and not too annoying to humans it's sharing the road with.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Driverless cars guided by artificial vision are totally new technology; nobody knows the implications of widespread use of such cars, how they can fail, etc. Furthermore, nobody understands legal and liability issues. It is rational to be reluctant to adopt them. We have centuries of experience with human-driven vehicles. We know what the failure modes are, who is at risk, and who is responsible when something goes wrong.
Furthermore, driverless cars don't solve the basic problems with automobiles: they are inefficient; we should instead invest in better city planning and better public transportation.
also, google's implementation is such that the driver can grab the wheel at any point.
i'd imagine they'd see a BSOD and immediately grab the wheel.
i'd imagine everything is logged, and can be analyzed readily.
i see two options:
- in robot-driver world a rare bug leads to an accident. the software is improved and the accidents don't happen anymore. when more bugs are found and fixed, driving gets safer for everybody.
- in human driving world, a human makes a human error, there's a crash, and nothing is learned from it. people continue to have the same chances of an accident.
also, the above poster talking about their car dropping them off and finding a parking spot on it's own has really captured my imagination. i want that.
i want seats that can be turned around so that i can see to the screaming child behind me.
i want the knowledge that every car out there is driving just as predictably as mine is. not having to mentally size up every single driver that hits my field of view would be a relief. it would also do a lot to reduce racism :)
Getting out of bed each morning entails risk. Walking out your door entails risk. Even staying at home involves risk. In life, risks are inescapable but they are not necessarily intolerable. I take the risk of being killed on the road every day that I enter my vehicle and drive it to and from work. That is simply part of my reality right now and I have learned to accept the risks associated with it. Indeed, I was once very nearly killed in an automobile accident on the way home from work (no doubt that would have made my enemies here on Slashdot very happy). So yes, to answer your question, I am willing to risk being maimed or killed by your irresponsibility in exchange for living in a free society where I can choose to drive to and from work. Would I be happy if it happened? Probably not, but I can live with that.
So... where are you going to put the nuclear waste? There is no permanent waste disposal site yet.
And where are you going to keep getting the Uranium from to run these power plants? Given how inefficient current nuclear power plants are, nuclear energy isn't going to last long.
these are all optional -- disable every single one of the systems mentioned, and the car would still work
same deal with the google cars...
and i certainly wouldn't want a car that i couldn't drive myself if i wanted to. some people enjoy driving.
but i'd also love to be taken home when tired or drunk, and i'd LOVE to not have to worry about finding a parking spot.
And can you cite an example of a coal plant that has forced tens of thousands to leave their homes for decades due to high levels of radioactive isotopes? I can't. But I can certainly cite one for the nuclear industry and perhaps a second that is unfolding before our eyes. I am no fan of coal but comparing the risks of nuclear to coal isn't practical. A public company cannot survive the monetary losses they will incur with a large nuclear power plant disaster. The losses are so huge it will break them and then guess who has to step in and pay. That is what scares people about nuclear power plants - not dying of the radiation immediately but what it does to people's lives. Forcing thousands of people from their homes cannot be understated and scare the heck out of people with children particularly. If you don't have a child yet you really can't fully appreciate that aspect.
You didn't watch the video, did you?
It's too late to stop them from mixing, Google has already put the test vehicles on the roads with other traffic, pedestrians, etc. No disaster yet.
And that's exactly how it's going to have to happen, because as you say, drivers aren't going to give up their cars.
Until you're in a war.
A driverlless car ate my baby!
oops...
This is something I seriously do not understand. On literally every forum I frequent, even the most liberal ones, you have tons of people lamenting the problems with nuclear reactors. But... what about the number of people who die because of coal reactors? What about the harm to the environment the pollution and the required mining causes? And how the devil do you take this insanely rare circumstance of a ridiculous 9.0 earthquake AND tsunami occurring to an island nation being an indicator of nuclear's lack of safety??? The reactors actually SURVIVED the earthquake. It was the tsunami that did them in. If you're so freaking worried don't build them at the freaking coast you moronic luddites. God gone it I hate people.
...And of course, the Apple fanboys will come out of the woodwork to explain how not being able to plot your own route is actually a feature.
Home invasions perhaps; but I do recall a study about carjackings, which showed that the victim possessing a gun decreased the victim injury rate from ~30% to ~5%.
More to the point however, most gun lobbyists would not deny that thousands of people are killed with guns every year. They would rather claim that banning guns is very different from preventing murder; in many cases, the same altercation would have occurred with knives instead of guns, and been similarly lethal. In other cases, guns would have been used anyhow, in spite of the ban. It is rare (though not unheard of) that murders are primarily inspired by the weapon. Reducing the number of weapons does not reduce the motivation or willingness to kill. It merely makes people use weapons that are available. (Baseball bats?)
Nevertheless, I must agree with you that most Americans believe Spock was wrong. Personal freedom implies the freedom to choose paths that are better for you, but worse for the community. Despite this, few would submit to slavery to the community to improve its lot.
An interesting reference is the trading ships in "Citizen of the Galaxy" by Heinlein. They were very tight-knit, with little personal freedom, yet they prided themselves in communal freedom: "The People are free; it is their proudest boast."
No disaster yet.
It's only going to take one.
...with respect to aeroplanes the degree of automation these days compared to 20, 30 years ago is astounding, for precisely the same reason: it's been shown to save lives a few orders of magnitude more times than the ones they take.
This is, I think, the root of the problem. Using statistics works fine for aeroplanes because, every time you fly, you are essentially getting onto a random plane with a random pilot and so you want them to be very safe on average. However when you drive it is always you driving so, while you might on average improve the quality of driving with computers that is not what is important to each individual anymore. The question which needs to be answered is "is it better at driving than me?" and since it has been shown that we generally tend to think of ourselves as better drivers than we actually are convincing people will not be easy!
For example, supposing there is an idiot driving and they do something stupid will the computer be able to handle some crazy situation it might not have seen before? Will it speed if it needs to to avoid an accident: very unusual but I know one person who was about to overtake a lorry on a motorway and saw the load start to slip so they floored it to avoid being in the accident...would a computer be able to handle that especially since it will have speed limits pre-programmed? Statistically these are rare situations but convincing early adopters will be hard because you won't have enough statistics to know how often an unusual situation which the system cannot correctly handle will occur.
Nope, automated trains aren't dead.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Plane_Train
Or even, it appears, dead in NYC.
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2009-02-24/local/17916708_1_nyc-transit-trains-subway-cars
Ignorant people measure the worth of technology by the number of features.
In design theory and practice, a major way make products better is by taking things away.
To stick with the car theme, take the Bugatti Veyron. Possibly the most expensive, fastest road car out there. And yet... no radio.
Families care, lawyers care, insurance companies care. Blah blah blah. It's not one of my primary concerns in such a system, but it is still a massive concern for some.
which is totally what she said
Ignorant people measure the worth of technology by the number of features.
In design theory and practice, a major way make products better is by taking things away.
To stick with the car theme, take the Bugatti Veyron. Possibly the most expensive, fastest road car out there. And yet... no radio.
Really? http://www.sybarites.org/2007/05/burmester-sound-system-in-bugatti-veyron/
If we don't trust robot cars, we shouldn't trust robot elevators.
Doesnt this sound familiar? Its very similar to the panic over the japanese nuclear power plants
Good point.
Except the track isn't the sort of fun I'm talking about. Track days may be exciting, but they're also stressful, expensive, exhilarating, amusing, harrowing, and potentially embarrassing.
And you don't buy a horse just to ride it, unless you've got a ton of extra cash going to waste. You buy a horse because it's an obsession.
Thus, your analogy works, because the sort of people who are THAT obsessed with driving are the guys who like spending their weekends at the track (aka ranch) and messing about with their cars (horses) every evening during the week.
I wouldn't be one of them. I like road trips.
Next up, let's get a Trusted Computing Platform out there, and bring the price of computers that allow you to compile your own OS up to the $50k range. After all, that's not really necessary, and it would be much safer if almost everyone stopped using the Internet from untrusted computers.
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
That is an outright lie. Nobody is being "sacrificed". This isn't a choice between two groups of people dying, but between more or less people dying.
If anything, it's you who wants to sacrifice people on the altar of being able to kill yourself (and them) with a car.
The problem with that logic is that you are also endangering other people with your insistence on driving yourself (assuming robot drivers really are superior, of course). What right do you have to do so?
Stupidity and correct risk assessemnt are not philosphies, no matter how comples forms the former sometimes takes.
Are you practicing for a career in lobbying, or what?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
That made NO sense. You are saying you prefer a situation where more deaths are likely because you will personally be responsible for death? Are you saying when you fly you insist on piloting the craft, despite having a perfectly good pilot on board, because you feel safer when "you are in charge" despite any evidence to the contrary?
Anarchists never rule
"Running with Linux for over 12 years!"
Aren't you tired yet? :)
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
So, you're out of practice because the car drives for you, and aren't paying much attention to the situation because you're not driving, yet suddenly you find yourself in control of a malfunctioning car? Guess what happens next?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
So you have irrefutable proof that there is 100% correlation between people who want to drive their own cars and people who believe in God. Or are you just trying to build up fake evidence against religious people even thought it has nothing to do with this story?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I did some contract work for the MTA. They're a bunch of bureaucratic, money grubbing, egotistical idiots. Each little group was more concerned with making their little slice of the project more important than everybody elses'. For example, the line power guys (3rd rail) wanted to provide backup power to stations in the event of a power loss instead of battery backup. They kind of forgot that a power loss kills the power to the rail. When it was pointed out to them, they said, "meh, it'll never happen." This came just about a year after the big blackout in NYC.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
This has nothing to do with a "collectivist" point of view. Some people are arguing that they "feel" safer when they are in control, as opposed to a machine or another person. This is an emotional, not "collectivist" appeal.
It is a well established fact that people do indeed feel safer when they are in control, but rational people make decisions based on facts and feeling, not just feelings. That is why I like well qualified pilots to fly my jetliners, despite my urge to "be in control".
Rugged individualism has been a myth since Ogg traded a stone arrow head for three chickens.
I enjoy driving. I don't want a machine to do it for me. But I'm not going to argue against a computer system based on any supposed right I have to be in control. The right of others to not have me crash into them over-rides my right to be in control.
I think a good compromise is a system that lets you drive manually if you wish, but will monitor your driving and take over if you are going to harm someone, ie crash.
Anarchists never rule
I disagree. Driving is *always* fun. Well, at least when it's more than just a couple of minutes, or you have a sprained ankle, etc. :)
I dunno.
Serious, maybe. boring? Only if you're not having fun.
(To be clear, I'm not thinking of "fun" as "playful", but as "enjoyable" or "satisfying".)
Granted, on rush hours. I don't like rush hours, so I adjust my schedule and route to avoid them.
And driving to and from the same place every day *is* fun. You need to pick a route (or routes) that avoids things you /don't/ enjoy.
I just don't understand this thinking. I want my tools to be enjoyable to use, appropriate to the task, reliable, *and* useful. I don't have one hammer in my toolbox, I have six hanging on the pegboard on the wall.
I can't afford six cars, nor do I have a garage big enough if I could.
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
Unfortunately, you kinda have to build them in coasts, because you need a temperature difference to produce energy, which means you need somewhere to dump the heat, and oceans are great for that.
Furthermore, the reason Fukushima isn't worse off than it is is that there were seawater available for emergency cooling. Suppose that hadn't been the case?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Funny no one ever talks about what happens at the world;s hundreds of nuclear power plants after a war. Forget the reactors, they'll just mostly melt into containment, but the spent fuel ponds have tens of megaCuries of contamination. The little fission pits of nuclear weapons are nothing next to those fuel pools.
One could blame the car. Someone who is really good at driving cars can stop a car faster if the ABS is turned off than when it is turned on. For an AVERAGE driver, who will panic and mash the breaks, the ABS will brake faster than them. However, an experienced driver who has a good feel for the cars tires, weight, suspension, and so forth, will expect a certain thing to happen when he applies the breaks a certain amount, and if the ABS kicks in, then that is introducing an unexpected variable into the equation. It's sort of like with the Prius, when people expected that if they let go of the accelerator, it would stop accelerating, but unfortunately it did not.
I am sure there are plenty of people who have had accidents because their car overrode a decision they made. I'm not saying this is always the case, and on the whole ABS, airbags, and so forth have saved more lives than they cost, but not everybody who blames the car is wrong in doing so.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Just saying, most of the time I would prefer the robot.
I'd prefer they have default options and Advanced Options
The tech crowd is an important and maligned segment - you absolutely need the ability to expand into the Advanced panel to do stuff. But it's okay if it takes two buttons to get there.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Which is why it will take a long long long time to ever have a driverless car in America. Your car is a part of your personality. I remember the day I got my license when I turned 16, it was my first taste of real freedom.
In a world with driverless cars will there be sports cars? Why would they even exist. Think of the classic american idea of the open road, driving down the PCH with the top down on a convertible. There is so much more to driving than the everyday commute.
There seems to be a geek tendency to hate driving that I see on slashdot all the time. Not sure where it comes from. But a lot of people love it.
Of course driverless cars do make a whole lot of sense. Even I will admit that, and I am someone who loves cars even more than I love computers (which is a lot). The way I see the transition happening is things like dedicated computer operated highways. You drive to the onramp, get into a queue, and the computer will take over control. It dumps you off at an offramp, stops the car, and you can regain control.
Advanced options don't come for free. Not only is there a button to get you to them, there is the advanced options screen itself which novice users may find themselves in by mistake. They may stop the application working in the way they want, and not be able to correct it, leading to support implications. And finally, having more options leads to more code, with more defects. With a multiplicity of options it becomes impossible to test all combinations.
Usually, excessive options come from a broken development methodology, where UIs are not designed by designers nor tested on users. It happens when programmers have a choice of two or more ways of doing something, and they are unable/unwilling to make the choice themselves and so pass the responsibility on to the user.
With a decent UI designer on the team, the programmer will have to ask the designer to add the option. And the UI designer, knowing that the best UI is no UI, and the better UI is minimal UI, will ask what they can do in order not to need to have that option.
For sure there is a market for the tech crowd who want lots of options. But that's a subset of the tech crowd as a whole. There's also plenty of techies prefer minimal UIs. And as a whole the tech crowd is far smaller than the non-tech crowd.
It's good that there are multiple devices on the market so people can get what they want. But the mainstream devices should try to reduce options to a minimum.