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Google Lobbies Nevada To Allow Self-Driving Cars
b0bby writes "The NY Times reports that Google is quietly lobbying for legislation that would make Nevada the first state in which self-driving cars could be legally operated on public roads. 'The two bills, which have received little attention outside Nevada's capitol, are being introduced less than a year after the giant search engine company acknowledged that it was developing cars that could be safely driven without human intervention.'"
Although, keep an eye on skynet cause it can take over these cars you know....
I think that it would be fair to approve Google's request, on the condition that they agree to ensure that all autonomous vehicles in their employ exercise their right to bear arms while within the state.
I would not feel safe with self driving cars on the road...yet.
Google's still a private company, and their word alone that these cars are safe does not a satisfied citizen make. Let these cars be thoroughly tested by both a government entity and a private third party before they be allowed on the road.
Furthermore, we all know that a program that's still being beta tested still has its bugs. Even if the bugs were worked out so that a car "experienced a bug" only once every 100,000 miles, given the number of vehicles presently on the road and how much they are driven every day, that would still be too many "crashes" for society to find acceptable.
Am I the only one who realizes that one of the many benefits of broad adoption of the driverless car is that the cost of a driver can be factored out of the production of Google Street View images?
With only 2.7 million people in a state the size of France, it's ok to do some funny experiments with real cars on public roads and buggy computer code :-)
The amount of money Google put into developing their self-driving car is far more than all their Street View drivers put together. What you're suggesting would be like Cave Johnson developing a portal gun and just using it to test food additives.
Am I the only one who realizes that one of the many benefits of broad adoption of the driverless car is that the cost of a driver can be factored out of the production of Google Street View images?
True. But what are the costs of lobbying for allowing the driverless cars in all individual states and countries in the world? I would suggest that a lobbyist is more expensive than a driver.
In NY, all self-driving cars will have drivers after they have been on the road for a hour or so. They will not necessarily return home.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
I can't wait for Microsoft's Kinectivehicle running Windows Live Turbo Edition. Oh, okay, even they wouldn't put motion controls in the car. Still after the search engine (all... four? ..of them), the music player and store, the phones... I'd really enjoy watching them throw their hat into the ring.
Only one error in 100,000 miles -- I'll take that in a heartbeat over the thoughtless people I drive beside each day. I guarantee the best drivers have more than 1 bug in 100K miles.
Of course, that proof wouldn't be good enough... Nothing ever will... not in our lifetime, anyways. Do you know how many centuries it will take for only a handful of cars being utilized only for testing to log a billion miles?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Automation will bring prices down so much that you hardly have to work to buy what you need. I can find computers in the trash that would be considered Super Computers 20 years ago.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Actually, mass automation of every job is one of the corner cases where communism starts to make sense... if there's just no work to do, the spoils should be shared among society.
anyway, for some good background reading about the topic of mass automation, check out Vonnegut's "Player Piano". It describes a technocracy with two classes of people...engineers (maintaining the machines) and everyone else.
As an engineer, this sounds good to me!
While I do not like the litigious (inherent) nature to the US mentality... I'd be happy to get hit by one of their cars. The hush money to avoid a lawsuit would put the next 3 generations of my family through college.
They've chosen NV because there's got to be a law already in place that makes them impervious to a lawsuit. They're google, remember do no harm and no fucking way you should trust them. But that's prudent with any company.
You are exactly right. Car accidents kill about 40,000 people a year in the US. If we went to all automated cars and reduced that to 400 deaths the car makers would still go out of business even though many lives were saved. This country is doomed because of the insane legal system and juries that give insane rewards.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I have to agree. No matter how you look at it driverless cars almost ineveitably will be safer then human drivers, and unless they are legalized in an area the testing to make them safer and better will not be available, but the first accident, even if it is the fault of the other driver, will make everyone fear and assume the worst about the automatic driving cars, even if they are replacing something that we all know is the leading cause of death in the country. The biggest difference between auto driving cars and human drivers, the automatic ones have the potential to continue to improve as a whole as more data is gathered, while humans will remain at roughly the same level of intelligence, if not get stupider as time goes on. It kind of reminds me of how in england there is a huge fuss over one person who was an ex-smoker that switched to electronic cigarettes, then died of indeterminable lung problems. If someone quit cold turkey after smoking for 20 years nobody would think twice about it it would have just been assumed to be problems left over from his years of smoking. I'm not saying it absolutely couldn't have been the e-cig, but for many that is the only option that will get them off of a more or less guaranteed killer onto a possible killer. I'll take possible death over almost certain death any day.
I wonder if that would be a problem though. What if most trucks were driven by a computer? Would high value cargo be left unattended, or would unattended trucks become targets of thieves? Would the driving job become a security job? I don't know, but if we can truly automate more work, but make people recognize that the important thing is to distribute ownership of the robots that do the work, we have a chance at improving the quality of life for everyone. Unfortunately, short sightedness by most people in the willingness to take the short term gain by selling capital to fewer individuals will continue to be a problem. I don't know how to counteract this trend.
The likelihood of this ever getting to be used on a widespread scale, I'd predict, is somewhere in the vicinity of the same probability as a leech could ever make an effective handicapped assistance creature.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Self driving car. Take me to work, drive very very slowly around the block while I work, great, now take me home. As to safety which I give some though to while cycling to work ignoring all the rules in my quest to average 30km/h through the city (mytracks..), if any of those pissed off motorists wanted to kill me with a deft turn of the wheel they could probably get away with it so I'd prefer them not to have that choice.
..is the turbo boost button, the jazzy steering wheel and a bucketload of red and green LEDs.
There are a lot of us. Its acceptable if a few people die developing a technology that could help solve so many of our problems. Our society's aversion to risk has become stifling. If we had fun labs in elementary school science class, perhaps we wouldn't be lagging the rest of the first world in technology. Sure we'd loose a few kids, but those left would be excited about science.
"If you love safe science so much, why don't you marry it!" -- Cave Johnson
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Automation will bring prices down so much that you hardly have to work to buy what you need. I can find computers in the trash that would be considered Super Computers 20 years ago.
That would be true if you could live in a computer, drive a computer, eat and drink computers, wear computers and so on.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If you drove a billion miles, you would have lived far longer than any other human being... and older than most trees, in fact.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Hey, at least they're asking for special rights to develop self-driving cars. It's not like they're not wanting to set up a tax dodge so they don't have to pay taxes in their home state, where their CEO lives.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Cant help but thinking of this little gem. Arent we a bit backwards today?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Act
HTTP/1.1 400
In case anyone was curious, 1 billion miles at 70mph is 1631 years.
A fully autonomously driving vehicle would be a nice target for all kinds of nasty hacking. Combine that internet connectivity and a nasty worm, and we'll see an amateur re-shoot of Maximum Overdrive on Youtube shortly.
Depends how fast you drive, now doesn't it?
Of course, at some point, relativistic effects come into play. I wonder what the break-even point is?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I think all states have a minimum age for (human) drivers, so that should have to apply to computers driving cars too. They would have to show stability and reliablty before being let loose on the roads.
Don't forget a fan in the dash to simulate the wind in your hair and bass drivers to get a good, throaty VROOM VROOM!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I really want a self driving car. Not for day to day driving, my commute isn't that bad, but I hate being bored out of my skull driving through buttfuck, nowhere to visit relatives.
Hours upon hours of nothing to even look at, being able to do something else would be amazing.
Not to mention, there's so few cars on these roads, that I doubt an auto driving car (assuming it works at least somewhat well) would hit anything.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
I know that Bruce Schneier has said that human beings tend to overestimate risks when we feel that we are not in control and underestimate risks when we feel that we are in control. That's why people tend to feel more anxious in the passenger seat.
I think it is this innate sensibility that will be the biggest obstacle to self-driven cars, and will remain after the technological problems are solved.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
How's that different from some idiot that hasn't bothered to scrape the frost and ice off his windshield?
There may be a nimby reaction where people don't want their home state to be the first area to allow driverless cars.
My neighbors might disagree, but I'd be happy to have them tried out near me.
They can't be worse than the 2 am crowd trying to drive home from the local tavern when it closes.
Besides, Google is one of the few entities with the huge cash reserves and legal department to let them do this without risking the whole company.
OK, so the gogol controls my car and it passes a high paying advertiser, does it take a swing through the lot so I can see the digital ads on the front of the building, or does it just park there until I buy something more than $100 value. This does not bother me at all because the car does not have a windows logo or an apple on it.
All this focus on the safety issue really exposes the critical flaws in logic we are committing. These cars are already safer than human drivers. If these cars took over today, we'd have fewer fatalities a year than we do now. That should be the end of it, but people are still going to complain because we'll accept 100 deaths caused by a human driver before we accept one death caused by a AI controlled car. Not to mention that any death caused by the AI controlled car would result in a massive investigation and therefore the death rate would asymptotically approach zero, unlike with human drivers where there's a bad driver born every second. The massively increased safety is still only one of the many benefits associated with this technology. There are a lot of people with severe disabilities who will have the roads open to them for the first time in their lives. It's hard to imagine for us what that is like because we were all able to drive at 15/16 years old. There are older people who are no longer able to drive as well and will now be able to. You can go bar hopping without worrying about getting a ride home. Cars will be significantly more efficient since the accident rates would plummet, cars can be made of lighter material. Electric motors would be more of an option since cars will be lighter and we will not be burdened with having to find an electric charge station for our cars. Parking will never be an issue again. We will be dropped off and picked up right at the front of any building. The list goes on and on people. Let's put all of these illogical fears behind us and help usher in a new age in human civilization before we're all old and gray.
Automation will bring prices down so much that you hardly have to work to buy what you need. I can find computers in the trash that would be considered Super Computers 20 years ago.
Yes, we've seen that with current car technology. In 1970 an average vehicle cost 20% of average wages. Today it is close to 50%. And yet, in 1970, most vehicles were assembled by hand. Today, most are assembled through automation. Music CDs are infinitely cheaper to produce than cassette tapes, but even after taking into account inflation, they haven't come down in price. While it is true somethings do get cheaper, it tends to do more with supply and demand than cost of production. A business will charge whatever it can on a product, regardless of the cost to manufacture. If there isn't enough of a difference between the selling price and the cost to produce, they will quit producing it.
Automation only reduces production costs, it doesn't impact selling price. Only competition can do that. But notice, even though there are numerous car manufacturers, they all sell in the same price range. Why? Because that is what the market will bear.
If you drove a billion miles, you would have lived far longer than any other human being... and older than most trees, in fact.
There are 125 million vehicles in the US. If each of those vehicles drives 1000 miles this year, then that is 125 billion miles.
Think urban sprawl is bad now? Just wait until you can sleep or work while driving. 8 hour commutes would not be uncommon.
I want a car like KITT. Frak Google's cars. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You not heard of Amish-R-Us?
I would love a vehicle that would allow me to go party downtown and take my own ride without paying $75 for a cab or relying on a designated driver. This would also be perfect for solo cross-country roadtrips, and even daily commutes if you're someone who views driving as a chore. How does one become a beta tester for these things?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
"Three mile island moment"
Something that sounds bad but no one actually got hurt?
Yeah, but no single person is going to drive all 125 million of those cars. That's my point.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
But, the error rate is per 100,000 miles driven. Would you actually purchase and drive a vehicle that states at least once in the lifetime of the vehicle, you are expected to get into a serious accident because of a software glitch?
Don't forget the economics. Assuming 1/2 of the 125 million cars on the road need to be this new vehicle to gain the safety numbers needed for public acceptance. Also, figure int he price, say what $40,000 as the Chevy Volt? That is priced out of the range were the majority of Americans can afford, so the government steps in an subsidzes the cost with a $10,000 tax credit. That at least brings it down to $30,000, which half still can't afford, but ignoring that, it costs the taxpayers $625B. Where will that money come from?
They wanted to automate aircraft and railroads a long time ago. They had/have the technology to do it. However, the unpredictability of the operating environment shelved the idea. Why would we expect a car to behave any differently? The notion that a driver could take over if the system experienced difficulty only works if a) there is time and b) they are alert enough to do it. On an aircraft which takes a minute to fall from the sky, that is one thing. On a car that takes seconds to hit another car or person, it is unlikely. If we had that good reaction time, we would need robotic cars int he first place.
The issue is not that current cars are not safe. It is that current drivers are doing all sorts of things besides driving and they don't pay attention.
I saw one on the road around noon yesterday, Velodyne inverted-cone scanner rotating on top. This was on I-280 headed southbound between Palo Alto and Cupertino, about ten miles from Google HQ. It stayed centered in lane, going exactly 70mph. Not clear if it was in autonomous mode or just someone out gathering data. I have a picture, but it's not too good; I just grabbed a Nikon CoolPix and aimed it out the windshield.
They can't be worse than the damn California transplant drivers... trust me, THEY are a real danger on the road in Nevada...
Stone
Once all cars on the road were self driving and mesh networked, they could travel at MUCH higher speeds, because there would be near chance of collisions with other vehicles. Speed limits would be totally obsolete.
The only hiccup is pedestrians and wild life.
not that i'm a conspiracy theorist by any means, but i can't help but stir in my seat a little while i mull over the privacy implications here.
undoubtedly the slashdot / cs population willingly accept (and for some of you, welcome) the idea of data mining, but in my humble opinion, this will set a new precedent.
if the government can demand and consequently obtain access to your emails, your phone records, your text messages what’s to stop them from accessing your vehicle?
similarly if a private entity can buy and sell those same things, what's next?
again not a conspiracy theorist here but cautious nonetheless...