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Nevada Authorizes Development of Driverless Car Rules
DrEldarion writes "Via Forbes: 'The State of Nevada just passed Assembly Bill No. 511 which, among other things, authorizes the Department of Transportation to develop rules and regulations governing the use of driverless cars, such as Google's concept car, on its roads.' Pretty soon, cars will be able to dump their own dead bodies into the Nevada desert."
Personally I would rather they go faster, to speeds that no human could feasibly manage, than see them slow down. Of course, erecting fences along driverless roads would probably be ideal in that case.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Actually, I believe that's prior AC's point: current freeway speeds are already quite a bit faster than any human can reasonably manage, insofar as not creating huge fucking traffic jams goes...
So, uh, the traffic is going too slow on the freeways due to traffic jams caused by traffic going too fast?
Cars drive you! Sorry, I meant in Nevada!
Ever driven or even walked the strip in Vegas? Few roads are worse to navigate than the ones in Vegas with a bunch of blasted white trash in rentals.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
I think he means the bunch - spread - bunch - spread of traffic slowing and speeding up that you get with lane changers, idiot drivers, middle lane managers and so on. Breaking, when it's busy can have a mile long knock-on effect on cars behind you. Of course, when there's noone on the road, it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference. We as drivers, are fairly bad at being a swarm and acting as one. We're all very selfish. I'll take computer managed driving on motorways any day.
ti's nice to see a lot of features i cars not only rolling out quickly, but the time it takes to go from a luxury car feature to a stand car feature is getting shorter with each technology..
Can't wait to have my car drive me to work. So many advantages.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In the very long term, automated cars able to coordinate their driving will be more efficient. There will be fewer driving accidents and people will get where they are going faster. In the short term this sort of technology is more likely to be first actually used when it is limited to highway driving (which is comparatively simple) before it becomes useful for general driving. Unfortunately, it could take only a few bad accidents before people will start reacting strongly against automated systems even if the systems are safer than humans on average. This is sort of what we're seeing now already with nuclear power: the death toll from nuclear power is much smaller than coal, but nuclear power is treated as terrible because the accidents are rare and spectacular and involve a technology that is seen as novel, strange and unnatural.
Cars that drive themselves have the potential to be virtually crash-proof, even under adverse conditions. We'll wonder why we ever allowed ourselves to drive in the first place.
Until then, it will be interesting to see what deficiencies in our road designs and traffic laws these self-driving cars discover. For example, when making a right turn onto a road just after the speed limit sign, how will the computer know what the speed limit is? Faced with trying to make a left turn onto a road with a steady stream of traffic, will the car just wait forever, or will it find another way, even when local laws prevent any maneuvers that could get it out of the jam?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
no driverless cars on public roads
Of course, before your driverless car goes out dumping bodies, you'll need a driverless backhoe to go out and dig the holes first.
I mean, you gotta have the hole already dug before you show up with a package in the trunk. Otherwise, you're talking about a half-hour to forty-five minutes worth of digging. And who knows who's gonna come along in that time? Pretty soon, you gotta dig a few more holes. You could be there all fuckin' night.
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
"Hello, I'm Johnny Cab. Where can I take you tonight?"
Now there will be fleets of driverless trucks hauling trailers three at a time blasting across Nevada.
It is a great place to test this sort of thing, though. Once you get outside of Vegas and Reno the roads have very few turns or intersections to confuse our new robotic overdrivers.
One thing that I have not heard or read about is bound to be one of the first things that somebody will sue over, so it should be taken care of first: who will be liable when one of these gets into a wreck?
I mean already more than 50% of the cars are only carrying the driver, so if you have driverless cars, they will be going around empty.
I've seen what happens when drivers are not selfish. Two lanes approach a stoplight. Most of the traffic wants to turn right, and can do so even if the light is red, but the "not selfish" driver who doesn't pay attention to the fact that there's another lane (with no cars in it) ends up sitting at the front of the overly-full lane, stopping traffic flow.
Am I the only one that sees the potential for serious abuses should driverless vehicles become massively adopted and standardized?
Roadways are ALWAYS under construction, which means that static map data inside the vehicle is never going to be an option. The vehicles will *HAVE* to connect to the internet in some fashion to pull updated maps.
It might be well within the tinfoil hat arena, but I can clearly see this being used to kill somebody. Case in point:
The Turn-by-Turn navigation software I used to use fell out of date by about a year. "Thats not too bad.." I said to myself, so I decided that I wouldnt update it before my next roadtrip when I went to go visit a friend of mine in another city out of state. Low and behold, the navigation software told me to turn *OFF THE TOP OF A BRIDGE* onto the parkway below, in order to reach my destination.
Reason: The software was unaware that I was crossing a bridge, and not an intersection.
Now, imagine an automatically driving vehicle, a sleeping diplomat inside with a hangover, and a similar malfunction. (Either purposeful or accidental, doesnt matter. The diplomat will be just as dead.)
A little step further, and you have malicious map injection attacks, with the intent to redirect vehicles at the hacker's whim. Sony losing millions of customers information would seem like small potatoes compared to hackers sending their CEOs to their deaths.
Then you have the whole can of worms of the vehicle-to-vehicle communcation cells that some automotive engineers want to try to implement to help "Improve roadway safety." Abuse of these transmissions could give a whole new meaning to the term "Road hog."
Actually I'd agree. The average densely packed freeway moves at a rate and a following distance where pretty much the only choice in the event of anything bad happening is to plug the brakes. That causes a cascade effect, and you wind up with a slow spot that takes hours to dissipate. We need more space between vehicles and drivers trained to do something other than panic stop, or lower speeds to give people time to react more rationally. Or computerized drivers.
Goddammit, I sound like a fucking eco-hippie. I'm a single guy with six cars, four of which are purely for fun, and I'm arguing for lower speed limits. Actually, I guess I'm arguing for better drivers.
Personally, I wouldn't mind being able to hand control over to a computer in dense traffic, but I want control back when I exit onto surface roads or get out of congested freeway areas. I drive as much for the fun of it as to actually go anywhere.
http://readr.ru/roger-zelazny-last-of-the-wild-ones.html
Imagine a Venn diagram of selfish people and inattentive people. Now imagine the area of people who are neither selfish, nor inattentive. Look, there are people there! Hi Guys!
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Call me "that tinfoil hat guy," but isn't this just another way to take away freedoms if abused? There are plenty of benefits, sure, but there are also many who want to know where you are, lock your car, and wait kindly for the reeducation agents to arrive.
I like my car. I like modding my car, and I sure like driving the way I do (like a maniac, thx Boston). This seems like a great way to censor that little bit of rule breaking, which has saved my life more than once.
Just couldn't help thinking Minority Report on this one...
Something witty.
That's just my latest cyber-stalker - APK, the "hosts file guy." Yesterday he was accusing me of being greedy because I run a website where I allow people to download code I wrote that I license under the GPL version 2. He thought his hosts file was "blocking the ads" - there never were any ads, and the moron would have been able to see that if he had been using a more modern ad-blocking technique that allowed for disabling blocking on a per-site basis.
He appears to hate linux, women, and reality (not necessarily in that order).
In terms of whack jobs, I don't think there's anyone sillier than him on slashdot. Any time someone posts against him using their logged-in name, he attacks them. If they do the safe thing, and post as an AC, he thinks it's me and does his usual crap-flood of my posts, demonstration of how stupid he is, and giving me the opportunity to distract him from tracking down and attacking others.
He should do himself (and everyone else) a favor and go hosts file himself. Until then, better he attacks me than someone else who might not know his reputation and actually gives a ****.
Most important thing the cars need to do is tell when their sensors etc are in a state where the car is not in a fit state to drive.
It needs to give itself a drunk test before every trip.
Soon it will be time to start working of viruses. I can't wait to hear my car's engine singing flight of the bumblebees for no reason.
Can someone please provide an appropriate Ocean's 11 joke? This thread is lacking without it.
I do security
Driverless cars will never happen because they can kill people. It's like anything humans use to do, if you wash dishes by hand you'll eventually break a dish, but if a dishwasher broke dishes OMG alert the press. If a driverless car had even the remote chance of killing someone that would be the end of driverless cars. We will eventually have cars that could drive themselves, cruise control that can stop and steering that stays in the lane, but it won't be called "driverless" and it won't work without a warm body in the drivers seat, and if you kill someone while driving it won't be the car's fault anymore than it's the fault of cruise control for the drunk driver slamming into you at 70mph.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
The current reality seems more like the parent answer ("GPS maps are going to have to be used for routing, and local, realtime sensors and vision algorithms are going to be needed for operation.") than yours ("Automatic driving systems would be at the mercy of the quality of the GPS maps, the GPS reciever hardware").
Cars following GPS instructions are still faraway dream, except for a few concept cars and experimental designs (like the google's one).
Whereas traffic lane exit alarm and collision avoidance systems are already appearing in regular cars.
Chances are, by the time GPS-driven cars get mainstream, the sensors would be even more perfected than today. In the example of a wrong GPS instruction due to an error (or hacking) of the map : well, the car will simply detect the impossibility to turn right due to an obstacle (guard barrier) or the absence of a proper lane to turn into. They are mostly able to do it now already anyway. The car will probably either continue ahead and try another route, or fire up an alarm to wake up the passenger to ask for a human assistance.
What is much more likely :
- specially crafted malicious GPS maps, designed by hacker to throw the car into a loop until it runs out of gas.
- virus affecting the on-board network and jamming the sensors.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]