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Blind Man Test Drives Google's Autonomous Car
Velcroman1 writes "'This is some of the best driving I've ever done,' Steve Mahan said the other day. Mahan was behind the wheel of a Toyota Prius tooling the small California town of Morgan Hill in late January, a routine trip to pick up the dry cleaning and drop by the Taco Bell drive-in for a snack. He also happens to be 95 percent blind. Mahan, head of the Santa Clara Valley Blind Center, 'drove' along a specially programmed route thanks to Google's autonomous driving technology. Google announced the self-driving car project in 2010. It relies upon laser range finders, radar sensors, and video cameras to navigate the road ahead, in order to make driving safer, more enjoyable and more efficient — and clearly more accessible. In a Wednesday afternoon post on Google+, the company noted that it has hundreds of thousands of miles of testing under its belt, letting the company feel confident enough in the system to put Mahan behind the wheel."
Yes, because Google (and the authorities letting these cars on the roads) would have *never* thought of the possibility of pedestrians running in front of these cars.
Quick! Get in touch with them and bring this to their attention!
And to go a little further, technology doesn't get sleepy. Technology doesn't get distracted by cell phones, GPS systems, or the radio. Technology won't have a blind spot. This is going to be an incredible advance. I'm much less worried about a driverless car hitting a pedestrian than I am the average driver hitting one.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Did they think of the possibility of driving over a cliff-edge while out of GPS reception?
If the Internet is to be trusted at all, I'll take the chance of a self-driving car careening off a cliff due to lack of GPS reception over the chance of a human careening off a cliff because of GPS reception.
Does it detect ice, snow, oil, sand before the wheels are there?
Humans certainly don't... but there are already automatic traction control systems that do an excellent job maintaining the vehicle's footing in all but the more extreme situations - I can't imagine it would be that hard to send that data to the pilot AI and have it react by slowing down. Also I'd imagine it would be easier for the computer to detect ice and such using sensor data (IR cameras to detect road surface temp, lasers reveal changes in surface reflective properties, etc.)
What about kids throwing stones off the top of a bridge onto the passing cars (common problem in the UK - someone died just the other month from this)? Is the car looking UP too and determining their intent?
Again, I doubt humans would do much better. The radar systems on an automated car could conceivably be used to detect objects that may hit the car even from above and some evasive/mitigating action could take place - with better reaction times than a human driver.
This is why even a jumbo jet - so of the most highly automated and tested machines in the world - has TWO HUMAN OPERATORS. And even there, they have TWO because the first can't be trusted on their own (proven by that recent thing with the pilot).
Again, though I don't keep careful track of these things, there seems to be more incidents related to human error than automation error. Specifically the humans overriding the automated systems to correct for a problem that didn't actually exist.
If you honestly, seriously, think that you can reliably determine the outcome of a machine complex enough to obtain all that data, you're an idiot.
Humans are essentially machines much more complex than that, and have tens of thousands of years worth of historical precedent for doing incredibly stupid things despite having accurate information - yet somehow they are more trustworthy than a machine just by virtue of not being a machine? This kind of argument instantly refutes itself.
How do you test the system for these things? Tens of thousands of hours of real-world driving. Considering all a human needs to legally operate a 2-ton projectile is roughly twenty minutes worth of testing (if you're lucky!) I'll take my chances with the machine.
=Smidge=