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California Legalizes Self Driving Cars
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Seattle PI reports that California has become the third state to explicitly legalize driverless vehicles, setting the stage for computers to take the wheel along the state's highways and roads ... 'Today we're looking at science fiction becoming tomorrow's reality,' said Gov. Brown. 'This self-driving car is another step forward in this long, march of California pioneering the future and leading not just the country, but the whole world.' The law immediately allows for testing of the vehicles on public roadways, so long as properly licensed drivers are seated at the wheel and able to take over. It also lays out a roadmap for manufacturers to seek permits from the DMV to build and sell driverless cars to consumers. Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at Stanford's Center for Automotive Research points to a statistical basis for safety that the DMV might consider as it begins to develop standards: 'Google's cars would need to drive themselves (by themselves) more than 725,000 representative miles without incident for us to say with 99 percent confidence that they crash less frequently than conventional cars. If we look only at fatal crashes, this minimum skyrockets to 300 million miles. To my knowledge, Google has yet to reach these milestones.'"
A human won't pass that test 100% of the time either, so I'm not sure what your point is about 100%. It's all statistics.
Why would a self driving car ever drive off a cliff?
Clearly it would rank available options and pick the lowest cost one. The cheapest collision in that case.
Human drivers allow fatalities everyday. The question is not is it better than some hypothetical human driver, but is it better than the drivers we have right now.
5 years ago the tech to do this was not cheap enough, now it is. This is called progress not being irresponsible. What is irresponsible is suggesting that the average person continue to drive automobiles when we have a better solution at hand.
Anybody with any experience with California drivers knows that most cars in California are already "driverless".
I think you're entirely wrong.
A much more likely scenario is that the self driving cars prove statistically to be safer than human driven cars.
At that point expect legislation to ban humans from driving.
Imagine trying to defend yourself in court if you've caused a fatal accident.
'Why did you turn off the computer when you know it is proven to be safer?'
So the self-driving wonder swerves right to avoid the other car and zooms off the cliff. A human driver would recognize that hitting the other car in this instance is the safer solution then to go careening off the steep cliff.
Someone has never, ever taken an AI class. Or even an algorithm class dealing with risk. Here's how the calculation actually works (and by the way, that approach is about 20-30 years old).
Every situation is assessed an impact value: driving into oncoming traffic, 0 (very bad); driving into the right ditch, 10; swerving into a legal lane, 50; etc. Every situation is given a set of possible actions, with each action having a probability of being completed successfully. The algorithm multiplies the outcome with the odds of achieving that outcome, and picks the highest value. You can set it up in different ways, but the idea is the same: multiply outcome severity with odds of achieving outcome, pick lowest combined risk/outcome. In your situation, driving off the cliff (which is assumed to be very bad, since the car can see a very steep drop-off with no bottom) is going to have a much worse outcome than hitting the car in front of it. Hitting the car in front of it is guaranteed, but so is driving off the cliff. As a result, the algorithm will make the automated car hit the car in front of it, rather than drive off the cliff.
Not to mention that cars don't sleep, always behave optimally (according to the algorithms in place), and have no blind spots.
Basically what I am waiting for is the inevitable 100 car pile up with massive fatalities that WILL occur at some point in time where investigation will identify that a self-driven car, or cars, was the cause of it.
You mean like the ones that regularly happen in fog and icy/rainy conditions?
Any company involved in programming or manufacturing that self-driven car will be sued out of existence and the "love affair" everyone seems to have about auto-driving cars will end quickly.
That is a very real risk. Not sure how the laws will deal with it. But until that question is addressed, we won't see large-scale sales of automated cars. I suspect that we'll see the equivalent of ToS: by using this car, you agree to be fully responsible for all its actions and accidents.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Driving is enjoyable?
Since when?
Sure a race track is enjoyable, twisty deserted roads can be fun, but 99% of driving is mind numbing boredom.
As far as I'm concerned, letting humans drive is putting trust in the other human drivers around me, and frankly, I don't trust them at all. I'd feel much safer if manual driving was illegal.
So if I come out of the grocery store and my car's not there, it might not be stolen?
1. your reaction time is absolute crap.
2. advertisers disagree with your notion that human brains cannot be hacked.
Self driving cars *never* swerve. They brake. Statistically they know that swerving almost always is worse than the incoming accident. Humans on the other hand will swerve. See all the accidents that occur when attempting to miss an animal crossing the road.
Heck, modern planes even try to fix the problems itself. In the famous case of Colgan Air 3407(crashed near Buffalo NY) after shaking the yoke to alert the pilot the autopilot attempted to trade altitude for speed to get out of a stall. The human pilot overrode this safety feature and killed everyone on board by attempting to gain altitude and thus turned a recoverable stall into a crash.
1) You reaction time is far worse than a computer.
2) Your estimation of distances is far worse than machines absolute measurements.
3) You are limited to two forward facing eyes, augmented by 3 small mirrors. And you share some of the vision time with looking at the dash. An auto-car can look in all directions at once, and monitor all dashboard information and more at the same time.
4) An auto-driver will be better at maintaining a safe speed. Able to stop in the distance it knows to be clear far more often than a human driver.
5) I'd expect an auto-driver system to be seperate from any other computing devices in the car, and connected to the internet or any other vector for hacking. I'd expect them to be as immune to hacking as an auto-pilot system in a plane.
No that question is; Is the car a better driver than me when I am sleep deprived, upset at my wife and in a hurry to get home?
The computer will always drive the same, humans are not the reliable.
I believe on public roads you do need a human available to take over for legal reasons.
And that worked so well for AF447.
Aviation autopilots should have proven by now that relying on a human to take over when the situation is so bad the autopilot can't handle it is a recipe for disaster. Besides, what's the point of a 'driverless car' if I have to be continually ready to take over at a millisecond's notice?
Car: 'Warning, warning, kid just jumped out in the road, you are in control'.
Driver: "WTF? I just hit a kid and smeared their insides all over my windshield'
Car manufacturer: 'Not our fault, driver was in control, human error'.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. How the public perceives it. How it is marketed. How it is handled by insurance companies.
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Why would a self driving car ever drive off a cliff?
I don't know, maybe life wasn't what it expected it to be?
The trouble with them is that they'll take the sting out of long commutes. You already have people who think it's a good idea to spend four hours a day driving for the sake of cheaper real estate. What if they up it to six hours a day when they don't have to stare at the road?
Note: cutting a problem (pollution, car-deaths) would do no good if you double the miles.
I think that the way it will play out is that as self-driving cars become a real and viable option, the penalties for bad driving will go up—drive drunk once, and you lose your license permanently, because why not—you can just use a self-driving car. Driver's tests will get harder, because why not—if you fail, you can just use a self-driving car. It will start with really egregious behavior, because voters won't feel threatened by it in sufficient numbers to cause a problem. Over time, the standards for human drivers will go up; at some point driving your own car will be about as common as flying your own airplane. We'll also probably stop giving licenses or learners' permits to teenagers, because they don't have the vote, and their parents would prefer to avoid a teenage testosterone tragedy.
Of course, a really spectacular failure on the part of a self-driving car could put that whole scenario off by a generation.
Why do Luddites chose to come to Slashdot?
Did you mean this forecast to sound neutral, damming, or hopeful?
I see it as hopeful. Driving a car on a public road isn't a right. If you want to drive with manual control, do it on a road you paid for yourself.
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"upset at my wife" AND "in a hurry to get home"????
This just proves how unreasonable human drivers can be.
Odds are cliffs do not move often and any automated car will have access to maps with topo data.
Given the last directions I got from Google Maps concluded with 'now drive through the barrier at the side of the highway and fall forty feet into the parking lot of the hotel below you', that does not give me warm fuzzies.
That brings up another thing autocars will be better about than humans. Individual humans can learn from their mistakes, but that knowledge is not directly transferable to other humans. Any mistake a self-driving car makes, however, can have its solution incorporated into all self-driving cars (or at least all the ones of that model.) So, lots and lots of testing should ultimately give us very safe and effective cars.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
The system just needs a rapid manual override and a little common sense from the driver.
See the results of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447 AF447 flight for the odds of this working. As a one time private pilot I am totally baffled as to how a professional pilot could hold a plane in a stall from 35,000 ft to the ground. I think there were several issues including human factors in the design of the interfaces; but I really think that these guys got used to being along for the ride and it was not conceivable to them that the plane had decided to stop flying itself.
After a week of having an auto-car drive me to work everyday I can not imagine I'd be ready in 1/2 second to suddenly take over for the computer and expect a good result.
Happens all the time. Your forgot to turn off the "Professsional Stuntman" option. For some reason they have that box checked by default. You might also want to double check the settings for "Knight-Rider Style Turbo Boost" and "Assume I Have Access to Airwolf."
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