Slashdot Mirror
How Do You Give a Ticket To a Driverless Car?
FatLittleMonkey writes "New Scientist asks Bryant Walker Smith, from the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, whether the law is able to keep up with recent advances in automated vehicles. Even states which have allowed self-driving cars require the vehicles to have a 'driver,' who is nominally in control and who must comply with the same restrictions as any driver such as not being drunk. What's the point of having a robot car if it can't drive you home from the pub while you go to sleep in the back?"
I want to car see car fight the ticket in court!
to ticket a driverless car. The car, by design and foregoing any human intervention, will obey the law exactly as it is programmed to. It will not speed, it will not swerve, it will not disobey traffic signs nor will it deviate from its programmed course unless directed to by human intervention.
Ergo, if the driverless car fails to function as specified, then the manufacturer is to receive a citation for the vehicle's failure, or otherwise the human who was in control at the time of the infraction will receive the ticket. The car itself is irrelevant.
We are at the early stages. Look at the laws from the first few years of automobiles. You had to walk in front waving a lantern. And go slow enough that the cop on horseback could give you a ticket. What's the point of a car with laws like that?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
How will the cop know who to arrest, if the car isn't displaying the obvious signs of a drunk driver?
For now, though the laws require a sober driver, no drunk driver will be in trouble under most circumstances. The laws will eventually catch up.
I understand how I might legally be the driver but if I'm not actually holding the wheel and constantly adjusting the foot pressure on the brake or accelerator, it is impossible to react in time in case something goes horribly wrong with the automated driver (or with the car, for example, a blowout). Are the judges just bending to pressure from the car companies and tech companies who don't want to be responsible for their software glitches?
Have you ever played with sensors before? They aren't perfect and can give incorrect readings (depending on type they may not even be very accurate under the best of conditions.) Which means software must be written to take those conditions into account, and usually coordinate among different types of sensors. But that software is written by people, and may have bugs in it (in fact certainly will) plus may simply not cover all the real world situations perfectly.
In some cases where people would have a tough time driving, the cars may do awesomely, but in cases where people would have little trouble the cars may behave strangely as sensors give odd readings, etc.
My phone has an incredible processor in it and can handle millions of calculations per second, but it still locks up sometimes, occasionally responding seconds later to all the stored input. Isn't that pretty close to being distracted?
Don't get me wrong, I want a self driving car so badly it hurts sometimes, but I don't expect it to be perfect. And if that's what people expect they are in for a world of disappointment and pain. And my fear is that will mean people panic at the first accident and push back against allowing them at all.
An automated speed/red light camera ticketing an autopilot car. I think the first one to get issued needs to go into some type of art exhibit.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
A lot of laws are "Oh no this is new and we don't understand it so we'll make old laws apply to it!" stuff. In the case of cars it'll be a long time before things get changed. Eventually automatic vehicles will be prevalent enough that there will be a big enough push to change the laws to something sensible. It'll be quite awhile.
As an example see the FAA squaring off with the FCC over electronics on flights. There is no fucking way electronics cause issues with modern planes. If they did, it would be an open invitation for problems/sabotage. Plenty of people forget/ignore the "turn off your stuff" rule and yet there are no issues. Hence the FCC has told the FAA they need to get with the program and allow electronics at all times. However the FAA is dragging their feet on it.
Also with regards to drunk driving there will be major pushback by special interest groups like MADD. They don't want drunk driving laws to make our streets safer, they are a prohibition/temperance group that uses it to try and push against alcohol. So they'll try to find reasons to keep it illegal to be in a car drunk, even if the car is self operating.
The human component is just there in case something unexpected happen on the road that self-driving cars may not be able to react to in time. While such disaster scenario may be rare, the possibility isn't 0%, which is why you need someone who is able to drive.
It's also possible that relieving the driver of the drudgery of driving during the vast majority of uneventful rides will actually deprive him of the instinctual familiarity that would allow him to react correctly in those marginal cases. That is, the purpose of keeping a human being in the loop just for disaster scenarios might be self-defeating if the driver does not possess the experience to best resolve the situation.
If by "gets distracted" you mean "is an entitled narcissist" then I agree. Robots will take the deadliest thing out of the driving equation, ego.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Perhaps, but a 9 YO that is paying attention is probably a better driver than most people out there.
On the other hand, with humans, each human learns how to correctly deal with situations. With computer drivers, they ALL learn from one mistake.
You must never have played a game with AI.
Here is a hint, we are actually very bad are creating smart machines. A 9 YO would be a more intelligent driver any most super computers.
In relation to the present discussion, I'd have to say that Google's driver-less cars pretty much put the lie to that statement.
In August 2012, Google announced that they have completed over 300,000 autonomous-driving miles accident-free, typically have about a dozen cars on the road at any given time. Not explicitly stated in their announcement was how often the driver had to take command.
Further, the summary above may be wrong, because the Nevada law also acknowledges that the operator will not need to pay attention while the car is operating itself, which implies the State has no reasonable expectation of holding the driver responsible for accidents.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Phones are not realtime operating systems. Embedded vehicle components are, and are based on operating systems designed from the ground up to ensure that when a process is going to get its quantum of time, it gets it. No app in the background hogging CPU, no blocked I/O from a long write to flash, no fooling around like on a general purpose OS.
Of course, automotive/marine critical stuff is expensive, but you get what you are paying for. This isn't just another x86 processor that is running Windows and autostarting a "run engine" app.
A self-driving car will have the circuitry most likely on a dedicated processor using CANbus.
I remember a control systems class at university.
We had a table we could move by motor, x and y. The motors were connected to a analog computer ( yes, that old. An EAI 580 IIRC ). Even that primitive computer could balance a broom on the table, moving it anywhere we told it to go, keeping the broom upright ( or we could move it by nudging a bit on the broom, kinda like how you operate a Segway). For all practical purposes, this was the predecessor to the Segway.
Not a one of us in the class could balance that thing as well as the computer ( when properly programmed ) could.
Now, where I think the computer is going to have a helluva problem is in dealing with people, who do the damndest things, like suddenly opening car doors or stepping out into traffic before even looking. Think kid on skateboard. Human intuition leads us to suspect human carelessness whenever we see certain behaviours, especially kids playing nearby or a freshly stopped or entered car. If the computer suspected everything as behaving as erratically as a human behaves, it would have to drive extremely slowly to make up for its lack of insight of which car door is likely to spontaneously open right into onflowing traffic. Even fully alert humans often find this situation unsolvable, with a collision the inevitable result.
One thing the computer has going for it is much faster response times. It would probably be able to bring the car to a complete stop much faster than a human could, leaving the human driving the car behind the robot car with quite a predicament on his hands. Tailgater Beware! We will probably shortly see lots of snub-nosed BMW's.
Now, if all the cars were under computer control, aka " the left hand knows what the right hand is doing", this looks quite do-able. Having to deal with humans, and our completely illogical algorithms, should be enough to drive anyone trying to design a computer algorithm to accommodate it completely buggy.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
My phone has an incredible processor in it and can handle millions of calculations per second, but it still locks up sometimes, occasionally responding seconds later to all the stored input. Isn't that pretty close to being distracted?
No. The processor does not "lock up". The software does. We know how to write software that will not do that. In the market for toys (cell phones, DVD players, PC applications), time to market is more important than correctness. When writing software for serious applications (airplane control, the embedded systems in medical devices, mainframe OSes) people take the time to do things correctly. Reliability is not perfect, but it is several orders of magnitude better than your cell phone. A human driver has a mean time to failure (a crash) of less than a decade. Software written by competent people should have no trouble beating that by an order of magnitude.
I really don't know why this is a difficult question, I see a simple law that solves the problem:
1. If there is an occupant in the car who holds a local drivers license, they are required by law to sit in the drivers seat, and they are responsible if the car is on autopilot or not.
2. If there is an occupant in the car who is unlicensed or incapable of driving they must not sit in the drivers seat and rule 3 applies.
(ie. this is what you do when you are drunk)
3. If there is no occupant in the car (eg. the car is driving its self to pick you up), the owner of the car is responsible as if they were driving.
(ie. If your car kills someone because Sergey programmed it wrong, you go to jail. You knew this was the law when you purchased the car and sent it off on it's own so don't bitch about it.)
4. For civil claims (that is, if someone is seeking money from you in damages), and it is proven that the software was at fault, then the liability is joint and several. (ie. the person who is suing can take you for what you are worth, and take google for what they are worth).
This is easy for lawmakers because there is always someone in their jurisdiction who is liable for the car, and as the owner, you need to trust that the software works. If you don't trust it, don't buy one.
Ego isn't the deadliest thing in the driving equation by far. Even though a lot of drivers think of themselves as "god on wheels" that doesn't mean that is what kills the most people. Some good contestants are:
1) cheapskating. Cars can be much safer if we were willing to pay a lot more for them, but we never buy the safest car we can afford. This results in manufacturers not making cars as safe as possible, but only complying to minimal requirements and matching the other makers in safety tests. Saab went bankrupt making safe cars, Volvo got sold to the Chinese and SUVs and trucks that have bad safety records get sold by the millions.
2) Bad habits, like texting, phone calls or doing make-up while driving, drinking or drugging up before driving. We all know that those things are a fatal distraction but we still do them. Narcissism or ego isn't a factor here, it's plain bad statistics capabilities of the people doing things like this.
3) Economics. If we would only let the best drivers get their license, there'd be a whole lot less accidents, but the economy would fail because nobody would be able to get to work and such. The reality is that we let anyone that's not a complete death-on-wheels get a license to control a motorized vehicle. If we didn't, the economy as we know and created it will not be able to function. Take the top 20% of drivers and let them keep their license. You'd have much less accidents, even relative to the number of drivers, you'd not have traffic jams, less smog, cheap fuel, everything bad about driving cars would probably be solved.Unfortunately, there also would be no economy left, so it can't be done.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
"How do you give a ticket to a driverless car?" is the wrong question.
The right one is how do you design the system such that tickets won't happen because the concept is meaningless and obsolete? The AI needs to be tied in to a wireless data network that combines satellite and terrestrial coverage that provides everything from exact details of every traffic/parking law & regulation wherever it is, speed limits for every section of every road, and obey override commands from authorities.
Otherwise, driverless car owners will be a revenue source for police and counties/towns/cities hungry for cash that learn how to set up situations that intentionally cause driverless cars without such a data network to technically break some traffic law.
I may well have provided at least one of the reasons above. Many towns/counties/cities depend on income from traffic and parking fines.
As long as driverless cars are not networked in this way, they will only be practical for use in limited areas. It would almost have to happen for near-100% adoption or anything close.
Well, unless, of course, one severely limited the majority of citizens' ability to legally travel, to well-mapped and controlled government-approved residential and commercial/industrial/metropolitan areas, unless "legitimate" need is demonstrated. Sort of like "Logan's Run" without the domes to keep people in. Just government enforcement of travel limitations. For the greater good, of course.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
What cop? An automated speed trap camera gives a ticket to an autonomous car. The passenger is not in control. One of the two automated systems is in error. Is there any kind of justice involved here at all? The entire concept of justice implies some sort of free will to make a choice of good vs bad decision. There is no operating free will here. What will a rational judge do? He'll assign it to a debugging group to determine liability, if any.
I can see it now: the road maintenance robots lower the speed limit to 25 on a stretch of road. Their comm access is not working, so the the highway comm net does not update the vehicle's GPS system, which thinks this is a 55 MPH zone. Traffic all rolls by at 55. They all get tickets for speeding. The unions call for a boycott on road maintenance, which causes more 'bots to be purchased. Politicians pass a law mandating fines for road crews that do not post accurate speed limits, a standards body to determine safe limits, and a mandate to cops to enforce them. Every so often there is a snafu and a huge pile-up on the highway. People decide to learn to drive again and my old Ford becomes a concourse antique.