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Why Self-Driving Cars Are Still a Long Way Down the Road
moon_unit2 writes "Technology Review has a piece on the reality behind all the hype surrounding self-driving, or driverless, cars. From the article: 'Vehicle automation is being developed at a blistering pace, and it should make driving safer, more fuel-efficient, and less tiring. But despite such progress and the attention surrounding Google's "self-driving" cars, full autonomy remains a distant destination. A truly autonomous car, one capable of dealing with any real-world situation, would require much smarter artificial intelligence than Google or anyone else has developed. The problem is that until the moment our cars can completely take over, we will need automotive technologies to strike a tricky balance: they will have to extend our abilities without doing too much for the driver.'"
This writer makes a fundamental mistake: believing that if full driverless technology is not perfect or at least near-perfect, it is therefore unacceptable. But this is not true. Driverless technology becomes workable when it is better than the average human driver. That's a pretty low bar to clear. I know all of us think we're above-average drivers, but there are a lot of really bad drivers out there, and even a flawed automatic system could do a better job.
I think we'll probably see self-driving cars in congested, relatively low-speed environments like inner cities before they're screaming down the highway at 75mph.
The first robot taxi company is going to make a mint when they integrate a smartphone taxi-summoning app with their robo-chauffeur.
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It's interesting that the article indicates that autonomous vehicles are still worse than the best Chinese drivers, but that Google expects to surpass that milestone within four years.
... because they will be, who is going to be sued?
If I was a car manufacturer I don't think I'd be mad keen on going down the self-driving route - it's only going to mean more lawsuits.
[Google] says its cars have traveled more than 300,000 miles without a single accident while under computer control. Last year it produced a video in which a blind man takes a trip behind the wheel of one of these cars, stopping at a Taco Bell and a dry cleaner.
Impressive and touching as this demonstration is, it is also deceptive. Google’s cars follow a route that has already been driven at least once by a human, and a driver always sits behind the wheel, or in the passenger seat, in case of mishap. This isn’t purely to reassure pedestrians and other motorists. No system can yet match a human driver’s ability to respond to the unexpected, and sudden failure could be catastrophic at high speed.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
they don't need full autonomy to be useful. ability to follow close behind a human-driven leader car in caravan is enough to start with.
Imagine if you had a car with a great AI, better than what is out there today. You just tell it to drive somewhere and it does. It never gets lost, knows where all addresses are, knows how to park, etc. Basically everything.
There'd still be people that did things like, "It seemed to be going too fast so I slammed on the brakes and the car spun out of control and into a ditch. If it weren't for your AI, this never would have happened! I want a million dollars." or "I was sitting in the driver's seat drunk off my ass with my hands on the wheel and pretending to steer the car. Your AI drove the car into a school bus full of nuns and now everyone is accusing me of being a drunk driver, I want a million dollars!" or maybe even "Your AI car was trying to kill me, so I had to run it off the road and set it on fire, killing the person who was also inside. Now the police are charging me with murder. Had your AI not been sent back in time to kill the humans, I wouldn't have had to do this!"
Look at the case history of cruise control, for example. It was a big thing to automatically claim cruise control fucked up and cause you to drive to the bar, get drunk, and then try to drive home.
i like to think of them more as personal variable path trains. whats really needed to make it work is a road infrastructure designed around this. when the focus moves away from the AI that can replace regular driver and more towards a combination of smart roads and smart cars that work together, then we will have what they hype is suggesting
Google has apparently been using this technology for their StreetView cars, and apparently meet all the straw-man requirements of the article.
So...do they have more bogus requirements that need to be met?
Driverless cars don't need to be able to handle any possible situation. Most drivers can't handle those situations either - witness the large number of accidents that happen every day. The driverless cars just have to be better, and have superior liability coverage, than human drivers.
Maybe AUTO drive only express lanes that cars will go at high speed at near bumper to bumper
If the car's AI cannot handle the situation, control of the car could be transfered to a central location where a human could take over. Another option would be to get the car to a safe spot and have a human come out and take over.
Also, the cars don't need to go anywhere at anytime under any conditions to be useful, they just need to be able to follow pre-determined courses safely. In the even of an accident, detour, heavy traffic, or even bad weather, the automatic driving cars could be sent home or told to stay home.
The big market I see is getting elderly people to and from simple destinations like the grocery store, the doctors office, etc. If the driving conditions are not ideal, the trip can be cancled.
remote lag / data coverage / tower roaming / other network issues make that a bad idea. And just think of what a hacker can do with that?
And overseas lag (if they just the center there) or even satellite lag is to high.
Really, no one read the headline and thought: "They're a long way down the road because they're driving away without us!!!"
Screaming down the highway at 75MPH is *exactly* where I want a self-driving car. I live in the Canadian prairies, the nearest large city is 5hrs of highway driving, next nearest is 7hrs. I would _love_ to put my car on autopilot for that trip.
Also, on the highway you generally have long straight sections, sight lines are long, cars are further apart, there are no pedestrians, and often you have divided highways so you don't even need to worry about oncoming traffic.
The article is about semi-automated cars, not fully automated ones. Semi-automated cars are iffy. We already have this problem with aircraft, where the control systems and the pilot share control. Problems with being in the wrong mode, or incorrectly dealing with some error, come up regularly in accident reports. Pilots of larger aircraft go through elaborate training to instill the correct procedures for such situations. Drivers don't.
A big problem is that the combination of automatic cruise control (the type that can measure the distance to the car ahead) plus lane departure control is enough to create the illusion of automatic driving. Most of the time, that's good enough. But not all the time. Drivers will tend to let the automation drive, even though it's not really enough to handle emergency situations. This will lead to trouble.
On the other hand, the semi-auto systems handle some common accident situations better than humans. In particular, sudden braking of the car ahead is reacted to faster than humans can do it.
The fully automatic driving systems have real situational awareness - they're constantly watching in all directions with lidar, radar, and cameras. The semi-auto systems don't have that much information coming in. The Velodyne rotating multibeam LIDAR still costs far too much for commercial deployment. (That's the wrong approach anyway. The Advanced Scientific Concepts flash lidar is the way to go for production. It's way too expensive because it's hand-built and requires custom sensor ICs. Those problems can be fixed.)
Because Skynet, that's why.
"Don't worry, there's a human to take over!"
Am I the only one who always finds those claims laughable? No one* is going to be paying attention to react to the unexpected better than the computer controlled car. That's like asking if you're always ready to takeover the car as a passenger.
Of course you can do it, but the computer will have already slammed on the brakes before you noticed the issue. A human suddenly taking over will almost surely result in disaster.
*yes yes, racecar drivers etc for pedants
ready to take over in case of an emergency, what is the point of the whole thing?
And assuming the human will be tweeting on his Facebook Amazon phone with his hands nowhere near the steering wheel and feet propped up on the dashboard, how is he going to take over control of the car in a split second when an emergency occurs? He can't. So that means he will have to be alert and in a ready driving posture and paying attention to the road like he's really driving. But then what is the point? Might as well have him drive it himself and save money by not buying the Google Car stuff in the first place.
Either make a car that can go 100% without a human driver, or go back to web advertising and forget about the whole thing.
Oh yeah, forgot part of #1: As part of making the manufacturer liable for accidents caused by the AD system, even limited, the manufacturer would build the liability into the price of the system, enabling dirt-cheap insurance if you can afford the auto-drive.
I don't read AC A human right
There will never be a "self-driving" care because nobody can afford the liability of selling an autonomous car. In any accident, the manufacturer will obviously get sued. You always have to have a human "in control" so you have someone to point the finger of blame at.
Constructing reliable, efficient self-driving cars is a solved problem: they're called trains. Now if only some of the major industrialized powers were more aware of their potential.
There are other fundamental problems with driver-less cars: Illusion of control, exchange of information, and unmodeled conditions
The illusion of control is why some people are scared to death of flying, but feel confident of getting behind the wheel: even though the stats say that people are safer in an aircraft than on the road, people hate to give up the control. Even if the control is just an illusion (you can do little if a drunk driver slams into your car).
The exchange of information is crucial to any large-scale automated technology. Right now, you try to infer the intentions of other drivers and account for them. If someone ahead of you turns on their indicator lights, you slow down and give them space (except if you live in a major city, where you speed up to avoid giving up an inch - God, I hate San Diego and LA drivers). If every automated car tries a greedy algorithm, it will be havoc.
The unmodeled conditions are the outliers that might not occur often, but a human is much better equipped to deal with them. What happens in a storm when some underpass might be flooded? A human would take a look out the window and decide to try a different route from the start. This could come under exchange of information as well - basically an automated system cannot make "judgement calls". It needs accurate information to function.
Given information, the technology today has enough bandwidth to control an unstable aircraft into a standing position; I think we can handle a car on a road. A basic problem relates to how information is collected and shared - an offline car is limited by having only local information, and little predictive abilities.
I want the self driving bus. Cheap and efficient buses endlessly cruising the countryside, ideally stopping for a mobile phone request. Who would need a car or a parking space? Life would be wonderful!
To be an efective driver an AI would need to understand my hand signals. Until then it is not safe for it to be on the road when I am on my bike.
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what about criminal library?
What if some get's killed by a auto drive car?? What if a auto drive car drivers though an on street farmers market as it some how missed all the signs saying road closed
This year, they're not quite good enough.
Next year, they'll show some impressive results... but still not yet.
When it gets to the point that the software and hardware is safer than a human driver, the insurance companies will lobby to mandate it in every car.
Then comes the fun:
1) Your car won't drive until *you* clean the ice off the cameras.
2) Will you still get arrested for drunk driving if the car is doing the driving?
3) Can your car drive your kids without you? Will it if you let them get ahold of the key even if you don't want it to?
4) No more "come pick me up" -- just phone your car
5) Will you even need a car, or will you just whistle for Uber's robo-cab service for anywhere you need to be?
Design for Use, not Construction!
Problem solved.
I keep seeing this argument of "Who pays: Owner or Manufacturer?" all the time, but I really wonder if the answer should be "Neither". If I crash my car into a tree, neither I nor the manufacturer of the car pays for the damage. My insurance does.
Perhaps if self driving cars could be show to have lower accident rates than drivers, my insurance might actually offer to cover my car for less than if I had a car that I had to drive myself.
Insurers already offer reduced rates for advanced technologies like ABS, anti-theft, air bags, etc. Couldn't a self driving car that reduces accidents be a good thing for insurance companies?
Given current speed and other road traffic, which do you hit? The ball, the child chasing the ball, or the tree to avoid them both? Hitting the ball or child will bring the least damage to me, the car, and my occupant.
Hitting the ball or tree is the least overall damage to society.
The human driving will almost always choose to not hit the chid, no matter whatever else happens. Can we program the car to make that same value decision? Will we?
I've always thought it was a quite a messy hack, trying to develop AI to the point of recognizing the infinite possible variations of roadways, traffic, control systems, etc.
The correct way to do it would be to install digital beacons (solar powered?) along every road with a failsafe communication protocol that always assumes failure until it confirms normal operation.
Yes, I realize this would be out of Google's hands (or would at least require a lot of paperwork that the AI doesn't) and would take an enormous effort, but it would be the correct way, nonetheless ... and not to mention, offer a whole lot closer to 0% collision rate.
Self-driving cars won't work for a completely different reason than all this...they will never work because they can't bluff.
As soon as people figure out that a computer is driving a car, they will pull out in front of it knowing they won't be hit. They will change lanes into it, knowing that it will slow down and get out of the way. And they will loath it, because it will never flatter their feelings.
Self-driving cars will be bullied off the road, because there is a lot more to driving with people than being able to control the car. There is a lot of social/herd/mental/aggression dynamics that are instinctive for people but not for computers.
So you're saying if humans were that resilient, Google's self-navigating automobile program would be superfluous?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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My prediction is that people will be so resistant to just letting go of the steering wheel that the major car companies will give up with that route and pursue having super assisted driving. That is basically cruise control on steroids. Already companies like Mercedes have cruise control that will maintain a safe distance from the car in front, matching their slower speed or even emergency braking if needed. Other cars will do what they can from having you change lanes and side-swiping another car. So I suspect that all the robot driver technology will end up holding your hand more and more. Technically you will be the driver but the robot will be ready to prevent stupidity and also react when you don't. After a while it will finally reach a point where you can just take your hands off the wheel (the car will probably bleat plaintively) and the car will maintain speed and the lane. But nobody will call it robotic driving.
But then the breakthrough will be that some company that has crossed some critical line of self-driving capability will say that full liability insurance is included with the price of the car. Potentially they will even cover all insurance short of trees falling on the car and whatnot as they will be sure the car can't cause an accident and that with all the cameras and sensors that some other fool can't blame you or your car if they are the cause of the accident.
At this point my money would be on cars finally being marketed and sold as robotic self-driving cars. Shortly after this the tidal wave will wash away all the non-robotic cars as being a dangerous menace. The key here is that most cars by this point will be largely capable of being autonomous or very close to autonomous with only antiques being the hold outs.
But, and the big but, is that some robotic car will drive off a cliff or into a train or whatever and that single incident or small collection of incidents (and their Youtube videos) will get everyone saying, "Those things are death traps, I'll never let the car drive." This will temporarily postpone the inevitable but going from 35,000 US annual road deaths to 35 will be too much reality for foolish people to fight for long.
I think you should perhaps invest in a nice AI grammar program because your post is unreadable without it. Let me specify in order from the beginning of your statement:
1) "what" should have been capitalized.
2) What the hell is a criminal library? I think you mean liability.
3) some=someone
4) "get's" isn't possesive; it has no apostrophe.
5) That is "an auto drive car," not a. It could be argued that auto and drive should have a hyphen but I'll let that slide.
6) You don't need two question marks. One is sufficient.
7) See #3
8) "drivers through" should be "drives through."
9) on street = on-street
10) "farmers" actually needed the apostrophe here; farmers' or farmer's depending on context
11) Somehow is one word.
12) "road closed" should have had quotation marks because you are quoting it.
13) You were generous with the question marks but failed to end you sentence with a period.
Now go ahead and blame your cellphone's autocorrect for the horrible grammar but be aware that it was YOU who clicked the "Submit" button, not your phone. See how auto-driving cars will be operated initially? A human will still be there and it will be that operator's fault if something goes amiss. Years of auto-pilot in aircraft have shaken these kinds of questions out.
FOR ONCE THE GRAMMAR NAZI WINS!
To be useful these cars will need to be crazily connected to some gigantic wireless network.
We have daily exploits for the various OSes out there (maybe not OpenBSD : ) , daily exploits for frameworks, languages, APIs and whatnots.
There are daily DDoS make by botnets of tens of thousands of zombies.
What makes anyone think these autonomous car would have a secure OS?
The only answer to that is: "It is so important that it is going to be a separate network and this time we promise it is really going to be secure".
I'm sure it won't: it's not going to be designed by security experts and it's gonna get owned.
And then there's also the possibility of non-malicious bugs breaking havoc.
Nobody ever talks about that yet this is just so much more important and immensely more difficult to get right than have these cars drive around safely: computer security / network security is one of the hardest problem of the 21th century (at least so far).
We're not there yet because we're basically nowhere when it comes to network security...
People like you are why we can't have nice things. Why does it have to be 100% or nothing? If they can make a car that can navigate the Interstate on a nice sunny day then myself and many others would buy it in a heartbeat. What happens if it isn't a sunny day? Then you don't drive it in autopilot! Please don't tell me you're one of the people who uses their cruise control in a down pour! If you do, you're running a big risk of a hydroplaning or limited visibility accident. So what do you do there? You turn it off!
People like you demonstrate what is wrong with America today. You want it all or no one can have any of it. Everything does not have to be a dichotomy. Besides being either/or, it could also be both or neither! Perhaps even some combinations in-between! If no one even attempts these experiments then nothing will ever get built. This work is "True Innovation (tm)" and not some crap like removing a start button. Stop it with the naysaying already!
A truly autonomous car, one capable of dealing with any real-world situation, would require much smarter artificial intelligence than Google or anyone else has developed.
A HUMAN DRIVER that is capable of dealing with any real-world situation would require a much smarter human than most of the human population.
Guess what happens when a human driver encounter situations he cannot deal with? He stops the car and calls for help.
So a self-driving car that is smart enough to fail safely and calls for help is good enough.
Oliver.
You told me the other day that I was the type of person you wouldn't ever want to work with. Sounds to me that it is, in fact, YOU that are the type of person that *I* wouldn't want to work with. You post alot here and even get modded up quite a bit but all I ever hear you say is "nope, can't be done."
How is it that you keep a job if all you ever tell your boss is the ways something can't get done?
Just because this technology doesn't fit every single possible hair brained and unlikely event that you can think of, doesn't mean it should be scrapped. There are plenty of technologies that don't fit all use cases yet there are products that are still made and you use every day. NASA didn't go to the Moon on the very first launch. It blew up on the pad as I recall and killed the astronaut. The first iterations of self driving cars ARE going to have some accidents. Someone may die in one. People already die in human piloted accidents. The computer has way better odds than a human at avoiding that outcome. The fact is that since it couldn't possibly detect the fact that an underpass is flooded, under 18 feet of snow, while on fire and being bombarded by meteors doesn't mean we should not keep working on this technology until it finally works. As an engineer, I commend Google and others such as Mercedes for working on this. They are busy getting shit done and truly innovating while you're just sitting at your desk naysaying.
First we need the high quality GPS map of the planet.
It should be wiki-style map, because it is impossible to map the world from an office.
When there is the map, we could start thinking of using it for navigation, including automatic or semiautomatic navigation.
The wiki style map www.openstreetmap.org has got more than a million editors already. What is needed yet is the HD international telescope project on the surface of the moon, which provides GPL quality aerial images of Earth for mapping.
www.openstreetmap.org is using now images provided to the OSM community by "Bing" (thank you "Microsoft" for this) and numerous government aerial images for certain regions of the planet. But the more comprehensive aerial imaging system is required.
To learn more of the GPS mapping of the world join the conference "State of The Map US 2013" June 8 - 9 http://stateofthemap.us/ and http://osmplus.co/ June 10, 2013 in San Fransisco.
Earl Nightingale wrote: "All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination."
Yes, that's exactly what we need. A bunch of cars that drive like the elderly so as to avoid any collision liabilities.
If we're going to be serious about self-driving cars, we need to designate them a lane so that the entire lane can begin moving in unison when the light turns green, and so that the driverless cars are allowed to drive at higher speeds, as they're presumed to be safer. If they don't have a better track record than Humans, why are we using them? They are presumed to be safer.
Unless it takes less time to get to your destination, it won't sell. We're impatient convenience whores, and you have to market things towards us with that in mind. How else would the credit card and computers made it so far?
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
Airlines are liable for around $175000 for each passenger death, set by IATA. A similar figure could and should be set by law for autonomous vehichles. So you do the math and find that per car, with a reasonably safe driving system, that's no big deal, whether it's covered by your car insurance or the manufacturer's liability.
Streetcars. In all seriousness, the technology that we are very close to being able to realistically automate is rail in less than fully separated environments. The nature of operating on rails eliminates the sort of unpredictable ad-hoc problem solving that is going to be a problem for truly autonomous vehicles, and while the application is fairly specialized it is significant enough that there could be real money on it. Realistically the two use cases boil down to being able to get all the sort of operational cost benefits that go with light metro like systems (think Vancouver, or what's being built in Honolulu) that are automated and as such very frequent but have the kind of capacity more associated with light rail without the cost of full grade separation, and being able to automate more typical transit routes with less than full grade seperated routes (i.e. streetcar systems like in Seattle or Portland suddenly have a big advantage over buses beyond capacity and aesthetics - they can be driverless, a change that eliminates upwards of 60% of operating cost). For that matter trolleybuses might even be close enough to fixed guideway to solve a lot of the sort of problems that full automated cars would encounter, though this is more complicated and possibly introduces some more liability (there are legal advantages to being a train rather than a motor vehicle in most jurisdictions).
Indeed, all proposed autodrive systems have obstacle detection. Avoiding hitting pedestrians is pretty much an ideal 'fast twitch' accident avoidance that said AI should be ideal at, even if Joe's example of missing signs marking the street as closed is a real possibility if they didn't follow NTSB guidelines in marking it.
I don't read AC A human right
Artificial intelligence will never reach human intelligence, for the simple reason that the brain contains 200 billion neurons in a vastly parallel network. Unless technology can duplicate that, don't expect human-level intellgence any time soon.
What could be done though today is automatic driving though automatic roads, i.e. roads enhanced with digital systems that provide the car with directional and traffic information through wireless stations, as well as kinematic information of other cars.
With such a system, it would be entirely possible to make driving automatic. it will turn roads to railways, but with cars instead of trains.
I wish more people realized just how bad the average driver is. Almost nobody wants to admit to themselves that they risk other people's live son a frequent basis for minor personal gain. But that's just the reality of anyone who's ever driven to work when tired. To admit cars like this are a good idea is to admit that you've been willing to kill or cripple other people for a paycheck. Then again I'm a bit bitter because I was crippled in a car accident by an idiot who thought she could drive on no sleep on an icy road.
Everything will be taken away from you.
Next big problem in autonomous vehicles are legal issues. The autonomous car can be as perfect as possible. As long as we are not able to solve the legal issues, it will not fly. At present: Car who park them selves are not allowed to control the engine, because the human must be in control so he can be blamed for damaging other cars or hurting people. Who is to blame if the car is doing all by itself? At present the problem will be relayed from the "driver" to the car company. A solution is, that the user has to activate the system and his insurance includes damages caused by malfunction. But this is only a concept and it is not backed up by any legislation.
Isn't this "it has to be 100% safe, before we want to allow it" attitude just force Google to go to dictatorial states and offer to use them as guinea pigs, they won't care if there's a 1% chance of accident, and google could trade that tech for precious resources.
The need to be over cautious with these automated vehicles will bring out a slew of automated spastic 'nervous nellies' robots on our streets.
Isn't that kind of human driver one of the worst to be behind? Constantly, touching the brake, never going 1mph (or more) over the absurdly low speed limits, taking 5+ seconds to leave a stop light or stop sign intersection.
I am not sure I am ready for a world full of those.
Full autonomy is not the immediate goal for most car companies. The more tangible near-term goal is to implement piecemeal aspects of technology as various "driver-assist" or safety devices. New cars on the market are already being offered with automatic parking, lane departure warning systems, autonomous cruise control amongst others. The goal is not to eliminate the driver but to reduce driver workload and eliminate the risk of accidents through various collision avoidance devices. Eventually, as automation in driver's seat increase the public may be more willing to accept a fully autonomous vehicle, but that was never the near term goal.
I don't doubt at all that the route has been driven first by a human or that a human in there to take over in theory. My guess, however, based on other (admittedly totally web based and mostly anecdotal) sources is that this has much more to do with liability than system performance... by reports the "driver" doesn't seem to be doing anything during these test runs. For a company with the resources to get drivers to go literally everywhere for street view, even if there is a requirement to have the route scouted beforehand, so what?
I'm guessing there are still interesting problems in the small fraction of a percent frequency of real world situations that the system could respond to better. But the reason for that guess is that most problems break down that way, and we're not reading about tens or hundreds of millions of miles of test runs just yet, only hundreds of thousands. Just saying "No system can yet match a human driver’s ability to respond to the unexpected, " doesn't make it true. In fact, I'd wager it's already mostly false.
I'll be interested to read first reports of truly heavy real world testing and Google's lobbying efforts on the heals of those tests. Even without that, we're up to three states (Nevada, California and Florida) that have allowed them to some degree. I'll be checking on the "Legislation" section here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car from time to time. From my standpoint (and I say this as the most vulnerable type of road user, a cyclist) the sooner the future starts, the better.
The real answer to driverless cars is the same one as the answer to electric cars. Driverless cars are unlikely to have a human-intelligence computer any time soon, just as electric cars are unlikely to have the magic battery that will power it for 300 miles and recharge as quickly as refueling a regular car with gasoline any time soon.
The solution is to build an electrically-powered railway system that cars can drive onto. That is, the car drives _into_ a railcar that encloses it, provides climate control, creature comforts, and entertainment, while it navigates via electrical grid power to wherever you want to go, automatically switching the railcar to get there, and operating like a personal rapid transit, where loading and unloading is done off the main line, so the only time you stop is when you arrive were you told the system you want to go. If such a system were restricted to reasonable speeds such as 80 mph or so, it could be constructed in the median of interstate highways, and eliminate 99% of the situations that a computer driver would fail at, and 100% of the battery problems of the electric car.
Well, thank goodness that these will be engineered to critical standards, not that of your average PC.
Indeed, my earlier post never posits that the auto-drive system will never fail-dangerous, indeed, it figures that accidents and failures WILL happen, and how the government could address said failures in a fashion that still promotes the welfare of everybody, at least on average.
If autodrive cars cut the fatality and accident rates in half, that's roughly 15k people a year saved, in the United States alone. Something like $82-115B/year saved.
I don't read AC A human right
I have bad reading comprehension? I have quite astute reading comprehension.
What you posted claimed Google was telling us the reasons why the system wasn't up to par; yet it didn't say that at all. All Google said was it had 300k accident free miles and drove a blind man around town. That second paragraph isn't from Google, that's the author's observations that get summarized into a human is better than any computer driver (last phrase) specifically at high speed. You also stated in a post further up that you might putter around at 25 in one but you wouldn't even consider the freeway at 75.
I saw what you did there. You basically rolled in and did a "I'll just leave this here." You didn't say anything but by chosing that particular paragraph you were trying to IMPLY that the car isn't worth a damn at high speeds and that computers just won't be as good as a human driver. Also since you didn't actually say anything, you have pausible deniability (which you did deny saying anything in the response). That's the same kind of weasly debating the talking heads on Fox do when they say, "I'm not claiming anything, I'm just asking questions," even when such questions are loaded. You are right, in reference to the quote, YOU didn't say anything. You just posted the part that implied it for you. The entire article is just one big bunch of negatives on why this just isn't feasable. I can't believe MIT even put their name on it.
You'd love to work with me! Especially since if our management started trying to pull some BS, I'd be the first one to call them on it and I'd stand with you to ensure we don't get screwed over. If you fall, then there's no reason to assume I wouldn't be next. The people at the top want people like you and I squabbling amongst ourselves so that they can do what they want while we aren't looking. Surely you have noticed this.
Yea, just like the F22 Raptor, [airforcetimes.com] right?
Not really: let's see how many differences there are:
1. The problem with the F-22 is with an oxygen system, not a computer system
2. The F-22 is still currently in it's testing phase. There will be extensive testing of autodrive systems before release.
3. Google probably has more self-driving cars than there are F-22s(IE there's already a larger base of self driving cars for testing purposes)
No, but it does blame any potential failure on the concept of improper road signage, not equipment malfunctions.
The SPECIFIC problem in question was 'driving into a busy farmer's market', a very specific potential failure, not a generic one. My response was that it would be a 'real possibility', IE high probability event, if they mismarked the street. It was more a statement of the sort of incidents I see auto-drive cars getting into. You could hang a white and black banner across a street above car level with 'STREET CLOSED' written on it and most humans would get the point, but unless an autodrive system is rather more AI than I'd expect, it'd miss it completely, resulting in a stream of cars going down the road. This decreases if it's marked per NTSB standards, because then in order to get onto the road you're going to have to maneuver around barriers at the least.
This is an example of an incident caused by 'failure to recognize strategic problems', as opposed to 'fast twitch' problems like somebody running into the road. It'd be dangerous even with 'fast twitch' accident avoidance responses to try to keep the car from hitting anybody/thing. Road closed improperly - Strategic problem. Somebody running into the road - fast twitch problem. Computers driven vehicles will likely be better at the latter than they are at the former.
What sorts of equipment malfunction could happen? Failure to recognize obstacle, unexpected acceleration, unexpected deceleration, veering into an obstacle as opposed to avoiding it, over-estimation of road surface resulting in loss of control, overcorrecting resulting in loss of control/rollover, etc...
What I have a problem with is all the Google-dick-sucking that goes on anytime someone (like me) posits any sort of doubt or question as to the infallible nature of such a system.
But that's not a good excuse when I lead off with proposals where the government specifically limits liability on the part of autodrive manufacturers in order to keep them from being financially slaughtered in liability lawsuits, indicating that I am neither sucking Google's cock or assuming that the system is infallible. Heck, I only posit cutting the accident rate [i]in half[/i]! Rain is #5, design defects is #10. Distracted driving is #1, Speeding is #2, and Drunk Driving is #3. Don't see percentages for #1&2, but #3 is around 30%. That's 90% of accidents right there that an autodrive system should readily solve almost completely.
I don't read AC A human right
welcome our automotive overlords
We have been working on step 1, speed-aware cruise control.
Thats step 1.
Speed aware cruise control