Slashdot Mirror
Concern Mounts Over Self-Driving Cars Taking Away Freedom
Lucas123 writes "Opinions in the blogosphere are building and run the gamut on self-driving automobile technology, but a survey supports the trend that most don't want their driving independence usurped by cameras, sensors and an onboard computer. The survey of British drivers last year commissioned by Bosch, a Germany-based supplier of automotive components, found that most would not buy a self-driving car. Only 29% of respondents said thay would consider buying a driverless car and only 21% said they would feel safe as a passenger in a self-driving car. David Alexander, an analyst at Navigant Research, pointed out that while driving yourself is often preferable, there's a lot of "grunt" driving that would be better handled by a computer. Navigant recently released a report stating that by 2035, 95 million autonomous cars will be sold every year."
I'm in.
I would pay a lot of money to be able to drive distracted, asleep, or inebriated legally. Right now none of those are legal and one isn't even possible.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Driving a manually operated car through a hoard of autonomous cars. Splitting two lanes, step on the gas. The autonomous cars detect your car impinging on their lane, so they move out of the way, and the sea of autonomous cars parts like a wave in front of you.
They'll need a lot of algorithms to deal with the unexpected, and people who deliberately want to mess with them, heh.
I love driving. Everything about it, but even I want it. Better driving from everyone. Safer, better traffic, and you can play board games with the family while driving down the road.
All around awesome.
I wouldn't feel safe. I know I would be safer, but at first it would feel dangerous. That's from years of driving and being driven.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I don't want to give up my driving freedom. Having seen how the rest of you drive, though, I want all of you to give up your driving freedom because I swear, I'd drive better sleepy, drunk, and texting all at the same time than some of you.
Giving up driving is a price I'm willing to pay if I don't have to risk my life on your competence behind the wheel.
Except that self-driving cars are already greatly safer than those driven by humans. If such a car doesn't cooperate with government surveillance, it doesn't degrade your freedom -- and as an useful tool, actually improves it. You can do whatever you want when travelling...
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Despite this technology not existing yet, it scares the shit outta me!
Can you imagine my self-driving car crashing? Next I would be loaded into a self-driving ambulance and taken to an automated hospital where a self-operating robot might cut off the wrong leg. I'll be right back, my Roomba is stuck in the corner again.
There are people who have medical or other reasons which make it so they can't drive. For them a self-driving car gives a huge amount of freedom: freedom to get yourself from point A to point B without relying on favors or public transit or taxis.
Just wait until insurance companies start requiring automated driving. That is likely to be decades away, but I think they will be a big factor in the push toward driverless vehicles. The irony of this is that ultimately the need for auto insurance will decline dramatically once accident rates plummet. At that point I think we're likely to see auto insurance become the domain of the auto manufacturers rather than the auto owners.
"War makes me sad." - Me
If I had a truly self-driving car, I would rent it out 23/7. My own personal taxi company. After all, I only need my car for about an hour a day on average. Maybe RelayRides will expand to accommodate this business model- I block out times when I need my car, and when someone books it for a ride, it drives off, takes them where they want to go, then comes back and parks in my spot. Or maybe I decide that since I only need a car for an hour a day, I personally don't need a car at all, and can rent one from the pool of public cars if I need to go somewhere.
We might not have flying cars, but the driverless car is now a legal problem, not a problem of unreasonable expense or technological ability. We have the technology to build them now, and mass-produced, probably for less than $60,000 a piece. We also have systems for issuing commands remotely over the internet ("car, come here") and systems for renting of personal vehicles (Relayrides, GetAround, Lyft). It is only a matter of time before someone ties them all together and forces the law to change, or the law changes and the floodgates open.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
It's mass transit without the masses. Imagine your own personal bus, taxi or train. Mass transit is good for many people because it enables travel without so much stress... or at least without the same type of stress and certainly less danger. But among the problems of mass transit is the crowding and congestion which often accompanies more dense populated areas.
I think having HOV lanes replaced with "Automated" lanes, self driving cars are likely to take you anywhere you need to go, respond to traffic problems by dynamically re-routing and generally even out the flow of traffic all over. Even if a driver decides not to participate in the use of self-driving cars, when there are enough self-driving cars, it will likely benefit the non-participants as well.
One caveat is the fact that non-participants will see it as a license to be an even bigger asshole than they were to "other drivers." They would be bigger because they would drive rudely around machines which would, ostensibly, not be offended... (the passengers might though... imagine cutting off a self-driving car and how it might respond)
There are probably a lot of scary scenarios which I haven't considered, but I recall batman movies and the self-driving batmobile and how that could be really useful. A car that will let you get out at your destination then drive away to park somewhere? Awesome... especially if you can notify your car that you are waiting to be picked up and have it arrive in a few moments. There's a lot of awesome there... and some scary.
Humans are simply not built for monotonous, repetitive activities. Driving is one of those. If you look at the main cause of accidents there is rarely faults in the machinery it's humans that are either sleepy, drunk or just plain dumb. I really do want to see smart roads and smart cars.
Ugh we really need to learn to let machines do the jobs that we simply can't do well in a consistent manner.
This reminds me of when the internet was new and my relatives were amazed when I told them I did most of my Christmas shopping online. They couldn't believe that I trusted web sites on the internet with my credit card number and they said they had absolutely no interest in doing that. The very next year, most of those same relatives were raving about how convenient it was to shop at home and not fight car and foot traffic to buy gifts. The point is, people fear new things that they don't understand, but once they see the benefits and convenience of new technologies, it usually isn't long before they consider life without that technology as primitive.
If you can drive, for whatever reason, it seems to me that a self-driving car would be a godsend. Folks with visual impairment, seizure illnesses, physical challenges, etc. are suddenly able to go wherever they want.
I'm willing to get a driverless car........once it's been tested. A lot. Not before.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Of course it's going to happen. Especially in crowded traffic. In those circumstances I'd much rather my life depend on something with a reaction time that will make the moving cars seem almost stationary.
Here's how this should play out:
1) Smart people with lots of money start developing these (happening now)
2) In real life trials, they work, and are statistically safer than human drivers (looks promising...)
3) In time, they're indisputably a lot safer than human drivers (we'll see, but I think this will happen).
Once you get to 3, not switching to driverless cars becomes rather dumb.
This reminds me of when digital cameras started becoming mainstream. A lot of people poo pooed them and said they would never replace real cameras. They had to be able to feel and hold pictures. Well, we see how Poloroid and Kodak fared. A similar attitude was had when automatic transmissions first appeared. People wanted the freedom to shift when they wanted and not when some mechanism decided it should be done.
I expect driverless cars to follow a similar path. Once available, they will slowly be adopted and then a tidal wave. There will always be the Jenny McCarthys of the world who have some freak incident and blame technology on their woes, but 99% of those who can afford a driverless car will use them 99% of the time.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Driving is a privilege, that you have to earn, and comes with a thousand point list of rules and regulations.
You can only drive when they want, where they want, and how they want. So were is there any freedom to loose?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
You wouldn't believe how many people I know were dead set against satellite navigation systems, how they would be forced on us, etc. Every one of those people now owns one, by their own choice.
I think people have a similar visceral reaction to autonomous vehicles, but once they experience not having to deal with the stress of everyday driving, will change their opinion.
Sent from my iPhone
While you have a point, I'd note that for people stuck in rush hour traffic, the average speed is usually lower then the posted speed limit anyway.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
the freedom to be stupid and cause accidents/deaths? or the freedom to speed at ridiculous speeds(i like this one)? or even the freedom to keep score while running over grandmothers?
I agree with this. While I would love a care that will just go where I tell it, I would like to have the option of driving it myself as well. I can't see manufacturers taking that option away, as long as they even pay lip service to giving the consumers what they want, unless the Government tells them otherwise. Too bad they seem to be so ready to jump when the Gov. tells them.
But that's crazy talk, right? What are they going to do, tell us to buy insurance too?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
It's interesting to watch tech trends change. End-user control used to be a priority; the Internet was built around it. With the rise of widespread connectivity, centrally controlled services have become much simpler and more popular. You don't update the OS on your phone, someone does it for you.
You lose the benefits of end-user control, which include more privacy, freedom (as in speech), openness and innovation. Who will track where you self-driving car takes you? On your iPhone, you only can use apps that Apple approves. Facebook was built on open technologies that emphasized end-user control; it allowed them to create something that the creators of the Internet technologies didn't envision and didn't have to approve; what will be built on Facebook?
I'm not against centralized services completely, and many of these issues could be mitigated if the service providers were motivated to do it, but I am concerned that it's a serious trade-off that's being made without discussion.
As long as the self driving car only slavishly follows the ridiculously low speed limits in most of the northeast it will be more hazard to other drivers than benefit, and it will also be slower.
Lots of slower drivers now who do less than the posted limit. My work commute is about 50 miles of rural interstate in Colorado. Posted speed limit is 75 mph. Lots of cars in the slow lane doing less than that and the worst thing is when one of them isn't quite willing to go as slow as the others and gets in the fast lane and S-L-O-W-L-Y passes the other.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
You've missed the point here. They do have a specific "freedom" in mind here:
The freedom to break the rules of the road.
The people talking about self-driving cars taking away their "freedom" are afraid they'll no longer be able to drive 75 mph in a 55 mph zone, or run that red light, or tailgate that person who's got the sheer audacity to drive a few miles an hour under the speed limit when they need to get home to watch the game so close they leave paint on their bumper...!
In other words, they're afraid that if everyone's got self-driving cars, they won't be allowed to be assholes anymore.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
We are a long way from jumping in the car, saying "work," and then reading or taking a nap on the way. We accept about 30 thousand deaths a year in the USA as normal. If the real bugs could be worked out, this number would go down.
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
I also want to be able to drag a slider on the console that lets me optimize between trip duration and fuel efficiency. You could enable drivers very easily to radically cut their fuel consumption.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Man you guys are living in ignorance city. I had the displeasure of working at a car lot for far too long. You guys just THINK Cars are safe, we had recalls all the time about things catching on fire or brakes failing and nobody knows about this except the owners who receive the letter in the mail to come get something important replaced. The manufacturer isn't going to tell you they knew about the issues and released a potentially dangerous product with potentially deadly flaws.
You actually think self driving Cars are going to be our savior? Then ignorance city fits you very well.
To the other guys who think Manual Transmissions are going away, no. Manual Transmissions are released with some of the cheaper model cars and sports cars as optional and are sold in limited quantity, have been for many years now since automatic engulfed us. But if you want it, you have to specifically ask for it. And by all means, you don't have to read a word I say, just wait for the bad things to happen when the time comes. Car crashes from computer error will become normal, just like stuck gas petals. Life will go on and nothing will change, just like it does now.
Isn't it something? How things so terrible, become the normal and acceptable. And nothing will ever change until people stop rationalizing things. Buckle up kiddies. That's actually or was, an inside joke once because of the number of early seatbelt failures.