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Google: Our Robot Cars Are Better Drivers Than You
An anonymous reader writes "At a robotics conference in Santa Clara, California, the head of Google's autonomous car project presented results of a study showing that the company's autonomous cars are already safer than human drivers — including trained professionals. 'We're spending less time in near-collision states,' he said. 'In addition to painting a rosy picture of his vehicles' autonomous capabilities, Urmson showed a new dashboard display that his group has developed to help people understand what an autonomous car is doing and when they might want to take over.' This follows another (non-Google) study earlier this week that found the adoption of autonomous cars could save thousands of lives and billions of dollars each year. Urmson also pointed out that determining liability for an accident is much easier using the data collected by the autonomous cars. At one point, a test car was read-ended, and the data showed it smoothly braking to a stop before being struck. 'We don't have to rely on eyewitnesses that can't be trusted as to what happened — we actually have the data. The guy around us wasn't paying enough attention. The data will set you free.'"
We'll soon reach a point where autonomous vehicles are orders of magnitude less likely than human-driven vehicles to have an accident. It won't matter, though; people would rather face a daily one-in-a-million chance of dying due to their own mistake than a daily one-in-a-billion chance of dying due to a machine failure.
Autonomous vehicles will still take over in the end. It's just that this particular rational motive to make it happen won't be contributing very much. So, it'll take longer than it should, and more people will die.
I commented about insurance and liability a couple days ago when another autonomous vehicle story was posted. This answered my question:
a new dashboard display that his group has developed to help people understand what an autonomous car is doing and when they might want to take over
Well there you have it. As long as a human has the ability to take over, and it's a decision they have to make, then the liability goes from Google to the person sitting in the driver's seat. Subtle but clear as day. Google wants to transfer liability off of their system onto a person in the vehicle. I can see it in court now "Our dashboard clearly indicated to the driver 5 seconds before the accident that it could no longer maintain control of the vehicle given the circumstances involved and that the driver was to disengage the system and take over control."
Better known as 318230.
Alternatively... you could just drive within the speed limit?
I can see this as having a raft of unanticipated consequences.
Suppose that driverless cars never broke the speed limit & other traffic laws, except in an emergency. Then, revenue from traffic tickets would disappear. Now, many police departments rely on those revenues. So, will they shrink, or find some other source of revenue? (I suspect the latter, and worry what that might be.) And, both the safety and the revenue desire to keep speed limits low will largely disappear, so many speed limits are likely to rise. Likewise, low speed limits are also used to keep people out of residential areas, and that could be accomplished by setting navigation preferences in the autodriver's GPS system, so those could rise too.
And, of course, if you want to have a mistress, she had better be within walking distance, or accessible by public transportation, lest Google start sending your wife ads for Private Investigators and Divorce Attorneys ...
you are so funny - you think drivers (or you for that matter) are some magical being that can predict actions?
So when you're driving today you're in a state of being aware of the situation and are engaged with the surroundings.
If you're letting the car drive, I highly doubt you're paying that much attention. Why wouldn't I let the car drive and I read, do email, surf the web or turn around and talk to the passengers in the rear seats.
In the event where you need to take an emergency action, it's much easy in the first case to go to heightened state than in the second one. Atleast in the first one you aren't completely surprised by the events you're facing before you.
Think of the case of a gravel truck that has a loose load. If I know there's a truck in front of me, I'm not 100% surprised if some gravel comes out, whereby if i'm reading/emailing and I'm forced to take over to avoid gravel, it's more of a surprise and I'm forced to figure quite a bit more out about the situation before I can act. One could also panic because of the amount of elevated emotion or adrenaline dump that would be taking place since you'd go from "reading iPad" to "dodging gravel".
There is no tech yet that can anticipate a child about to kick a ball out onto a road, or to see that a pedestrian is about to walk out in front of you without looking first.
Do you really think you 300ms senses are better at detecting 'random_object_in_car_path()' and doing a 'controlled_break( distance( random_object_in_car_path() ) / car_speed() );' than a laser detection system operating at sub-millisecond speeds?
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I think we'll see some high-speed lanes (like diamond lanes) for robo-drivers only. They can do 160km/h safely, bumper to bumper. When there are enough robo-cars, the main reason to impose a speed limit at all is noise or environmental concerns
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Where I come from, that's called "gross negligence" and "endangering lives". If you need to be taken to a hospital ASAP, call the police or an ambulance. They are trained to drive ignoring the traffic rules, and are equipped to warn the other drivers that someone ignoring the rules is coming. If you had failed to yield (because you're going with 80mph all the time) and killed someone, that'd have been certifiably less cool, huh?
Higher-than-thou attitudes like this are one of the reasons why I would absolutely welcome self-driving cars. And a lot more stricter police enforcement of existing traffic rules.
Last week I had an American friend over and we were talking about driverless cars, and she said she thought they might work in the USA, but having seen what UK roads are like, she was very skeptical they'd work there, so maybe Google should try it!
For example, many roads in tows date back to roman times, and are too narrow for two-lane traffic. You need to look far ahead and work out when exactly you need to duck into a gap behind a parked car to let oncoming traffic through, and when to go for it when you have right of way so as not to block traffic in either direction. And if a block does occur, will it mount the pavement (sidewalk) to free things up, or know when it's time to back up and give in?
The UK has very few towns laid out in a grid, and most roads are twisty, and narrow, other than motorways. Can a driverless car cope with such terrain? If Google really want to prove their technology is better than a human, let them bring their cars over to the UK. If they work here, I'll be impressed.
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
If you're going to use such specious reasoning, your driver could have driven you into the path of a falling meteorite that an autonomous car would have missed by being slower.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Where I come from, that's called "gross negligence" and "endangering lives".
I don't know where you are so I can't comment on your local laws. In the United States, it would likely be considered neither. Acts necessary to save human lives are neither criminally prosecutable nor subject to civil litigation.
The important word in that phrase, of course, being "necessary." Here's how a judge would evaluate your affirmative defense of, "Your honor, I had to drive like a madman: I had a man in obvious cardiac distress in the back of my car."
I am generally not a fan of urban driving. I own a Mustang GT and I go to the speedway whenever I can to race at high speeds in a controlled environment, but once I'm on public roads I obey the speed limit and I live in mortal fear of Suzy Homemaker in an SUV who's jawing on her cell phone instead of paying attention to her lane merge. I welcome the development of automated driving: for 99% of people it will be a massive step up in safety.
But let's not pretend that driving at 80mph in response to an immediate threat to a human life is something that we need to condemn. Those drivers amount to such a vanishingly small fraction of all accidents that I'm happy to give them a free pass. Go with God, may your tires have good tread, and I hope your passenger makes it.
What a terrible argument against autonomous cars. Are you claiming that if they had only driven 65 mph then you wouldn't be alive? How about 70 mph? Unless you were way way out in the middle of nowhere I find that hard to believe. Protip- instead of the hospital stop at a fire station (if you pass one) instead, as the ambulance can do most things the ER can.
Also, why do you think these cars won't have a manual mode?
The first car cannot avoid the deer, true, but this condition will not cause a pileup.
Think about the physics. The inelastic collision between the deer and the car will marginally slow the front car down, true, but only slightly. (since a car weighs 2000 kgs and a deer weighs less than 100, for an estimate). So the combined car-deer vehicle will be going only slightly slower.
Ok, so now the car that is about to hit the deer applies maximum braking force. It begins to decelerate at a rate limited by friction between ground and car. This friction is independent of the mass of the car, for reasons I can't fit into here.
The moment it hits the brakes, the car behind it will see the distance between the two begin to decrease. They are "bumper to bumper", or within 1 meter of each other. The car behind will apply maximum braking force the very moment a single cycle of it's control loop happens (probably 1/1000 or a second or so).
The car behind that will do the same, and so on.
As long as no car in the pack has significantly better brakes than the other cars, no one will hit anyone. Even if a particular car does have better brakes, the collision will only do slight damage, as the relative velocities will be low.
Contrast this to what can happen in a real highway, where a car in front can have time to decelerate to a stop in some cases, and the cars behind may be driven by a distracted driver who does not see the stopped vehicle in time. The collision happens at highway speeds between the trailing car and the stopped car. This, in some cases, will be fatal.
Try it sometime and you'll be passed left and right.
So?
It sounds like autonomous cars are safer because they're not so concerned with "winning."
The biggest incorrect assumption here is that going 10% faster will get you there 10% sooner. Not only is the maths wrong, but it ignores that the actual result is that it gets you to the back of the queue at the traffic lights 10% sooner, and through the lights at the exact same time. Even on a freeway generally all it does is gets you to the back of the queue of slow moving cars slightly sooner, whereupon you get out of the queue at basically the exact same time.
That's a nice way to deal with things.
The only problems is, it makes too much sense. The US are never going to adopt it.
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