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Kids With Wheels: Should the Unlicensed Be Allowed To 'Drive' Autonomous Cars?
Hallie Siegel (2973169) writes "From the Open Roboethics Research Initiative: Earlier this month, when we asked people about your general thoughts on autonomous cars, we found that one of the main advantages of autonomous cars is that those who are not licensed to drive will be able to get to places more conveniently. Some results from our reader poll: About half of the participants (52%) said that children under the legal driving age should not be able to ride driverless cars, 38% of the participants believe that children should be able to ride driverless cars alone and the other 10% also think that children should be able to drive autonomous cars with proven technology and specific training."
no. the idea of an autonomous vehicle with no possible driver to override it is just plain stupid.
http://pinopsida.com
It's not like the guy sitting in the seat is the actual "driver" of an autonomous car.
And it's not like anyone is actually required to sit in that seat.
Note that if an "autonomous car" that requires someone to sit in the driver's seat and pay attention, you might as well not bother making it autonomous. If I have to pay as much attention as if I were the real driver, I might as well drive it myself, since the act of driving at least helps me keep my attention on the traffic.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Should kids be allowed to ride trains/metros all by themselves? Same answer.
If the autonomous car is reliable there should be no need for a drivers' license, for the same reason I wouldn't be required to have one if driven by a chauffeur.
Who ordered that?
Is there a scenario in which the unlicensed will be required to operate the vehicle themselves?
If yes, the unlicensed can't drive.
If no, they can.
For a partially autonomous car requiring occasional driving an unlicensed user obviously can't use it.
For a fully autonomous car there should never be a necessity to drive since an autopilot failure will require a graceful break down mode regardless. Even if there's a manual drive mode an unlicensed user won't be allowed to use it and the car will essentially be broken down on the road.
The only time it comes up is with a partially autonomous car requiring occasional non-driving guidance. Then it's simply a question of whether you design an alternate certification process for the unlicensed and it really depends on the degree of user interaction required.
I stole this Sig
For every Frankenstein pre-emptive handwringing stops, you'll kill a million improvements which will make the world a better place.
Well, you COULD give every passenger a virtual control stick on a display panel on their back seat, and let democracy fly the plane.
It worked for Twitch Plays Pokémon.
The government would jail you for leaving your child at home alone. If your autonomous vehicle is as safe as being at home, then the government should also prevent children from operating such a vehicle. Perhaps the child could be allowed to ride alone only if a parent or guardian programmed the destination....
Or perhaps we need to go back to the 1970's and allow children as much freedom and autonomy as I had when I was eight or ten, when my mother would tell me "Go out and play, and be back before dark."
The reimagined Battlestar Galactica copped a lot of (somewhat) deserved flak for its filler episodes, but my favourite episode of the entire series is also one of the more blatant filler episodes ("Scar").
In particular, I loved the scene where it is revealed that Cylon raider-ships also reincarnate, just as their fleshy biological counterparts do. Sharon even spells it out for the characters.
Starbuck: Raiders reincarnate?
Sharon: Makes sense, doesn't it? It takes months for you to train a nugget into an effective Viper pilot. And then they get killed and then you lose your experience, their knowledge, their skill sets. It's gone forever. So, if you could bring them back and put them in a brand new body, wouldn't you do it? 'Cause death then becomes a learning experience.
This is why, I believe, the future will eventually belong to automated drivers. The initial ones are already very good, but there will be holes. There will be headlines like "automated car drives headlong into school, killing 10 of the world's cutest orphans". Human drivers have similar issues and events like that are almost everyday occurrences all around the world. The problem is, as Sharon pointed out, when those drivers die their experience is lost. With an automated system, the skill set improves. Someone discovers that, for example, hey, if a drunk passenger opens the door to a self-driving car at low speed and falls out the system doesn't realise they're gone and blindly drives away.
So the system improves. The car's internal systems track passengers, and if one exits the car, the vehicle will double back and pick them up. Or contact emergency services if the speed is high enough, and form a roadblock so that this person isn't hit again. Or simply lock the doors to begin with. Or any number of more sane actions. The point is: the accident becomes a learning experience. With a human driver, we spend months training people to become drivers. Then one day they make a stupid mistake -- one other drivers have learnt to avoid, but not this driver -- and become a red smear. Their skill set, their experience and training, is lost.
With automated systems, every mistake is an opportunity to grow. I personally believe that automated driving systems are already better than humans, but this massive evolutionary benefit (directly learning from the mistakes of others drivers as though they were that other) ensures that they will continue to improve, whereas human lifespans are finite and so ours will not.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
First the dirverless cars need to be ridden by people of the general public who can take over if it is necessary. When driverless cars prove to be trustworthy, then it'll make little difference who the "driver" is. All I know is that taxi drivers are going to go the way of the buggy whip makers.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
There are three broad topics that I feel need to be addressed before allowing minors to ride around unaccompanied in automated vehicles:
Liability: Who is responsible for the safety of an unaccompanied minor in the event of an accident or vehicle malfunction, especially if the vehicle is a long distance from home? More importantly, who will be willing to accept that kind of liability and at what cost?
Capacity: Is there enough room on our roads and in our parking lots to accommodate children riding around in their own personal vehicles? Will the efficiencies of automated vehicle traffic be enough to overcome an overall increase in vehicle traffic? How much will associated expansion projects cost? Can we afford to pay for them?
Energy: Can we afford the increase in energy consumption associated with increasing vehicle traffic at a time when the capacity of available energy reserves is questionable and energy policy is all over the place?
An autonomous car should not allow human input. It should come to a stop if the controls fail and remain stopped until help arrives. This is perfect for getting kids to school and picking them up from school as well. We might even be able to eliminate school buss drivers.
"Should the Unlicensed Be Allowed To 'Drive' Autonomous Cars?" Hell, no! Not any more than non-pilots be allowed to operate aircraft! It'll be decades, if ever, that so-called 'autonomous' cars are actually reliable and tested enough to be trusted to have no qualified driver at the controls, and even then if I had anything to say about it that will still never happen. People should always be properly trained, tested, licensed, and checked periodically for competency if they are to operate any sort of motor vehicle. It's bad enough out on the roads as it is, the last thing we need are people who have no idea how to drive, or more to the point, what to do in an emergency situation.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
1) If you need to take control it's probably going to be Right Effin Now!!!! If the car is driving itself what are the odds you're paying any attention to the road?
2) If the car has been driving you around for a couple years with no intervention from you, how good a driver do you think you'll be in an emergency?
In the next few decades there'll be plenty of elderly that need to get around: They're a huge part of active society, yet for simple physical reasons (eye-sight or limb coordination issues) many of them can no longer drive, and a lot of them are homeowners that live in the suburbs, far away from public transportation. I'd say that's a much bigger market, especially in the next 30 or 40 years.
I'm a parent of four precocious kids in a small college town in the mountains of NC.
We have taxpayer-funded public transportation here. 12 years old and up are allowed to ride the bus alone (to go to the library, etc). Would I let my 7-year old if he were allowed? No. Would I let him go with his 12-year-old brother who has a way to stay in touch with me? Probably.
I don't think the issue here is automotive safety. A fully-automated car should be safe enough for kids to ride in by themselves, or it shouldn't be on the road. I think the bigger concern is, when is it okay to let your kids out in public without supervision? 72% of the people who said flat out "no" did so because they have the impression that parents should be attached to their children at the hip, or because there was no option for, say, 15 and up. Maybe kids should be able to earn the freedom of being out without their parents with good grades above a certain age, etc. The survey sucked. There should have been an option for unlicensed adolescents but not younger children, etc. Parental consent and discretion should be part of the equation as well. We're the ones responsible for our kids, and with that responsibility should come some discretion on our part.
On a side note, I think autonomous cars will reduce the need for us to go out for non-social things. I mean, aside from losing the ability to pick the best produce, I certainly wouldn't mind telling my car to make a run to the grocery store for me. For me, shopping is just time I'd rather spend with my family.
I was thinking the same thing about the blind and the blind drunk, but the problem is at the start and end points. The car may not know how to get out of a parking garage (scan for exit signs?), and it probably won't know how to find a parking spot in congested metro areas (heuristic search?) so at some point you're going to have to take over.
I know autonomous cars will be "oh so safe". At the moment I'm just as worried about what these things will make people do to people.
[OPENING OVERATURE]
Your driver liability insurance policy has come up for review. We have been recently been acquired by AAAA, the quadruple-A company -- the "Autonomous AAA of the future" and what that means for you as a member is -- it has never been easier to upgrade to an a-car! Financing is available! [link] Due to increasing pressure in the political, legal and underwriters' arenas, we regret to inform you that the cost of your driver policy will be rising this quarter in order to begin collection of fees for the Federal National Driver Insurance Pool, and rising at a steady rate thereafter. It will continue to rise over time despite your [good to excellent] driving record. Now that the Autonomous Vehicle Safety Act is law, and blanket liability accident investigation procedures have been approved by Congress, the legal liability of autonomous vehicles is capped nationwide. While this grants the manufactures freedom from risk of direct criminal penalty and potentially unlimited civil liability, it places human drivers in a difficult position. Most a-car accidents will, of historical necessity rather than actual circumstances, be "no-fault". Since human drivers and any victims claiming injury from them are still obliged to use traditional law enforcement and legal means of redress -- and the cost of these continues to rise -- underwriters are pressuring insurance companies to drop human drivers altogether. We do not intend to do this, but we can no longer provide policies for extended periods. Your new maximum policy period is now [one month]. Thank you for insuring with AAAA.
[INTERMISSION]
Meanwhile...
Dear editor: DRIVERS cause accidents. A-CARS prevent them. That's what the billboard says -- and if Howard County Referendum passes this September manually operated cars will soon be a thing of the past here. What started as a discussion at a hearing after last year's tragic accident grew into a full heated debate, and to think it all started with the parents who provide their children with a-cars pinning the blame squarely on other peoples' children. But then, after co-opting the national campaign with its slick literature and canned answers for everything -- NOW the fault is with human drivers themselves. And then in an astounding feat of lunacy they claim that it's only fair to place the blame on everybody. Not just the drunk, the aged or infirm, the inexperienced, the distracted or the just plain stupid. But no one's stupid in their book, we're just behind the times is all. They are like the drum majorettes of some utopian humanist parade. I say, SAVE US from these rich hippies, their weird toys and their broken ideals. Now I know a lot of these people, even like some of 'em, but aside from this national 'sideline the humans' campaign they're pushed at us (and WHO is paying for those TV spots I wonder) let's not forget that this debate started around kids. Kids who need to learn to drive as surely as they need to learn to push a pen and spell their name. It's like swimming, who would discourage their own children from practice in swimming, to become expert swimmers, because water is dangerous?? Every kid will need to drive some day, or suffer harm or hardship by not knowing how. These a-car parents even forbid their kids from riding in cars being driven by folks they've grown up with, trusted for years. At the parent conferences we even sit on opposite sides of the table, we can barely be civilized even, because this crap has gotten so deep. Well I say they are making a big mistake and don't seem to get it. It's not just that everyone who cannot afford these a-toys will be walking or begging rises on a-buses or buses wi
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Ya know, they're either autonomous or they're not. If they're truly autonomous, I should be able to train my dog to get inside and hit the "home" button and it should be just as legal and appropriate as if it were an elevator. If they still need an adult behind the wheel, they're not what I would call autonomous.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Mythbusters (almost as accurate as wikipedia) tested the myth of an untrained pilot landing a plane with coaching from the ground. They concluded it was "plausable".
But their second go-round with coaching assistance from an air traffic officer was much smoother sailing. Though the coach wasn't inside the simulator with Jamie and Adam, he was able to point out the gauges and controls and how to use them to correctly maneuver the plane. After being talked through how to steer and land step-by-step, Jamie and Adam each brought their imaginary planes safely to the ground, leading the MythBusters to rule this one "plausible" for someone actually flying the friendly skies. And at the end of the show, they said had they used the automation available, it would have been much easier....
see: http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh...
I hate to break it to you, but I know for a fact their are aircraft in the air, right NOW that the pilot will do nothing from the moment the roll out, until they have landed.
" Try talking someone in from the ground"
it's trivial:
Push this sequence of buttons. After which the craft will go to the proper airport and land itself.
Of course you know as well as I do that has never happened, outside of the airport movie's.
"By the way, doing an automatic Cat 3 approach is actually more work than a normal manual approach and requires special training and certification. "
WHAT? Automated landing systems are REQUIRED for Cat IIIa, Cat IIIb, and when in operation Cat IIlc landing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on