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German Auto Firms Face Roadblock In Testing Driverless Car Software
An anonymous reader writes As nations compete to build the first operational autonomous car, German auto-manufacturers fear that current domestic laws limit their efforts to test the appropriate software for self-driving vehicles on public roads. German carmakers are concerned that these roadblocks are allowing U.S. competitors, such as Google, to race ahead in their development of software designed to react effectively when placed in real-life traffic scenarios. Car software developers are particularly struggling to deal with the ethical challenges often raised on the road. For example when faced with the decision to crash into a pedestrian or another vehicle carrying a family, it would be a challenge for a self-driving car to follow the same moral reasoning a human would in the situation. 'Technologically we can do fully automated self-driving, but the ethical framework is missing,' said Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn.
Maybe the Germans should start focusing on pilotless planes.
Just weight the situation, if the car you're in is going 40 km/h and you know that you can slow to 20 km/h then hit the car in front of you because the pedestrian won't survive. Also you'll have access the license plate, so you can easily look up information on the family in the car and get the stats of everyone in the car. More then enough data will exist at the time at the accident to judge it properly, what is the issue? You'll have more information then any normal driver would. It really is just black and white.
So, disregarding how the self-driving car decided who it is best to kill in any given situation, for me the biggest problem with self-driving cars is legal liability.
If Google wants to sell autonomous cars, Google should be liable for anything the damned thing does.
And none of this cop out where if the computer doesn't know what to do it just hands back to the human -- because that's pretty much guaranteed to fail since the human won't be able to make the context switch in time (if at all).
As far as I'm concerned, the autonomous car has to be 100% hands off by the user at all times, and the company who makes the damned thing is 100% responsible for what it does.
Why the hell would someone have to pay for insurance for something they don't have control of what it does?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Humans are unable to make moral decisions in a few miliseconds. They would either freeze for a least one second and hit the next car or pedestrian depending on which comes first. If they have more time, they would try to avoid collision with the human and hit the car, because you cannot really see other people in there and you do not know how many persons are in there. Also people in the car are better protected. So the safest thing is hit the car. But beside that people know when approaching an truck trailer and they cannot stop, they should aim for the wheels and not the section in the middle. However, most people are unable to implement that so why should be cars be able to do these things?
As opposed to all the laws and regulations making driverless cars difficult to test in the US? Google has to pay someone to sit in the front seat so they can take over from the computer (that can make better decisions faster than a human).
What regulations concern them so much (I didn't see any listed in the article) and how do they differ from the US regulations (like the US in some lawless state..)
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
But the self-driving cars ARE capable of hitting the breaks quicker and more reliably (avoiding skidding) than a normal human would
Think about it if it were the other way around - what if humans were crappy about deciding to hit the pedestrian but computers had incredibly slow reflexes and took ten times as long to decide to hit the break. Given that example we would laugh and say no way would we let anyone with slow reflexes drive a car.
But we already do that - we let human reflexes drive a car - (Even if they have had one drink 30 minutes ago, slowing them down). The question is not and never has been will computers be perfect drivers. Instead the question is will they do
And that is something that we likely can do within the next couple of years, if we can't already do that.
So stop being obstructionists idiots bringing up the rare/never seen in the real world situations, and talk about what actually happens.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I think it's more likely we'll ban human drivers. Just this morning I counted over 16 silver/grey/blue-grey vehicles driving in pouring rain and light fog without headlights on. On average a computer driver today is probably better than a human, and they'll just get better as time moves on whereas human improvements are a bit slower to happen.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
For example when faced with the decision to crash into a pedestrian or another vehicle carrying a family, it would be a challenge for a self-driving car to follow the same moral reasoning a human would in the situation. 'Technologically we can do fully automated self-driving, but the ethical framework is missing,' said Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn.
We learn how to drive in driving school and not how to crash. In a situation like the above. Most people will hit the next thing in front of them, regardless of what or who it is.
The faster the car goes the less likely anyone is to avoid an obstacle.
If anything. A machine could improve things by being able to react in time.
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
The trucking industry would absolutely love to do away with hundreds of thousands of long-haul drivers. The mass-transit industry, which is often contracted by the municipality to private companies, would also love to do away with bus drivers and other high occupancy drivers where they could be deemed not necessary. On top of that, removing the payroll for drivers could allow bus companies to start employing private security on bus routes where assault or vandalism is a problem without increasing their payrolls to do so.
Even low occupancy transit like taxis will do away with drivers- it will remove the human element as a risk to the passenger and will mean that the cab companies make more money as they're not simply renting cabs to drivers for a flat rate, they're collecting all of the revenue for the cab's use, and they only have to operate as many cabs as they have service demands for at any given moment, so there's less unnecessary wear and tear on the cars as drivers aren't speculatively taking cabs out.
Sure, there will be plenty of human drivers out there, but there's going to be a whole lot of automation because it will simply be much more cost-effective in many circumstances.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
While they are trying to change the laws back home they might as well do their development and testing in the United States. We currently have fewer restrictions here.
I agree with gstoddart about autonomous cars being able to be 100% hands off by the user at all times for normal driving regimes. If the companies that make them do it right then they should not be afraid of being 100% responsible when the vehicle is in autonomous mode. Some computer modeling of autonomous vehicles has shown a major drop in the number of accidents; hopefully this can be realized in real life. However, owners will have to have insurance to cover the vehicle as property and when they are operating it.
That will become a union thing (in both cases). The trains and trucks will still be required to have a warm butt in the seat, the butt will just be totally ignoring the windshield though instead of just partially ignoring.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
ahem
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I somewhat agree... but the problem is not "is a driverless car better than a human" it's: who do we sue when something goes wrong.
In the proposed hypothetical, whoever gets hit is going to be suing someone. Who do they sue? The owner of the car (even if they weren't in the car the time?) the "passenger" or the company that makes the vehicle.
I tend to think that it will be the owner - and the owner will need to have insurance to cover whatever the autonomous car could do. There is no way a company like Google is going to put out a product like this where it's liable.
As for "rare/never seen in the real world situations" you have to remember that with a high enough saturation of these on the roads... those "rare" situations will happen all day long, every day (they already do with regular cars). The statistics makes this quite tricky...
Note that I am NOT an obstructionist and I am all for autonomous vehicles... but the legal aspects of self-driving cars is something that needs to get solved soon...
'Technologically we can do fully automated self-driving, but the ethical framework is missing
Ethically we can allow fully automated self-driving, but the Technological framework is kinda missing
The trucking industry would absolutely love to do away with hundreds of thousands of long-haul drivers.
At least in America, the drivers are the trucking industry. When you see an 18 wheeler on the freeway, the chances are very high that the truck is owned by the guy driving it.
Why this obsession with moral reasoning on the part of the car? If using self-driving cars are in 10x fewer accidents than human driven cars, why the requirement to act morally in the few accidents they do have. And it isn’t as if the morality is completely missing, it is implicit in not trying to to hit objects, be they human or otherwise. Sure try to detect which are objects are human and avoid them at great cost, but deciding which human to hit in highly unlikely situations seems unneeded and perhaps even unethical in a fashion. As it is now, who gets hit in these unlikely scenarios is random, akin to an Act of God. Once you start programming in morality you’re open to criticism on why you chose the priorities you did. Selfishly I would have my car hit the pedestrian instead of another car, if the latter were more likely to kill me. No need to ascertain the number of occupants in the other car. Instinctively this is what we humans do already -- try not to hit anything, but save ourselves as a first priority. In my few new misses (near hits) I’ve had, I never find myself counting the number of occupants in the other car as I make my driving decisions.
Letter To Iran
This is totally true. No human ever was able to make a moral determination and act on it in an accident situation. Beside the fact. The pedestrian and the family in the car is quite simple. The family is protected by their car the pedestrian is not. It would be a different thing between one or a group of pedestrians. Most humans would freeze and hit who ever comes first. End of story. The car could try to reduce victims.
Who owns the trailers and the merchandise? It's usually not the owner of the tractor.
Who pays the trucker? The owner of the merchandise or the trailer.
Don't forget, lots and lots of large retailers maintain their own over-the-road fleet. Sears/Kmart, Walmart, Target, Costco, Kroger, Safeway, Autozone, and that's only a drop in the bucket. They could all retrofit to an automated tractor, or at least where a pilot car or truck escorts a caravan of autonomous trucks following behind.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
As soon as any autonomous car advocates start talking about 'what actually happens' the conversation can start in earnest.
But for now, all we have is Google's marketing BS and some DARPA challenges that paint a much less rosy picture.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Self preservation should always triumph. Why? That is what people do anyway.
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
Trains are great for large volumes to dedicated yards where the terrain allows the train to pass. Unfortunately there are lots of towns and cities where railroad access is poor or nonexistent. There are also deliveries of perishable goods from regional distribution centers to retail locations, like grocery stores, where they cannot afford the time to load, move through the 'backbone' of the rail system, to then unload at the next railyard, to then be loaded on to a truck for final distribution.
I can use my own commute as an analog; I drive around ten miles to work, going a half-mile east to the freeway, going a mile and a half north on that freeway to another one, about five miles east, then about three miles north. It takes about fifteen minutes if I hit all of the lights red. If I were to take mass transit I would have to wait for a bus to go half a mile WEST, then go north about six miles by bus, then take another bus east that goes the six or so miles but makes a detour to a senior center and sits for fifteen minutes, then walk a quarter mile up to the business. it would take me well over an hour even if I hit all of the connections perfectly. It makes more sense to drive.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Someone still has to unload the package and bring it to the doorstep. Packages are not of uniform size. It's much more likely that long-haul, with depots at both ends where robots and humans can load the trucks efficiently and completely unload them at the destination, will allow for an autonomous navigation due to a lack of needing humans in between. A route with numerous stops will be much harder to automate without adding a whole bunch of equipment to the trucks.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The summary doesn't really explain why that dilemma is harder for German companies to solve than American companies.
For Americans, the answer is: always hit the pedestrian(s). What the hell was anyone doing outside of a car?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If your requirement for caring about emerging technology is that it has already achieved commercial success, you're going to have a very short list.
Why yes! Just the other day a baby stroller magically appeared 2 feet in front of me while I was doing 90mph on the local autobahn, forcing me to make a snap decision between creamed baby or ramming the President's car which was carrying a gaggle of pregnant neurosurgeons to a peace conference that just happened to be in the other 5 lanes of the freeway and the shoulders and the sidewalks and the ditches, all at the same time (except for the lane the baby stroller was in, of course).
Fortunately being the superior human being that I am, I was not constrained by mere binary thinking and through a little ingenuity and physics, managed to lean my manly, manly physique across the vehicle just in time to ski past the baby and land safely on the other side. Not only that, but as it gracefully settled back onto four wheels, the breeze from the air displaced by my HMMWV (only the real ones are worthy of my leisure time) blew out a forest fire that was threatening to ignite a fireworks factory right next to a nuclear waste storage shed.
Let's see one of those auto-no-muss cars do that!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
For example when faced with the decision to crash into a pedestrian or another vehicle carrying a family, it would be a challenge for a self-driving car to follow the same moral reasoning a human would in the situation
Or maybe it would follow better moral reasoning. Ours is not perfect, it's just whatever evolution came up with that gave us the best species survival rates. That doesn't mean it's really the most ethical solution.
For example, in a post-feminist society, let's assume for arguments sake that gender discrimination has been overcome, wouldn't we also do away with "women and children first" - which is a suitable survival approach in a species fighting for survival in the african prairie, but hardly for the dominant species that already is overpopulated.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Don't worry, they can all get new jobs servicing the self-driving vehicles that replaced them. That's how it works, or so Slashdot tells me.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Do you have a point? Besides the one on your head?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Most large companies outsource their transport to JB Hunt, Schneider, etc. Sure, the big letters say 'WalMart', but in smaller, DOT minimum sized font, it often has another name.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
"For example when faced with the decision to crash into a pedestrian or another vehicle carrying a family."
Ethical human traveling 60kph when pedestrian and family in car simultaneously appear as obstacles 30 meters ahead..."OMG, OMG, I'm gonna hit one or the other! The car is better protected, but there are more people in the car. What did Spock say about the needs of the one? OMG " BANG!
Robot driver in same situation... "Obstacles detected, apply maximum ABS braking". Car stops 8 meters short of collision.
For every "ethical" dilemma a human decides correctly, I would guess there are 1000 fatalities caused by humans just being lousy at driving.
Oh, and what is the right ethical decision to make when deciding whether to hit a single pedestrian or a family in a car?
Although slightly over the top, you do bring up a good point about privacy. This would be the most ubiquitous form of surveillance...ever. Look around you, do you see a car? It sees you too.
Most large companies outsource their transport to JB Hunt, Schneider, etc. Sure, the big letters say 'WalMart', but in smaller, DOT minimum sized font, it often has another name.
So what you're saying is that there are actually fewer transport companies than there appear to be? Because that's an argument in favor of self-driving trucks, once again.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think that only a fraction of the employed drivers could turn to providing service or operating pilot trucks if there's an interest in using automated convoys with a real driver or two to babysit. It's one thing to change a wheel when a tire blows (even that usually requires existing service companies to find the truck to assist) but dealing with other problems requires trained mechanics. Driving, by contrast, is much easier than that.
I expect that some human drivers will remain for odd jobs, like weird oversized loads that are poorly balanced, or routes with poor or unimproved roads, or the logging industry where the trucks are operating off-road, but there's going to be a whole lot of people looking for work.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
1) Cars are not technologically at a point where they have omnipresent awareness of the constituents of every vehicle around them and the locations of every pedestrian (add in crowded street-facing cafés, structural members for buildings, and everything else you could possibly think of). Neither, for that matter, are people.
2) The most brilliant philosophers still disagree over the ethics of choosing who dies when someone's gotta go. See also the Trolley Problem, most other ethical dilemmas, and generally the eternal struggle between various consequentialist and deontological systems of ethics.
3) This precise scenario is highly contrived and seems (1st approximation) to be vanishingly rare.
Given the above, maybe the question shouldn't be if a robot can make a perfect (or any) ethical decision. Maybe for now it should just be if the robot can do better than a human at not killing anyone at all in these sorts of situations. Maybe "I did my best to protect my owner from death and just happen to average out safer for everyone" will have to be ok for now.
Nothing posted to
Because that's an argument in favor of self-driving trucks, once again.
Nobody is arguing that about whether SDTs are coming, but about who will drive the change. The "trucking industry" is unlikely to be an agent of change. They are entrenched incumbents who will fight, lobby, and bribe to stop automation. Progress is more likely to be driven by customers such as WalMart, or entirely new transport companies. They will be lobbying and bribing in the opposite direction.
The whole ethics framework debate is a straw man (computer) argument. It's patently obvious people don't make those split second judgement calls. The real reason the Germans are on sound moral grounds is autonomous cars are nowhere near commercial prime time on sunny day clear traffic straight highways. Dirty sensors, unpolished code with bugs, proper reliable extraction of features, sensor failures, intelligent prediction of object locations, prediction and proper avoiding of road hazards, and many more things still need to be ironed out. Problems creep up where a driver may have only a second to take over after the AI bails - complete bullshit that a human can hyper concentrate over the controls and take over in one second properly three hours and twenty six minutes in.
How the fuck do you justify putting people's lives at risk with your crap box wanna be AI? I want self driving cars as much as anyone not employed in the commercial driving industry. But not when any jackass car with half capable systems risks everyone's life. Honestly it needs to be banned in the United States on public roads. Wanna play? Pony up for a closed course before risking people's lives. If you think moral decisions are the barrier to AI cars you haven't the foggiest idea what the actual challenges are.
Let's say they manage to program the car so that it can calculate which course of action will cause the least injuries/fatalities. Now you get into a situation where the only two options available are a.) evade some obstacle on the road, but thereby hit a group of five pedestrians, quite possibly severely injuring or killing them or b.) hit the obstacle, quite possibly killing the driver (you). You are alone in your car.
Now, would you drive such a car which sometimes can decide, with cold, pure Vulcan logic, to kill you?
The "trucking industry" is unlikely to be an agent of change. They are entrenched incumbents who will fight, lobby, and bribe to stop automation.
Again, why would they do that? The only members of the "trucking industry" who stand to lose if trucks go automated are truckers themselves, but they can't possibly out-lobby trucking companies.
Progress is more likely to be driven by customers such as WalMart, or entirely new transport companies.
No. Wal-Mart will just contract with whoever can moves the trucks most cheaply. But they're not going to do the leg-work themselves. They'll just contract whoever has the self-driving trucks, after they do the lobbying.
Wal-Mart doesn't give a shit how cheap trucking is, only that they get it at the lowest possible cost, because they don't care what their prices are, only that they are lower than the competition.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Those made up example with the family van and the walker are laughable. Firstly out of my experience you do not have time while being in an accident to think that far as to check & see the family van is full of children. You steer , brake, and do as much as you can to avoid the walker. And the van. Secondly you really think there is even a concurrence ? The walker will get the full hit of the kinetic energy in his body. The van will absorb part of it in its structure. What sort of SICK FUCK would hit the walker rather than the van because there are children in the van ? There is no photo finish : You steer to avoid all, and if you cannot, you try to hit the target which will get the less physical damage from your damn car *if you can think that fast*. Does not matter if the walker is an old 99 guys and the van full of the brim of puppies and babies. I expect any automated car to make the same damn calculation : between hitting a car and a walker, go for the car. Hit the one with the most protection.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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Again, why would they do that? The only members of the "trucking industry" who stand to lose if trucks go automated are truckers themselves, but they can't possibly out-lobby trucking companies.
Again, the drivers are the trucking companies.
JB Hunt, as an example, is who is contracted to move goods. They have close to 50,000 trailers. It appears that they own around 12,000 trucks. Even if they own zero trucks now and are entirely dependent on independent owner/operator contractors and those contractors' trucks, they could start purchasing their own self-driving trucks and no longer contract-out for drivers and their trucks.
Large companies like doing business with other large companies. If JB Hunt, Swift, Allied, or any of a slew of large trucking companies stop using human drivers then the big players like Walmart, Costco, Target, all of the department stores, will simply continue to use JB Hunt et al. because they're not going to contact thousands upon thousands of independent owner-operators. They care about selling merchandise. If they're not already running their own fleet directly then they'll continue to sub that out to whoever can.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The trucking industry would absolutely love to do away with hundreds of thousands of long-haul drivers.
At least in America, the drivers are the trucking industry. When you see an 18 wheeler on the freeway, the chances are very high that the truck is owned by the guy driving it.
Its the same in Australia.
Truckers are a very powerful union and a lot of them are owner/drivers. This is changing of course, but it's going to be a slow and laborious process. However it will be a very long time before we have fully autonomous trucks.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The pro-driverless car crowd always love to ignore the fact that the autonomous car wont be driverless for decades. A human will still be required to oversee and in case of a failure, take control of the vehicle.
The big problem with this is that people will be taking manual control because the autonomous car will abide by the rules that human drivers like to ignore like keeping a safe distance, not driving in the passing lane, keeping to the speed limit and slowing down in potentially hazardous areas (I.E. roads frequently entered by pedestrians).
Human nature wont change overnight because a pro-tech crowd wills it.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
not hitting anything. Unless you're going really fast, I would expect the longest part in stopping a car from hitting something is the human reaction time. Take that out of the equation and driver less cars shouldn't be hitting anything.
"For example when faced with the decision to crash into a pedestrian or another vehicle carrying a family, it would be a challenge for a self-driving car to follow the same moral reasoning a human would in the situation."
No, a self driving car shouldn't get into that situation in the first place. The right thing to do here is to anticipate events and slow down. Self driving cars have a huge advantage here, in that they don't get tired or lose attention over time.
Self driving vans will be deployed by UPS / Fed Ex / et al simply so that they can have the driver become a full time package sorter and deliverer. On some routes in a busy downtown area there may even be multiple people in the van getting dropped off and picked up by the self driving van which then does not need to park.
You could also see people moving from an empty truck to a newly arrived full one. The empty one heading back to the depot to fill up. The full one having driven itself out from the depot.
People will still be involved. They just won't be driving the vans around. Using them optimally will be a competitive advantage.
For example when faced with the decision to crash into a pedestrian or another vehicle carrying a family
Um there is no question for several reasons.
First if the situation is so immediate your only two options are hit a vehicle or hit a person its highly unlikely you have time to peer into the other vehicle and count its occupants.
Second most vehicles on the road today have lots of safety features; if they are being used, seat belts fastened airbags not disabled etc, most crashes are highly survivable; most pedestrian vehicle crashes far far less so for the pedestrian (excepting very low speed nudged someone in a parking lot cases).
Finally while your liability insurance should most likely be on the hook in any situation I can image you finding yourself faced with such a choice another driver is more likely to have supplemental coverage that will ensure they are taken if your insurer dicks out and tries to screw them.
I really can't image a situation, most things being held equal, ( I know you could contrive a situation where you will be nearly at a complete stop before you hit the pedestrian vs hitting the other vehicle at high speed ) where it would ever be appropriate to choose to hit the pedestrian.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I should actually correct myself slightly: Wal-Mart (and others) have some in house drivers and some outsourced.
BTW, in discussions of the transport industry, don't get distracted/lied to by the companies. Some drivers think they are owner operators, when in practice, they aren't. They will lease/buy a truck from (as an example, all of the bigs do this) Schneider. As part of the lease terms, they can only accept loads from Schneider. It should be obvious that the 'owner' is an employee who has assumed much of the risk that the company would usually take on.
ShanghaiBill has a decent reply, but he misses a point: if the automated truck is cheaper, the big companies will drive that change in a heartbeat. The trick is that someone has to be convinced that they will be cheaper. They are unlikely to automatically accept that an automated truck is safer, faster, etc. One area where they are likely to be impressed is the possibility of 24 hour operations, rather than the 10 hour per day (rough) limits of human operated trucks. In addition to (possibly) being cheaper, this will allow faster shipments for more mundane goods (there are already plenty of ways to have fast shipping, but it is cost prohibitive to do for everything) which would offer them a competitive advantage. I suspect this last point will be the thin edge of the wedge.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Again, the drivers are the trucking companies.
A romantic notion, but incorrect. Private fleets account for 80% of trucks and over 50% of OTR tonnage shipped.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That lease and exclusivity scenario completely destroys ShanghaiBill's argument about owner-operators if they are indeed at the mercy of the company to whom they're contracted.
I expect lower operating costs could come from simply not having to operate as many trucks. If man-operated trucks usually only operate 5/12 of the day, it's conceivable that autonomous trucks could operate much closer to the full day, less maintenance, refuelling, and load/unload or hookup/unhook, and those latter tasks might count toward the ten hours that a human operator is allowed to work. Depending on routes a trucking company might only have to operate half as many tractors to pull the same number of trailers around, so capital costs and insurance costs could go down rather dramatically. Even if there are scenarios where trucks are organized into convoys and a human-operated pilot car or lead truck is necessary, it still might be possible for 20 loads to be operated by a single driver, or if 24-hour service is wanted, three drivers working in shifts on the convoy, trading off the pilot position.
Labor costs are usually the biggest expense to an organization. They're always looking to reduce labor costs, so I fully expect this to come.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
But it can be legislated away if driverless cars are safer than their meat-driven alternatives.
There are some owner operators as described, but most are beholden.
The problem with swapping drivers has to do with hours of service requirements. A bit too much detail to get into right now, unfortunately.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
You are absolutely right about security. People just don't seem to have done the basic marketing on autonomous vehicles. - One of the biggest dangers for all autonomous vehicles - or autonomous machines in general is theft.
The only solutions are that machines are kept under constant human guard - and or - are set up to defend themselves against theft. One of the biggest problems is emergency stop buttons, or 'Steal Me' buttons. - The solution for Strong AI machines is that there is no absolute stop button but there is a priority override button. The machine will only stop if it recognizes an authorized user or owner.
Even there the maze gets complicated because the machine must also obey people like police or officials - but it must also recognise the difference between real and fake police. Maybe a solution is for people like police to carry special encoded radio badges, or to have the machines carry an on-board database of all authorised police & officials.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
I expect that since Australia is so much more rural than even the western half of the continental United States, there will be more need for humans to be involved with trucking simply to handle situations that crop up outside of the computer's ability to handle.
How closely can road-trains operate to each other? I could see a lead truck with a human in it even if it's still driving mostly autonomously, a bunch of fully autonomous trucks, and a tailgunner with a human too, so that if there's a problem far down the line in such a convoy someone would notice it even if the computers didn't. Plus, if those drivers are responsible for tires and other on-the-road maintenance, having more than one person might be handy.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
That sounds pretty good actually.
Apparently back in the day, telecom workers for the phone company didn't have their own service vehicles. One van or small bus would drop workers off at their sites so they could splice cables, which takes awhile, and would then collect them after they finished, to move on to the next area. After build-out has ended it has become more necessary for workers to have their own service vehicles as they don't need to drop five workers off along a ten mile stretch to each work for two hours.
For doing dense urban package delivery this does make sense. It might still make sense for one of the occupants to be licensed to drive the truck though, so that if they have to override the computer to park it they're legally allowed to.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Around here most emergency responder vehicles have transmitters that can tell the traffic lights to change as they approach. It would not be hard to design such a system for short-distance transmission to alert autonomous vehicles to make way.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It's still money though. You either pay your own staff or you pay someone else to pay their staff.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Oh, sorry, I forgot to add "successful". These are very interesting research challenges, but nowt here about succeeding on an actual real-world road.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project
The next culmination point was achieved in 1995, when Dickmanns re-engineered autonomous S-Class Mercedes-Benz took a 1000 mile trip from Munich in Bavaria to Copenhagen in Denmark and back, using saccadic computer vision and transputers to react in real time. The robot achieved speeds exceeding 175 km/h on the German Autobahn, with a mean time between human interventions of 9 km. In traffic it executed manoeuvres to pass other cars. Despite being a research system without emphasis on long distance reliability, it drove up to 158 km without any human intervention.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.