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Focusing On Tech Alone, You Miss How Autonomous Driving Will Change Society
Hallie Siegel writes The way that consumers interact with and operate cars will transform most functions in commuting, travel, communications, car ownership, and many other as-yet unknown ways. Dieter Zetsche, chairman of Daimler and head of Mercedes-Benz Cars, said at this year's CES in Las Vegas: "Anyone who focuses solely on the technology has not yet grasped how autonomous driving will change our society." Robotics watcher Frank Tobe writes about how imagination is overtaking the ethics debate around autonomous cars."
Mostly because of idiot bosses that think they need to be able to walk up to you and poke you with a stick to make sure you are working.
A large number of jobs can be done at home over the network. Maybe someday we will start getting Executives and managers at businesses that have IQ's over 80 that will start allowing it or even require it.
Videoconferencing is trivial, always on high speed internet is getting to be common. There is zero reason for many people to go and sit in a cubicle for 8 hours a day to do work they can easily do at home.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Why do we *need* to travel at all? Autonomous transportation in many cases is simply very inefficient teleconferencing. At least this is true in business.
Because sometimes there's real value in being there. Sure, most of the information you get from a conference or meeting could be found online, or you could watch a seminar remotely, but you don't necessarily get the same experience and make the same contacts that you would from a face-to-face meeting. Often times, you end up learning things at a conference that you didn't even know you were looking for.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Mostly because of idiot bosses that think they need to be able to walk up to you and poke you with a stick to make sure you are working.
A large number of jobs can be done at home over the network. Maybe someday we will start getting Executives and managers at businesses that have IQ's over 80 that will start allowing it or even require it.
While true a large number of jobs can be done over the network with little to no problem, that isn't the concern. Many people do not possess the self discipline necessary to work in an environment with that many distractions. The temptation to not actually work is too great. So the easiest solution for companies is to force people to come into the office.
please name 1 OS that is 100% bug and problem free. And what if i don't want to engage the driver-less bot? I'm not that drunk. Wait your not suggesting mandatory DUI check before the car can be driven??lol ya that's not going to happen any time soon either....Got to love you guys though. We already have taxis, buses, trains, friends,family i see it as a huge fail and a huge wish and Lawyers will see huge paydays.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Agree too, but you've missed a couple factors that should be considered.
1. All the "You can have my steering wheel when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!" people. America's love affair with the automobile is in part about "freedom," and despite some people, esp. in big cities moving away from private ownership of automobiles, there are a LOT of older folks out there who will NEVER trust a machine's judgement over their own. A car's maneuvering system could see farther, wider, and in more detail than I can, but I can tell what things I'm seeing ARE better than a machine. The human visual cortex can interpret something like a couple quintillion polygons per second, blowing every GPU ever built out of the water. Even if most of those polygons are determined to be irrelevant and never passed along to the cerebral cortex... photons reflecting off the objects (or passing through or being emitted by them,) are still passed into the retina and still got sent across the optic ciasma, so they count...
2. Not every place everyone will want to go is paved or mapped, and mapping is not 100% accurate, so you still need periodic human intervention, or you have an arbitrarily limited car, that many people will be unlikely to accept.
3. What happens when every pedestrian, cyclist, etc., knows that pretty much every car on the road, being automated, will run itself into a tree rather than hit you? How far is the urge to ride down the street on a skateboard and whack cars with sticks or newspapers as a prank to set off car alarms from the urge to jump in front of a car knowing you can force it to stop?
4. Conversely, how long from that point will high-end cars, built for paranoids and assholes are programmed NOT to stop for pedestrians, etc., but instead to knock them out of the way with a directed blast of sound or wind? Or a 'pain beam'? Or a water-cannon?
5. What happens when someone roots his car (or someone hacks cars) and directs them to run over pedestrians, or malware enters the car's systems and causes them to slam into each-other at freeway speeds?
6. How long until advertising takes the form of a car that's cheaper for you to own, but when you tell it to take you to Chili's, instead takes you to Apple-Bee's because Apple-Bee's is a partner of whoever made your car, and Chili's ISN'T? Or you tell your car to take you to Wal-Mart and it drives you to Target instead? ETC. ETC. ETC.? If you thought multi-colored blinking popup ads were annoying, wait until a destination POPS UP IN FRONT OF YOUR CAR!
7. Or how about when you want to go to the rally outside _______'s headquarters and your car takes you to a "black-site" instead, where you're locked up without trial for a few days, then released when it's too late for you to do anything, like join the protest that's now over, or VOTE in the election...
Here's the thing. People wetting their pants over the thought of Sky Net sending Terminators to kill us but feel relief at the unlikelihood of that scenario playing out in the near-term because it'll be a while yet before a machine with anything resembling the human capacity for malfeasance develops, are ignoring the fact that you don't NEED an artificial intelligence to misuse the trust we place and increasingly continue to place in machines. Human beings are perfectly capable of abusing and misusing that information provided by relatively simple, dumb-machines.
You know how freaked everyone gets because 150 people put their lives in the hands of pilots and copilots to go from A to B? What happens when millions of people entrust their lives to MACHINES to do that job on highways and byways, implicitly putting themselves in the hands of the people who own the technology?
In any case, I'll keep my goddamned steering wheel, thank you very much. I'm old enough to remember when there were very few computers. I have handled punched cards, I have used 8", 5.25", and 3.5" floppy disks, and remember the excitement that the new medium of CD-ROM's brought to
Not a single word in the article about HOW an autonomous car will change our society in a tangible way. You can safely skip TFA, because it actually says nothing about what the title implies. Instead, the author seems to needlessly hand-wring about the "ethics" of these cars.
These cars won't really deal with ethics, per se. Rather, they'll have goals and rules, and these will essentially encapsulate the ethics in an indirect manner. I'm betting these cars will have reasonably simple priorities for safety, like (I just came up with this on the spot, so don't get hung up on the details):
1) Never knowingly drive the car off the road for any reason.
2) Keep the car in the correct lane unless a collision is unavoidable, otherwise allow emergency lane changes.
3) If necessary, allow movement across the entire roadway, but only if it is otherwise unoccupied and can't cause a collision.
4) If all else fails, slow down or stop and tell the human to make sense of the situation
The trolly-switch dilemma that people keep bringing up is so ridiculously contrived that I just don't see it having a bearing on the reality of day to day driving and safety of the vehicle for a couple of reasons.
First, autonomous cars are much less likely to be surprised by someone cutting in front of them or other obstacles. They don't have blind spots, and their reaction times are many thousands of times faster than a human. As such, the choice of "hit A or B" is much less likely to come up in the first place, because the car would have been following a safe distance behind and would have hit the brakes at the first sign of trouble. So in the vast majority of cases, the car starts braking before the human occupant even realizes there's a problem. No accident at all, or a survivable collision at 10 or 20 mph instead of 70.
Second, in the rare situation an accident is inevitable, the priorities will be straightforward: protect the occupants of the car first within the constraints of keeping the car on the road, and if possible, in it's own lane. That simply means avoiding collisions if possible. If that's not possible, the car will simply attempt to brake as much as possible before the collision to protect the occupants. There will likely be no "swerve to miss the human and hit the bus instead". The car will brake as hard as physically possible, but if it can't safely swerve, it really has no choice but to continue forward in the safest path for its occupants.
I think people are making more of this than is actually necessary by constructing ridiculously overly-complicated and completely hypothetical scenarios and saying "how would an autonomous car deal with this?" Humans are almost never put into a situation where they have to make such a complicated choice in a split second. I'm not sure why we expect our machines to properly make choices that *we* could never make it in real time either. They're going to be better than humans in almost all situations that really matter, such as concentration, navigation, and reaction time in emergencies.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Carpooling is a pain because you don't have the car with you during the day. If something unexpected happens and it isn't you driving that day, you are in trouble. With driverless cabs this problem disappears -- you will most likely have to accept a delay when you request an unscheduled cab and possibly a higher price, but you are not stuck.
You forgot the most annoying part about car pooling, you must be on schedule like a clockwork. At work I have to be there certain "core hours" of the day, while mornings and evenings I have a bit of flexibility as long as I get my total hours done. Can't find your keys in the morning? Need to leave an hour early? Work an hour late? Should have stopped to buy milk on the way home? Heck, even those who take the bus can mostly catch one leaving half an hour later. You get the door-to-door service, but it's the least flexible solution. If any of you are the least bit sloppy and unorganized, chances are big they'll either be annoyed with you or you'll be annoyed with them. It's not all of my friends I'd carpool with, to put it that way.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Particularly since there will be empty cars driving around to reach their next 'driver' instead of being parked. Either by being full on autonomous taxis, or shared between a number of individuals (like one car per family, once the father has reached work he sends the car back home so that the mother can take the kid to kindergarden, etc). Also, instead of paying 40$/hour to park the car download, tell it to drive around slowly until your meeting/dinner is over; that's not going to be a good thing for traffic.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
is in part about "freedom,"
No need for the scare quotes. Owning your own means of transportation that can go almost anywhere is an obvious boon to freedom.
Conversely, how long from that point will high-end cars, built for paranoids and assholes are programmed NOT to stop for pedestrians, etc., but instead to knock them out of the way with a directed blast of sound or wind? Or a 'pain beam'? Or a water-cannon?
This is assault, which is a felony for both the driver/owner of the vehicle and the business making the vehicle and it generates considerable potential for negligent homicide too. It's not going to happen in today's world.
How long until advertising takes the form of a car that's cheaper for you to own, but when you tell it to take you to Chili's, instead takes you to Apple-Bee's because Apple-Bee's is a partner of whoever made your car, and Chili's ISN'T? Or you tell your car to take you to Wal-Mart and it drives you to Target instead? ETC. ETC. ETC.? If you thought multi-colored blinking popup ads were annoying, wait until a destination POPS UP IN FRONT OF YOUR CAR!
If you bought it, you get the strings that come with it.
I doubt the parking bit. Many people will choose to use a driverless cab
Yes, many people will choose not to own a car. But even if that doesn't happen, parking problems will go way down. SDCs can park themselves, after the people are out. So they can park within inches of each other on either side, and they have cameras instead of side mirrors, so that saves another 6 inches on either side. They can also park head-to-tail, an inch apart, three or four cars deep. When a car is summoned, it requests the other cars to move out of the way. Finally, the lanes through the lot can be much narrower, since SDCs can navigate much more accurately. When you combine all of these factors, the capacity of existing parking lots can easily be doubled, and maybe tripled.
The problem with public transport in the burbs is that they only provide timely service during rush hour.
If your shift is different, or if you have to go in early, or leave unexpectedly late, you could be waiting an hour or more for the bus, at a bus stop without a shelter, after an up to 30 minute walk to get to that stop, lugging a briefcase or a laptop bag, in inclement weather.
The reason this happens is because it costs too much to pay the bus drivers to keep the system running all day.
And on top of all that, it has been shown that there is a non-zero chance that you could be sitting next to an ax-crazy murderer.
Public transport really, really sucks in the burbs - it's why we all have cars, even if we don't like to drive them.
The instant you feel you have to call your debate partner "fuckface", you have lost. Just letting you know. Rei's correlary.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
why is it when someone on this site makes a comment about technology not being a slam-dunk, sure thing, utopia producing panacea of goodness -- the first instinct is to call them 'old fashioned'?
My money would be on in the next 40 years cars will mostly be electric/hybrid, but the driver-less stuff will be relegated to delivery vehicles and DUI offenders. Not everyone is a tech evangelist, and while there's a huge selection bias on a tech website -- it's a bit premature to extrapolate that to the general public.
I wonder about uber driverless. Without a person, what prevents people from trashing the car?
The same thing that prevents people trashing buses, or train carriages. Most people simply don't.
More than the train/bus, there's probably a record of exactly who hired the car, and before/during/after CCTV pictures can be recorded.
The #1 job for men in the United States is.. driving a truck.
It pays well.
Those two things make it ripe for disruption as there is a clear economic incentive; autonomous trucks don't need to stop. It's not clear even if you'd ever have to turn them off, save for regular maintenance. That is a huge economic motivator.
Trucks also follow well defined routes that are easier for the autonomous systems to deal with right now.
The Teamsters will of course freak out; but change, it is a comin'.
..don't panic
For example, image that the car as been put in a position where it needs to decide whether it is likely going to kill two people or kill one. Which path should it choose?
I imagine a future in which people stop asking this incredibly stupid question and recognize that the car will (a) be less likely to be in that position to begin with since it won't break the law regarding getting into those situations and (b) will simply follow the law, and won't make any ethical decisions whatsoever. It will drive into whatever is in its lane, but it won't drive in such a way as to erroneously drive into something in its lane to begin with — see point (a).
I also imagine a future in which people don't mod up such inane comments, but I imagine that future is even further away. So far I've gotten modded up making this same response on the last two or three different autonomous driving conversations here on Slashdot. Is it Groundhog day, or what?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I don't think the parking will be a problem. The reason we have $40/hr parking in cities (well, $2.50/hr at most in mine, but whatever) is that people need their cars within walking distance. If you don't need that, parking becomes super cheap. I'm investing in shit land near nothing of interest a 10-15 minute drive from downtown. I'll slap in a parking lot and charge 1/3 the price of downtown for self-driving cars. Your car drops you off, it goes and parks in my lot, and 10-15 minutes before you want it you call it on your watch. In addition, all you need is to implement parking space sensors and link them to the car network, and cars can figure out where the nearest parking space is. Right that that will reduce the amount of traffic in most cities. Imagine knowing there are 0 parking spaces on a block, and being able to just hop to the next one over without slowly driving the whole length!
A second factor will kill your empty car theory. Right now my city has community cars and zip cars. Would I ever use them? No. I don't live anywhere near where their home lot is. But they are cheaper than owning a car, that's for sure. Especially if you have to pay for parking, want underground or off-street parking at your residence, etc. If I could summon one as needed? I would rethink owning a car. Self-driving cars mean less cars, as there's less reason to own one. Less cars mean less empty ones driving around.
I think the combination of less cars and the ability of an empty car to get the hell out of the way and park somewhere more remote would actually reduce the amount of traffic. Plus you could pack more cars into the streets at higher speeds with automation. TL;DR: I think you're dead wrong.
This will require a minimum requirement for braking and acceleration capabilities...because in that long chain of cars going bumper to bumper at 60 mph...its the slowest braking car that will determine the speed and bumper to bumper distance of a large number of cars behind it.
Think ISO standards for braking and acceleration capabilities.
Think, "this lane is accessible to all cars that implement the AMR (Acceleration Minimum Requirements) 2.0 standard"
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
If you bought it, you get the strings that come with it.
If it's anything like software music and books, you won't be able to "buy" it, you will rent it or pay a usage license.
Car companies are not dumb, they'll soon see that having a regular income from captive users is much better than selling good products that last decades and can be sold used to someone else.
And self driving cars will give them the opportunity to make this switch.
Try it! Library of Babel