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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."
Bottom line: we probably cannot imagine all the implications and collateral effects driverless cars will cause beginning early in 2020 for top-end and early adopters and progressively more widespread year after year until mid 2030 when these cars will be our major form of transportation.
That's it? That's your substance? Hell, why not try? Here are my own guesses:
These are all, of course, many years off. But it is starting to look more and more inevitable.
My work here is dung.
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.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Why do we *need* to travel at all?
Because lots of things have to be done in person. I run a manufacturing plant. I can assure you that you cannot run a manufacturing plant from your bedroom at home. It's a little hard to run a restaurant while telecommuting. Good luck operating a retail store while telecommuting. Farming? Mining? Medicine? Freight delivery? Most jobs aren't really compatible with telecommuting if you actually give it a moment's thought.
Autonomous transportation in many cases is simply very inefficient teleconferencing. At least this is true in business.
I assure you that that is quite false in the majority of cases. Autonomous transportation is basically like a very small flexible train system that does not require tracks. It's like riding the bus - someone else is doing the driving but you still have to get there for a reason.
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
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