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Why Self-Driving Cars Should Never Be Fully Autonomous (roboticstrends.com)
An anonymous reader writes: David Mindell, an MIT professor, says self-driving cars should never be fully autonomous. "There's an idea that progress in robotics leads to full autonomy. That may be a valuable idea to guide research but when automated and autonomous systems get into the real world, that's not the direction they head. We need to rethink the notion of progress, not as progress toward full autonomy, but as progress toward trusted, transparent, reliable, safe autonomy that is fully interactive: The car does what I want it to do, and only when I want it to do it." Mindell writes, "Google's utopian autonomy is a more brittle, less functional solution than a rich, human-centered automation."
safe autonomy that is fully interactive: The car does what I want it to do, and only when I want it to do it."
Sure, if I own the car it should do only what I want it to when I want it to, but why should I own a car at all? I use a car only a few times a month, driving maybe 5000 miles/year total. Why should I spend $30,000 on a depreciating asset and devote 200 sq ft of space towards housing it.
I want to call a car and have it come when I want it, take me where I want to go, then go away until I need it again.
If the you can make a car that would drive significantly better then a human (accidents per mile) why wouldn't you?
love is just extroverted narcissism
Why does this guy care? What about private roads? Private cars and private property rights? Who gives a shit?
I don't see any arguments to back his theory.
So, vehicles will still require something to tell them where they are to go, and maybe some assistance on picking a parking spot?
Okay. Once again I'm wondering if I'm missing something news worthy. Is he just trying to clarify intricacies that the standard consumer (i.e. individuals that don't know or care to know how their own goods work) would overlook or not think about?
I just want a car like those in Demolition Man. Truly a movie foretelling the future. Now to figure out those damn sea shells.
There are already systems that will warn you if you're drifting out of your lane, and systems that will warn you/apply brakes if you're in danger of collision. And of course systems that will plot a route for you and give you step by step directions to your destination have been around for quite awhile at this point.
If the goal isn't full autonomy then it doesn't really seem like we need to do much more research and development. How boring will it be to be "driving" a car that can do 99% of the driving by itself but insists on you paying attention (at least intermittently) to do the remaining 1%, instead of kicking back and enjoying your time doing something else?
(And note that anything less than full automation will provide little benefit to the biggest commercial interest, long distance trucking. Having to pay a person to ride along and babysit the automation doesn't save anything over just making that person drive in the first place.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
“The notion of ceding control of something as fundamental to life as driving to a big, opaque corporation - people are not comfortable with that,” -- David Mindell
I'm not sure I agree with that. Sounds similar to someone 150 years ago saying "The notion of ceding control of something as fundamental to life as growing and hunting the food to feed my family to a big, opaque corporation - people are not comfortable with that".
People get comfortable with a great number of things if you make their life significantly better even while asking them to give up a little control.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
In a related story, the new toaster from MindellCo was announced yesterday. It's just like a regular toaster, except when you push down the lever, it asks you if you're sure before it starts toasting, and then asks again every ten seconds.
From the article:
“[Full automation is] just proven to be a loser of an approach in a lot of other domains,” Mindell says. “I’m not arguing this from first principles. There are 40 years’ worth of examples.”
For how many of those 40 years have today's sensors, computing hardware, and AI been available?
It's possible that fully automated driving will turn out to be hard like commercial fusion power, or like commercial space travel. I think it's more likely, though, that it will turn out to be hard like speech recognition or cheap, lightweight flying drones -- each popularly regarded to be "a few years away" for decades, until suddenly it was here, courtesy of a few research advances and a great deal of exponential improvement in computer hardware.
I don't think we'll have self-driving cars right away. Instead, we'll have cars with "Enhanced Cruise Control." You get into a lane on a highway, hit Enhanced Cruise Control, and your car will stay in that lane (turning left or right as needed) keeping to the speed you set but slowing down if needed (e.g. if the car in front of you brakes). For long car trips, this would mean that a bulk of your trip would be automated. You'd still need a driver there to take control once you wanted to leave the highway and you might not be able to use this during bad weather (just like you wouldn't put cruise control on during a snowstorm), but it would be one step towards autonomous cars.
As the software gets more refined and the edge cases are dealt with better, the car will be able to handle more driving situations. For example, "automatically stop at red lights" or "keep going straight unless the driver indicates otherwise." Eventually, cars driving themselves will be the norm and human drivers will be the exception.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Incorrect in principal and practice. It's like the angry bear vs the two people. You don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other human being. The cars' don't need to be perfect - they just need to beat a human mind that is NOT an expert. If the car by itself can do better than a human without the AI, than it is sufficiently good to replace the current model that is human without the AI.
The idea that we need to achieve the maximum possible result of human+AI ignores the current situation's inherent problems of poor drivers, the elderly, drunk drivers, children, etc. etc. etc.
Parents of teenagers, children of the elderly, alcoholics and their loved ones ALL are VERY comfortable with the idea of having the car drive, not the person. They will provide the demand and market. Once their demand is met, then simple continuing research will eventually make EVERYBODY comfortable with letting the AI drive. If you are OK with the AI drive your teenager, your grandma, and your drunk cousin Joe - knowing they might be in the car next to you, then you will be OK with letting them drive you.
His comparison of other modes of transportation such as space, submarine and airplane, is also flawed.
The main reason we never automated those is that their need for accuracy was much much higher than we have for automobiles and up until recently, computers have not had the real ability to beat a trained, expert human. But in cars, they don't have to beat an expert, just a licensed and impaired human - drunk, young, elderly for example.
A better comparison is to look at welding. Originally people welded. Then robots came along and were better. Automated welding has taken over a large proportion of welding, we don't have humans over-riding them. Why? Because the robots are better at it than humans in most cases.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Depends on how one defines "full autonomy". It's not like Google or anyone else are trying to develop a car that drives you where the car wants to go when the cars wants to go there. The purpose will always be for the car to take me where I need to go, but with minimal input from my side and as safely as possible. What other input would I want to give besides "I want to go to x", "I changed my mind, stop", "go to y instead". "Play Mozart", and "serve me a drink" are obvious ones but not immediately related to autonomy in driving...
Is basically what I read in between the lines in this.
It's basically the same whining that the gun fanatics spout whenever gun controls is being talked about.
The day every cars are fully autonomous, is the day we get rid of car crashes for good.
Removing control from the dumbass behind the wheel IS the single best option. You might say "but it's OTHERS who are bad drivers! I'm a good driver!" you're just as bad as every other drivers on the road, you're just in denial/unaware of how bad you are.
If anything, sure, you could have the "option" to take over the controls, but it should be illegal to do so as you then become the biggest danger on the road. It should only be "legal" if and when, the car's AI no longer works properly, and that would only be to forcefully stop the car so you can get out, not actually taking over the wheel.
I think the technology being implemented in cars today is not really the most useful technology. Self driving cars are pretty cool from a 'sci-fi' perspective, but inherently dangerous. Personally I don't want any software driving my car! Non-moving computers can be buggy enough.
I think what should have been installed decades ago are safety systems such as proximity and speed limit sensors. These types of devices would alert the driver to potentially hazardous situations and allow them to avoid an accident.
Yet, with all of the "goodies" in new cars these days - wifi; satellite radio; gps; self-driving systems; DVD/Blue Ray players, etc. there really isn't much - if any - high tech safety features (other than ABS brakes, etc).
Most non-technical users (and some technical ones) rarely if ever update software to the latest stable version. I have seen GPS systems tell the driver to make a left hand turn on the middle of a bridge because the software was out of date!
I'll drive my own car, thanks.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Wait: TV sets which self-align vertical and horizontal hold.
Subway systems which run completely automatically (granted with all sorts of staff there to pull the Panic switch and/or make travellers feel more 'safe')
elevators which automatically go to requested floors.
Heck, IP packets which automatically make it to their intended destination.
I think this guy has no idea where and how software is running automated control systems.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
One, it is unclear from having read the article exactly what level of automation the author is railing against. There is a huge amount of experimentation on the part of the major players in this race and likely several levels of automation will arrive nearly simultaneously. The best approach will tend to win out in the market. Its not like it will be suddenly all totally automated cars and an “OMG we made the wrong choice” scenario.
Likely we will evolve into fully automated as more and more cars become automated. Eventually it will reach a tipping point where the government needs/wants all the human drivers off the roads for safety and efficiency -- when this happens, driving laws and automated enforcement of every minor offense will force humans to cede control to automation else be fined into the poor house. The biggest challenge to fully automated cars will be dealing with unpredictable humans. The mixed environment for the next 2-3 decades will be quite challenging for all involved.
Letter To Iran
Will be a problem as people drive less in their autonomous cars. A new driver of an autonomous car won't have the experience to notice a problem and correct it.
Why Self-Driving Cars Should Never Be Fully Autonomous
I think the author meant "selectively autonomous." "Never fully autonomous" implies there are things it shouldn't do by itself, rather than the author's wish that "the car does what I want it to do, and only when I want it to do it." What if you want the car to be fully autonomous?
What does he think "fully autonomous" cars will do? Force you to go to work when you actually want to skip and go to the beach?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It could be worse.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"Mindell says he is eager to see how technologists, especially robotics engineers, react to the book." Yeah, I bet he does.
The article says next to nothing about actual cars. The Apollo lunar missions and research submersibles are not routine. Driving to work is. They are at opposite ends of the automation spectrum and comparing them as equals does not produce a conversation that is useful or enlightening.
Sure, if I own the car it should do only what I want it to when I want it to, but why should I own a car at all? I use a car only a few times a month, driving maybe 5000 miles/year total.
Let me guess, you live somewhere on the East coast or Chicago? Or one of the few other places with public transportation? Out here in the rest of the country we tend to drive a LOT more. I routinely rack up 30-40,000 miles each year. Not because I love driving so much but because work is 20 miles each way and you cannot get anywhere else without driving there. Public transportation for all practical purposes doesn't exist where I live. The infrastructure and population density simply doesn't exist for car rentals to be economically viable and self-driving cars will not change that fact.
Why should I spend $30,000 on a depreciating asset and devote 200 sq ft of space towards housing it.
A reasonable question. In my case, that depreciating asset is the only means of transportation available to get me to a job that pays a lot more than $30K. Your mileage may vary. (pun intended) It also is the only way for me to get groceries and other local shopping done. It allows me to tote my three dogs without worrying about messing up someone else's property. It allows me to come and go as I please and when I please without waiting. One of my cars is actually a lot of fun to drive.
He uses the examples of planes and how humans are constantly correcting human errors. Okay, full automation would not have the human errors in the first place. Also the system would be aware that under no circumstance should a highly perilous course be taken. Actually the article more makes a point for why planes should be fully automated as most of the plane crashes have been human error. That being said, humans are still better at landing planes smoothly, but that will probably change over time.
As for cars, he says most car companies are trying to enhance driver control instead of replace it. Not so, just do a cursory search on automobile companies and find out how many already have fully computer controlled cars, or are working on it. A computer does not get tired, it can look in more directions and pay attention to them all at the same time, it does not take drugs, it does not get angry.
Now he does make one point in passing that should really be the main point, which is some people really want to drive themselves because they like driving. Some people don't trust computers. These social things are the only valid point I found in the article and it is just mentioned in passing.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
I propose a law, requiring each of the autonomous cars to be accompanied by a human driven car waving a red flag, carrying a lantern or having rotating lights switched on ...
You know.. to warn bystanders and other drivers of the driverless vehicle approach.
I'd be happy to have a car "automated enough" to drive by itself on the boring, shitty parts of driving where you're likely to fall asleep - dull, EASY stretches of highway. That's pretty much the 80% target the automated cars are at today. I wouldn't even mind if it drove half speed, since I could be reading/working/sleeping while sitting there.
If we wait until AI has mastered the complicated, cluttered, HARD bits of driving in cities, construction zones, neighborhoods, etc it'll never happen.
It's just a problem of having appropriate systems to awake/alert the driver before the AI disengages, and/or fallbacks like pullouts where cars can go when their driver ISN'T responding.
-Styopa
Lots of self defeating arguments in the article. This is just a guy trying to jump on a bandwagon and make a few bucks.
Look at the Mars Pathfinder, hell look at most space missions. The best way we can use technology outside of our atmosphere is to automate it completely, we send some commands, the device goes through the motions and runs what we program it to do. It comes back with data, next...
A good example are the rovers on mars, those things got tossed up into space and we hoped and prayed they made it where they needed to. Automated systems took over because we have no way to control them in realtime, the distance is to far, the delay is too great. So they automatically land themselves, deploy themselves, and start wandering around the planet. We send orders, the wheel around for a bit, send back more data.. repeat.
And this is using technology that is by requirement already decades old.
Most cars built in the world are banged together by robots running fully autonomously, the manual parts are largely being done out of the desire to employ humans, a machine could build a car from just about all standpoints without having to have a person involved.
Look at airplanes? yes, that's right we do have highly trained pilots, but there are so many examples of those highly trained pilots doing something wrong, or stupid, and destroying all the lives on-board. I haven't heard once about an auto-pilot system crashing a plan. "Airline pilots are constantly making small corrections, picking up mistakes, correcting the air traffic controllers."
Those mistakes and air traffic controllers are human systems, perhaps we need to automate more and get rid of more humans.
And he talks about Apollo. Seriously? The entirety of every computer on the planet from 1970 could fit into my smart phone, why not tell me about the ISS?
Ceding something as fundamental to life as driving? wow, but we are okay to give over things as fundamental as the air we breath to them... and all of our personal information and privacy concerns... but goodness, driving? that's much to important to everyday life...
Quack!
If the you can make a car that would drive significantly better then a human (accidents per mile) why wouldn't you?
Nobody is saying we shouldn't but that is a HUGE if you have there. It's very much a hypothetical right now. If you could build a rocket that could get to orbit for $1/pound launched why wouldn't you? If you could build a clean fusion reactor why wouldn't you? Same sort of questions. We aren't entirely sure it is possible though it seems worth trying to find out and people are working hard on the problem.
The car does what I want it to do, and only when I want it to do it.
Sounds a lot like .... regular driving.
I think one of the biggest problem with autonomous vehicles is directing them where you want to go. Let's say you are in a crowded parking lot and you want the car to park in the 3rd spot, 4 rows over. How do you instruct the vehicle efficiently to do that without taking control of the steering yourself? That's not an easy thing to articulate clearly. Worse, how do you tell it where to go when you don't clearly know the final destination yourself? Sometimes you don't have an address or the destination is very large like an airport.
I think autonomous vehicles might do well on major roads but I think the problem of giving specific instructions is going to be a LOT harder than many people think.
Because they are advertisements. He cites a few old examples of people with vested interests and influence who were opposed to being replaced by automated systems and ignores countless examples of people replaced by automated systems. To find out any more of what he thinks, claims or pulls out of his ass, you have to buy his book.
He uses the examples of planes and how humans are constantly correcting human errors. Okay, full automation would not have the human errors in the first place.
No, it would have it's own set of unique errors. Maybe less of them or maybe more of them. But there will be errors of some sort. Failed sensors, interference, logic errors, defective hardware, etc.
As for cars, he says most car companies are trying to enhance driver control instead of replace it.
That's because the full autonomy problem is too big. You have to break it up into bite sized pieces and solve those. Trying to eat the entire elephant in one bite simply isn't possible.
A computer does not get tired, it can look in more directions and pay attention to them all at the same time, it does not take drugs, it does not get angry.
It also is inflexible, completely literal and sometimes challenging to communicate with. I think the problem of instructing the car to take you to very specific locations will be quite challenging. How do you tell it where to park? How do you tell it to go to a place when you aren't certain of the exact destination yourself? Etc. It's much more challenging than just giving an address.
The professor is wrong. Full autonomy is possible and it will take place.
Planes mostly fly themselves but we still require qualified pilots in the cockpit. Software engineers are awesome but there are still bugs in code being patched every day. I want a licensed driver in the vehicle if it is on public roads.
Autonomous self-driving!
Think about thatâ¦
Cars. Why cars?
Cars provide self-sustaining R&D funding capital along the path to autonomous robotics. Cars are the highest and best embodiment for human-robotic technology development. Developing cars enables companies like GOOG, AAPL and Tesla-like competitors to affordably grease the runway for the autonomous economy future. Future progress promises autonomous action without the detrimental reliance upon an irrational unreliable primacy of man of modern economies.
MIT street-cred notwithstanding, the argument for non-autonomy is simple strawman which serves to appease the present status quo in the ascendancy of technology over human based economics.
With any of this, there needs to be an absolutely manual override. Software can get hacked or just freak out, and the passenger needs to always have the option to take control of the vehicle, especially on a large scale, like a major bug or hack. I don't see a world where law enforcement isn't going to want a backdoor that shuts down the vehicle or runs some program to pull it over or even drive it to a certain place. This hat is itchy...
X
First of all, autonomous cars, lets just call them "automobiles" (harhar) needn't drive perfect to be fully autonomous.
They only need to drive better than humans.
And - Newsflash! - they already do that!
And even just right now I'd trust a google car way more than I'd trust at least 20% of human dimwits at the wheel today.
Testing phase or not.
And that's in Germany, where driving training is a very big deal, takes long and is very expensive and elaborate.
And behaviour in traffic is compareatively civil.
Second of all, TFA says: "Yet as Mindell also observes, there are many challenges to the Google model: Its cars must identify all nearby objects correctly, need perfectly updated mapping systems, and must avoid all software glitches."
Well, no shit, dude.
"Avoid all software glitches" is called "testing" and/or "test driven development" and/or "design by contract" and/or "correct error handling". Like, for instance, warning the driver ... errrm, passenger, when there's a severe problem and they need to stop and he/she needs to get out... It's basically non-douchebag software guys doing the sort of thing any regular respectable engineer would do when designing a bridge. And, trust me, those folks at Google aren't your Type-A hobbyist/wannabe WordPress Plugin Scriptoid - they actually know what they're doing.
And now thats aside, yeah, an autonomous car needs to recognise all those many things. Well, guess what? That's exactly what an autonomous car today is by order of mangitudes *better* at than any human will ever be. For enlightenment I strongly recommend this talk by the head of Googles Autonous Car division, Chirs Urmson, "How a driverless car sees the road". Yes, it's a TED talk - you're gonna live.
Now could someone send this guy the memo?
Thanks.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Nuclear waste is so deadly and so long-lived that it really is just a question of when, not if, it kills.
I love how the nuclear industry says only 9 people have died, nobody died at Fukushima and only a few at Chernobyl blah blah. Worldwide explosion of cancer rates over the past 50 years? Meh, can't prove nuttin'. Basically mafia dons.
This is the most expensive, least clean, least safe most outdated power generation technology on the planet, except coal. It's a 20th century dinosaur that needs to die right now. There are better technologies.
A fully autonomous system can only react properly to those situations which the programmer has anticipated. When something unanticipated happens, chaos breaks loose.
Even with non-autonomous vehicles, chaotic situations can happen. But at least there's a better chance of a real person being able to respond properly to unanticipated situations and therefore minimize the damage.
How do autonomous vehicles fare when an oncoming drunk driver zones in on their headlights, veers into the lane and tracks the autonomous vehicle as it tries to avoid the collision?
How will the autonomous vehicle avoid the T-bone collision from the driver that fails to stop at the red light on the cross street? Does the autonomous vehicle have peripheral scanning that will detect a cross-traffic vehicle that doesn't appear to be stopping?
How about four fully autonomous vehicles that approach a 4-way stop from four directions at the same time? Who gets to go first? Will they communicate somehow?
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
"Google's utopian autonomy is a more brittle, less functional solution than a rich, human-centered automation."
And yet, Google's self-driving cars have *already* been shown to be more perfect than drivers on the road.
Throughout the umpteen thousand miles of on-road testing their cars have done, they have been involved in a few accidents. *None* of them the fault of the car. Some happened while the driver was in control. Some happened when a *human* driving the other car made an error and hit the autonomous car.
Self-driving cars don't need to be perfect. They just need to be better than humans, and that's really not a very high hurdle, given that humans accidentally kill tens of thousands of other humans while driving every year.
See this from XKCD
http://xkcd.com/1559/
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/driving.png
His main theme is, people do not want it and it did not work that way in the past. While it is usual to determine the future by past experience, it is not a totally save method to predict the future.
There ALWAYS needs to be a manual override in case something goes wrong
I would NEVER buy an autonomous car without an emergency manual mode
The pundits and futurists who write about autonomous cars need to spend some time talking to people who actually manage highly automated facilities
Something ALWAYS goes wrong
To say that full autonomy shouldn't be the goal is like saying copulation shouldn't be the goal of sexual contact. Instead, our goal should be to masturbate and then shake hands with our partners. Some people might want to do that but that isn't the goal.
What would a non-autonomous, self-driving car even look like? I would think the goal would be to tell the car where you want to go (it already knows where you are) and it goes there. If you want to take over the controls, that's a valid use-case but that isn't the development goal.
âoeThe notion of ceding control of something as fundamental to life as driving to a big, opaque corporation - people are not comfortable with that,â he says. Additionally, other companies and research groups looking at automating cars are âoevery clearly not going for the Google approach to fully driverless cars.â
And so many of you said I was nuts; not so nuts now, am I?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Dark and rain are not problems for Google cars or cars using Mobileye company technology (Tesla) The big problem is snow and ice. Humans are amazingly advanced at driving on snow covered roads. I foresee trouble in the parts of the world with snowfall if a generation of drivers emerges that is very dependent on self-driving technology. You need lessons and experience to become good at snow driving and I feel self driving cars are many years away from being safe in snow and ice.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It (Enhanced Cruise Control) already is a feature on some cars. I know I could have bought it on my Audi, but it wasn't something I wanted to pay for as I don't drive on the Hi-way/Freeway on my commute.
To go one step further, they are working on a different kind of tech, that truly is self-driving; well self-parking anyway:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt20UnkmkLI
Slashdot claims that it is more signal than noise but it is becoming more shill than signal. This is another article written with a clear agenda in mind. This is to promote cars that fit the model of the traditional car companies. They are beginning to freak out at what the driverless car will really look like and are beginning to sponsor anyone who will say that it will look like more of the same.
Here is the driverless car of the future (not the next generation but a few generations of development away). First the car is on the road with all automatic cars, there are no manually driven cars because they have been proven to be more of a burden to society than we were willing to put up with. Crashes are pretty much a thing of the past. The cars have shed nearly all their safety gear and no longer have to pass onerous safety tests. The only remaining safety tests are that the cars need to go a certain number of miles while not breaking down.
So the driverless car uses one of a handful of off the shelf autonomous systems all of which are battle tested and battle hardened. The cars are of a variety of shapes and sizes with many tiny single user cars popular among commuters who are one of the last bastions of private car ownership. Most people couldn't tell you one brand of car from another as they just call them on their phone and it shows up. They no more pay attention to brand or model than people do now with uber or taxi cars. Someone might notice if the taxi were a hummer but any boring midsized sedan and they can't even tell you the manufacture let alone model.
So looking at the manufacturers they are plenty in this world of SDCs. This is because the large companies have lost their competitive advantages starting at the moment that self driving cars began to rapidly evolve. The old car companies were very good at tooling up very cost efficient assembly lines and then making roughly the same car for nearly a decade. But the SDC evolved very quickly much like the cellphone which resulted in whole assembly lines being completely out of date in less than 6 months. Also the delay of the assembly line allowed complete upstarts to pound out whole new generations of cars in less time than it took the old companies to get a single, out of date, model to market.
Then in the end with only bulk fleet buyers making up the market the traditional skill of mass marketing was just another department that needed to be shuttered by the old car companies while the new companies didn't have the same liabilities. Also the new companies integrated every modern manufacturing technology possible without "Proper" testing and review by the senior engineers. This meant that most of the upstarts failed but left knowledge in their wakes that other startups built on resulting in fantastic new cheap ways to make very high quality low cost cars.
But the worst insult to the old car companies will be that as the kids start using self driving fleet vehicles their desire to own a car or even give a crap about a car will approach zero. There won't be 16 year olds with posters of a car that the car company can sell to them when they are 50. Movies like the fast and the furious will make no sense and thus won't sell a single car.
This whole allowing people to override the robot will very quickly be proven entirely stupid when the stats will show that cars in manual mode are some massive multiple more likely to crash than cars in fully automatic mode. Also they will be able to run simulations against the manual mode accidents to show that had the car been in control there would have been no accident.
So to allow people to continue to have any control over what is really a robotic car is the rough equivalent of those steering wheels we buy children for their car seats so they can go vroom vroom and stay out of our hair while we drive.
Really the human in charge is the weak link in a car. It is not as simple as common errors but moods, substances, and mental issues as well as family or financial problems can lead to a crash. The entire benefit of robotic autos is getting the humans out of the loop. It is nor quite practical today but it will occur soon enough.
"Some claim that the Pipe actually controls "Bob", but .. the Pipe no more controls "Bob" than we control the cars that carry us around."
The whole article is just a book promotion and is full of some poorly thought through arguments.
That said, the real reason we wont have autonomous cars soon is the same reason captcha bot checks still work so well in 2015 - our ability to get computers to successfully recognize patterns is still in its infancy. The same reason why a 5 year old with no training beats the best web crawling bots and galaxy classification and analysis for many systems is crowd sourced to people with 10 minutes of training.
I would argue that we nearly have the processing power necessary already and average humans currently beat the pants off state of the art autonomous systems with inferior sensors (stereo cameras and microphones, dual 3-axis accelerometer and gyro and some tactile sensors). What we lack are the creative algorithms that will allow better than human navigation.
However, an early objective was to make the missions fully autonomous, able (in theory) land on the moon and return without any contact with Earth. This was because of a concern the Soviet might try to actively jam communications in the event of the Cold War turning very very frosty.
Yuri Gagarin was a passenger on the first space flight in 1961 as his spacecraft was indeed fully automatic. It''s controls were locked out by a three-digit combination lock on the insistence of the doctors, who thought there was a chance spaceflight might make him go psychotic.
The head of the program thought this was BS, and was much more worried about an in-flight emergency that might make the controls necessary, and also kill communications with the ground. Consequently, Gagarin was quietly told what the combination was before the flight, when no doctors were around.
You just let the car drive along the lane and tell him: park here. Same decision process if you are driving yourself.
Not that simple. What does "park here" mean? Left or right side? Which lane? What if there are no defined parking spaces? Which parking lot? My airport has 3 parking decks with multiple levels each. How do you communicate all this nuance to the computer efficiently? The easiest way is simply to take over the driving physically because verbal communication in this case is actually quite difficult unless the computer can process information equally well as a human. Current state of the art is something like Siri which is no where near what would be needed to accurately navigate a car. Frankly I think people would get hugely pissed off trying to tell the car where to go rather than simply steering it themselves.
Finding a parking slot never was so easy, with autonomous cars tolerating and honouring the first come first principle and let the first car that 'booked' a parking slot indeed occupy it.
Plenty of parking does not involve neatly defined spaces. How do I tell it that I want to be backed up across the lawn to my front door? I don't think you are really appreciating the difficulty of the communication problem here. We have a hard time communicating this stuff to other humans. We're not going to be better at doing it with a computer.
And you can pick that slot ofc on your mobile or tablet.
Or I could take the MUCH easier approach of grabbing the steering wheel and navigating the car to my exact preferences myself. Telling it what to do on a smartphone is nothing more than an abstracted and clumsy form of driving. Might as well grab the wheel if you are going to do that.
Autonomous cars seem to be a product that is supply driven. Of the folks I know only a couple actually dislike driving, many hate bring a passenger, especially the two who easily get road sick. The whole thing strikes be as a "because we can" proposition.
I rather expect it to be a shiny feature that most folks will quickly tire of and shut off.
How about :
- Change lanes
- Stoplight/stopsign handling.
- Park (Parallel & parking lot style) while in the car.
- Park yourself (Lets occupants out in front of the parking spot, then car parks itself when everyone is clear.)
- Go park yourself. Drives to parking lot and parks itself.
- Come pick me up.
- Semi-auto mode (Driver gives Turn left, Turn right, Park here directions, car does the rest of driving including stopping at red lights etc.)
Useful for slightly drunk/underage/too old drivers.
But anywhere that's populated enough for a taxi service is populated enough for an autonomous taxi service.
A taxi service isn't more useful just because it doesn't have a driver. A taxi service IS available where I live and do you know how much I use it? Never! Because it is economically inefficient for me except in very rare circumstances. I drive over 30,000 miles a year and that's normal where I live. Eliminating a driver from a taxi will not change that. Owning a car is far cheaper given my transportation needs. Furthermore how do you propose I get a taxi to help me bring home a load of dirt for the garden? Or 2x4s for construction? You really going to take a taxi to the grocery store? How do you plan to store the car seats for the little ones after taking a trip to the mall in a taxi?
Seriously, you haven't really thought this through...
What is begin ignored is that some of the biggest real-world use cases are driver-less or have a driver-less component.
Drop me off at work, then return home for my family to use. Come pick me up at the end of the day.
Drive my elderly grandmother somewhere. Or me when I'm sick/tired/impared/got a good book.
Distribution, getting loaded at warehouses by their staff and dropping of at final locations, unloaded by their staff.
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
I do not want a robo-car, you may and that's ok. I like driving, like the freedom and utility of my own vehicle and unlike Mr. Only goes 3000 Miles a year, there are lots of places to go, see and explore, accessible because of my car. Oh ya, I have a smart phone but unlike him, it is not my entire life. I don't want to use public transit and share the ride with vomiting college types nor with your 17 ugly dogs and cats or the crazy lady with the conceal carry permit.
But listening to the rather poorly thought out reasons why robo-cars are the best for everyone, I really have been convinced that most of you should not be allowed to drive, you're just not smart enough. So get your robo-car or use tax assisted transport for rich people (public transport - allowing the wealthy to never pay the true cost of their transportation for 100 years now) but please don't drive...you're just not capable.
If you're a passenger, how would you tell the human driver that there's an open parking spot 4 rows over, 3 spots in? I imagine you'd be able to tell an automated car the same way.
The passenger is a human who can understand language at a human level and even then we get it wrong a lot. We currently have no computers capable of even close to that sort of level of capability and are in no danger of getting it soon.
It's probably even easier, as the automated car will likely have something like a touch screen for input, which can show you on a map and/or on a camera view exactly which spot it's taking you to. If it's the wrong one, you can correct the car verbally, or even just tap on the correct space on the touch screen.
If you are bothering to use a touch screen then you are controlling the vehicle and you may as well just grab the wheel yourself. The car can override you if you look like you will his something. Seriously, do you REALLY want to navigate a car via iPad? "Computer... wait you passed the spot. No I didn't mean that one I meant the one over there. Tap, tap, tap.... Stupid computer..." Seriously, I think you really haven't thought this through at all. You're thinking it'll be some Jetson's technology that will magically infer your intentions in fine grained detail and I think you have no idea how difficult that human interface problem really is.
Ah, I think the problem is that you're thinking of automated cars like airline flights, where you buy a ticket to a destination before you head out, and once you board you can't change anything.
Not at all. I'm pointing out that communicating anything much more complicated than an address or an intersection is going to be a REALLY hard problem to solve. I'm not saying it's impossible but it is going to be super hard to do well. Basically I don't think we are going to be able to strip out driving controls from most vehicles for a very long time.
The Japanese have had that handled for years. Not a problem.
Fuzzy logic. It's what's for dinner. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I don't think there's an validity for an argument that applies examples from history at a time when we are going through unprecedented technological changes. We are still at a relatively early stage of the digital error, and we are barely at the start of a new era in robotics.
His whole argument seems to extend from an age old egotism that nothing can replace the human mind.
Well I think he's totally wrong.
In the case of driving cars, the process can be replaced with a relatively simple autonoma i.e. don't run into anything.
The human mind is often so bored with this simple task that it finds other things to distract itself with, and that's how accidents occur most of the time i.e. whilst driving, people simply forget to drive the car.
If anything Googles program has proven that automated systems can make driving safer than human controlled systems
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
To me this guy seems to be making a statement which is purely opinion based, with no real technological or scientific methodology behind it and he is making this statement purely to gain publicity for himself
I have had a femur destroyed by a car driver. Of course this is not considered an act of violence -- simply that I (as a pedestrian or cyclist) got in the way of a car. I was in the "right" -- the driver received a charge of "careless driving". Nearly killed me and I still use a cane after three years.
I don't operate a motor vehicle; I don't even have a driving license.
My take on this? Cars *must* be completely automated. I do not trust drivers. My other "attitudes" to the car society? Inner-city speed limits set to STRICTLY 30 to 40 kilometers/hour.
No seatbelts or airbags allowed as "safety devices" -- these certainly do not help with cars killing pedestrians and allow the car operators to be mre reckless.
On car-only highways, I would certainly allow unlimited speeds -- I don't even care about "drinking and driving" on those highways.
In cities and shared paths? I really want automated cars.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
just as dumb.
Look- I understand the need for an emergency- hard wired- kill switch.
I.e. a hard switch you can flip to turn off the vehicle.
I can even understand "not autonomous for now/the next few years" but anything else is just silly.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That's the stupidest thing I've every heard. Have you every heard of commercial airline service? Do you know how they fly in cloudy weather? Instruments!
What you meant to say, if you're not an idiot, is that "Google cars should be able to work on a reduced set of input to allow for redundancy."
Sorry to be so harsh, but - well, if you propose foolish things...
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Here's the thing - there's a finite chance that your seatbelt will trap you in your car as you burn to death or drown in a lake. In fact, that was the exact argument made against mandatory seatbelt laws.
And yet today pretty much everyone wears their seatbelts and we don't hear about people burning alive or drowning because they were trapped by a seatbelt and unable to escape. Instead, the survivability of crashes is greatly increased and vehicular deaths are on the decline even as road miles and number of cars in continuing to climb.
By the time autonomous cars are allowed to operate on their own, the safety benefits will far outweigh the complications.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If you are safely hurtling along an Interstate at 70 mph, in a car whose systems required literally millions of hours of engineering, on a road surface that was also heavily engineered and painstakingly built by hundreds of workers using millions of dollars worth of large equipment... then congratulations, you've already ceded control of life-critical operations to numerous big, opaque corporations.
You're trusting your life to GM, Toyota, and the manufacturers of all the cars around you, that they won't spin out of control and kill you. You're trusting the road designers and government regulators that the surface won't suddenly buckle or turn. You're also trusting all your fellow bozos on the road not to be drunk, sleepy, texting or spilling coffee in their laps. Looking at the odds of what causes road deaths, I'm not that unhappy about extending further trust of my life to the relatively capable hands of auto company engineers.
You shall see a cow on the roof of a cotton house.
Sounds like David Mindell doesn't really understand the difference between 'Weak AI' and 'Strong AI'. If this was the basic technology of cars we were talking about here that would be like not understanding the difference between cars powered by engines and cars pulled by horses...
(Weak AI = Non-self-aware / non-sentient, Strong AI = Self-Aware / sentient.)
There are different problems between weak and strong AI. Strong is expected to be vastly superior in potential capabilities and driving ability and almost certainly much better at basic safety than weak. However Strong is still at least ten years away and certifying a Strong AI for cars is at least 15 years away.
Weak AI has the basic problem that it doesn't really understand the world or what people are. Weak AI also has the severe problem that as it becomes more sophisticated it reaches a point where the possibility of machines becoming spontaneously self-aware begins to rise exponentially. (At least 9 times out of 10 such a machine will immediately fail and crash - not good in a car.)
True Strong AI does not encounter this risk because it is always sentient right from the beginning. The big problem with Strong AI of course is that its no longer merely a machine, and as it requires a kind of homeostasis it can be argued that it is alive or even has a 'soul'. This creates problems with 'ownership', and how machines are treated. It also creates the problem that a strong AI can potentially choose to kill malevolently.
This is the real debate at the heart of future autonomous machines. Even with todays weak AI machines vision capabilities have improved hugely and have come a long way since say the Spirit or Opportunity Mars rovers - or since Apollo or the Ford model T. Computers today are about 10,000 times faster than those used 1n Apollo, about 10 billion times faster than the mechanical calculators used at the time of the first Ford.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
More important than self-driving cars is to reduce the number of cars on the road. Invest in public transit of all kinds (bus, tram, light rail, regional rail, long distance rail, and yes, air travel as well unless we get serious about high speed rail) and a tremendously better Internet infrastructure. I could do my work from home without having to drive the (comparably measly) 8 miles to work...if I was offered a decent VPN with split tunneling and acceptable performance...something AT&T is incapable to deliver. I'd go for that because I hate driving. Until hell freezes over and the above mentioned happens, how about drastically improving driver education? Make it mandatory across the nation that drivers have to attend at least 20 hours of driving training including driving at night and on the highway plus a much better theoretical education that currently is practically non-existent. In other words, if we keep uneducated morons from driving around in their pick up trucks or doing motorcycle stunts during rush hour we might not only be safer overall, but autonomous vehicles would perform much better. The big problem for AV is other drivers.
The current ideas of what computers and automation can or should do, are bases on hundreds of years of human experiance with horses and slaves. That is not good because computers are quite different! 8-)
Many people's idea of what a car should do, came down from stories told by family. Tales of taking the carriage to the local pub, gettintg drunk, and climing back into the carriage so that the horse could take you home. Since the horse had lived there for most of it's life and knew quite well how to get home! 8-)
Computers just don't work that way. But people keep looking for a horse with no upkeep...
They'll never (in my lifetime at least) be fully autonomous like I am, because then they would be responsible for accidents and by that time we'd have to have courts and prisons for robots. They'll be autonomous at the "do what my owner says at a supervisory level". I expect what many cars will do when they're fine-detail autonomous is "go out and earn me money". It'll be the next BuyToLet. Wealthy people will buy self-driving cars that less wealthy people will rent. The cars won't need parking space - it'll be cheaper to drive around or 'hide' during quiet times. They'll book their own servicing and valet visits.
The cars won't be our overlords; the wealthy people who own our transport and accommodation will be. 'Carlords' competing with each other for our transport coin can only be a good thing - I can't see how they'll be able to monopolise supply like they have with accommodation.