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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."
Fucking google car's sensors can't see in the dark or in the rain....
Which Google sensor" can't see in the rain? You are saying that radar, and sonar and LIDAR aren't able to see in the dark? I've used all three with full success in darkness. Please stop talking out of your ass. If you think Google's driverless cars use a single sensor then why are you wasting peoples time here?
You're making the same mistake that TFA makes.
No one is saying that a car IN MOTION should cease autonomous operation.
What I said was that the car should STOP and then turn over control to a human when it encounters a problem it cannot handle.
Data, please? People make this claim all the time, but given that there are over a billion trips a day in the US and only around 120 fatalities, I'd say humans drivers pretty much have this thing down. The fact that people can make it around in their cars in myriad weather conditions, successfully navigate unfamiliar terrain, and quickly respond to sudden changes in circumstances (kid darting out in front of them) speaks volumes to how good human drivers are.
So I'm going to try. Putting aside fatalities, as the Google cars have not been involved in any, there were approx 5.5m traffic accidents in the US in 2010. Taking your number of 1b trips per day, we get a figure of ~66k miles per accident. According to Google they have been involved in 11 accidents over 1.7 million miles which is ~154k miles/accident. Now this is a combination of fully automatic and driver assisted miles, so the comparison isn't exact, but it's pretty safe to assume the computer is at least as good as your average driver. And maybe twice as good.
I watched a Google self-driving car cross an intersection this weekend (in Austin). It was moving very cautiously and then slowed down to a walking pace on the other side of the intersection, leaving a trail of human-driven cars stuck in the intersection while it decided to turn down a side street.
That may be evidence of it driving badly. Or it may be evidence of it driving well, because it was responding to a potential danger that the human drivers didn't see or didn't care about. Remember - if we're saying we want the computers to drive better than humans we have to accept that they will at times drive differently.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
It sounds cautious.
Now let's review my friends experience with human drivers tonight.
Tailgating. Holding down the horn.
The lanes to the left and right of her were open.
Finally. zooming around her on the left-- cutting in front of her within a few feet and braking hard. Which was stupid because so many assholes have done that trick now that when someone passes me in anger, I'm already slowing down. She knows to do the same thing.
A google car will NEVER do that.
Let's review my accidents with humans.
Rear ended from behind while sitting at a red light (30mph) (he was ticketed)
Rear ended from behind while sitting at a red light (5mph) (minor damage- more from my bike rack to her grille).
Sideswiped by an 18 wheeler that changed lanes into me without signaling (he was ticketed)
Front ended when the truck in front of me put it into reverse at a redlight and GUNNED backwards into me. (minor damage to my front bumper).
Rear ended from behind while sitting at a red light (30+mph - car totaled) (she was ticketed)
The person that rammed me in a parking lot when I wasn't even there and drove off without leaving info.
How about my friend who was nearly killed recently.
Rear ended from behind while sitting in the HOV lane with stopped traffic (50+ mph- evidence the human didn't even brake until he was 20' behind doing over 50mph).
NONE of these accidents would have happened had a google car been driving.
If nothing else- I'd like cars to start slowing down automatically when they detect a collision is about to occur. And prevent a driver from flooring it into another car ahead or behind them when both are stopped.
I, for one, an looking forward to our autonomous car overlords.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.