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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."
“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
More like it is so rare AND so many people die that the news organizations play it over and over and Over and OVER and OVER!!!
Now imagine if those news organizations gave that same coverage to every single car crash (with a fatality).
The news would be nothing but car crashes.
And people would start to be terrified of driving anywhere.
Also TFA is incredibly stupid. His examples are meaningless in this context. An autonomous car SHOULD be able to stop itself and turn control over to a human when it encounters something it cannot handle.
And, over time, those cars WILL become more popular because the people who use them will pay lower insurance rates. That is because any accident they are in SHOULD be the fault of another driver OR the programming.
Look at the airports around Thanksgiving. They will be packed with people. Because people see the value in flying. Even when they give up control to someone else and it could result in an "exotic" death. The same with autonomous cars.
This is purely a cost-benefit analysis, and what's true for you will not be true for others.
If you purchase the car new for $30,000 (smart people don't, but we're talking the typical car buyer here), use it for 5 years, and sell it for $15,000, it depreciates an average of $3000/yr.
The average car in the U.S. is driven 12,000 miles/yr. Gas for 12,000 miles/yr, at 25 MPG and $3/gal, works out to $1440/yr
Maintenance and insurance is around $2500/yr (mine and maybe yours is a lot less, but we're talking the typical, median driver here with an accident or two on his record).
Total cost of ownership is then $6940yr, or $0.578/mi, which is almost exactly the IRS reimbursement figure of $0.575/mi so we're on pretty solid footing here. If you use the car on 300 days out of the year, that's $23.13/day.
Can you do everything you usually do in a typical day of driving the car for $23.13? If you live in a city with good public transportation, the answer is probably yes (ignoring the cost of time you have to wait for said public transportation). If you have to rely on taxis, the answer is probably no. And if you live outside the city the answer is almost certainly no.
There's also the tragedy of the commons to worry about. I just got back from taking my dog for a walk at the beach, and there's wet sand all over the back seat. Do you really want to get the autonomous car right after I've used it to ferry my dog around? In a taxi, the driver's presence discourages you from abusing the shared asset. You won't get that with an autonomous car unless the car service puts cameras inside them that are always recording. Which would could as a huge negative for a lot of people in the buy vs rent a car argument.