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The Humans Crashing Into Driverless Cars are Exposing a Key Flaw (bloomberg.com)
schwit1 sends in a story from Bloomberg pointing out that the rigid adherence to traffic laws and overcautious programming have caused self-driving cars to rack up a crash rate twice that of an average human driver. "This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up — all minor scrape-ups for now — the arguments among programmers at places like Google and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?" While the autonomous vehicles aren't at fault in these crashes, their relative unpredictability on the road are nonetheless leading to more accidents than expected.
used to be the domain of grandmas, now it's hipsters showing off their newest toy
I have always thought that for automated vehicles to be a reality, ALL traffic has to be automated.
It takes almost an A.I. to be able to adjust to the random nature of human driving.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
This should go both ways. People will need to adapt to the way automated vehicles drive (this would be helped by labeling them so they are easy to spot). Then automated vehicles should be given a set of exception to the rules and this would need to be legal, so the can override the regulations when the regulations are likely to create trouble.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
People expect Caddys to drive slow and do weird things, because Uncle Harry is driving. Same for Priuses, because it's either Aunt Marge or some granola-head hippy doing his "hyper-mileing" thing. Problem solved :-)
Either that or put a sticker on the back: "This car rigorously obeys all traffic laws"
It might be safer in some situations, but you won't be able to buy an autonomous car that's programmed to break the law. The DoT will just never allow it, and I can't blame them.
Perhaps the robots and their rigid adherence is just making more obvious the flaws in many traffic laws that most people have known about for a long time now.
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
I'm sure there will be AI defenders who will question the assertion about a crash rate "double" that of average humans. But it doesn't matter. The point is that human drivers are idiots and drive in all sorts of unpredictable ways. They also tend to hate other drivers who operate in demonstrably safer ways (e.g., allowing plenty of space in front of them, not accelerating wildly just to stop 100 feet ahead in stop-and-go traffic, not zooming past a slower lane in a merge situation, but instead attempting a "zipper merge" at the same speed as the slower lane, etc). Of course, a lot of the less safe human behaviors also tend to be the reason for traffic snarls in the first place, but you'll have a hard time convincing most drivers of that, since they want to drive as if they are on a racetrack and somehow think that weaving back and forth to get into that tiny gap you've left in front for safety is going to allow them to get home so much faster (even if it's only 2 seconds earlier).
I imagine the biggest problem with having AI cars obey traffic laws strictly is not the accidents -- rather that it's going to lead to human road rage, which often leads humans to be even more irrational and drive in even less safe ways. Thus, while AI cars are still a minority on the roads, I'm not sure it will lead to a net improvement in accident statistics -- just as a "slow driver" on a highway can block up traffic, cause other drivers to drive unsafely around them, and ultimately lead to the potential for more accidents, even if that slow driver thinks they are being "safe" by driving the speed limit or a little below.
There was a study a few years ago about traffic in cities. They found that if all the drivers kept to rules that most cities would halt into complete grid lock.
People need to break rules to clear junctions, to pass cars that are stuck, and even force priority to not starve lanes going into a junction.
I travel by bus to and from work in Amsterdam, it is quite a long trip which includes traffic jams in the inner city. The bus driver needs to often break the rules to be able to pass cars, and force priority on junction because they are often stuck. Cars are backing up, cars are trying to make room.
WCPGW? There's a part of me that thinks, "We point lasers at planes!"
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Get humans out of driving. Humans tend to break rules and that disqualifies them from being good drivers.
People are the problem.
Guns are not the problem.
People are the problem.
Cops are not the problem.
People are the problem.
The Government is not the problem.
People are the problem.
It's one of several key reasons why autonomous vehicles on the road will likely never happen. It almost has to be an all or nothing approach.
This is nothing more than a sophisticated from of "everybody else is doing it" argument that you get from small children. If the rules aren't working, the solution is to either enforce the rules better or to change the rules. Having everybody ignore the rules and not change them is the worst possible outcome. It creates a situation where things simply can't get better. Nobody can know the real effect of properly enforced rules so there's no data that can be used for improvement of the rules. What we need is better enforcement for human drivers. It's almost inexcusable that neither cars (nor trains) have automatic speed control systems that prevent exceeding the limit. Invariably somebody will point out the fantastical corner case where accelerating and swerving makes sense but those can be easily solved.
Not only is it not an infraction to drive in such a way as to save lives and prevent accidents, when you can save a life or prevent an accident, but it requires you to go against the suggested speed, or swerve into the left lane (even when the divider is solid) you are actually required to do so. That is the entire point of cars having a maximum speed of several times the maximum suggested speed is because you are supposed to speed in many situations to save lives.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It's difficult to say without having the telemetry from every collision.
If the one incident I've seen the data from is the typical case, then hell no. The driver rear-ended a Google car stopped at a stoplight without even slowing down.
On the other hand, if we're talking about merging, then that's possibly no. I don't drive big truck anymore, but let's face it: four wheel drivers just can't figure it out.
Merging is a bit of a difficult case because you can't merge if you haven't matched the speed of traffic. (Well, you can try....) So if the Google AI is trying to merge say onto 80 in downtown Chicago and is attempting to do it at 45 mph, which is the posted speed limit for pretty much all freeways in downtown Chicago, it will fail. I'd say this is the one case where the AI should flat out ignore the speed limit. Perhaps add some kind of heuristic to determine when it's a good idea to ignore posted speed limits.
On the other hand, if the on-ramps where they're testing are anything like the on-ramps in LA, well, the merging strategy I learned was get up to speed on the ramp, make a split second decision because that's all the merge lane you get, and pray to $deity. (Maybe they need to figure out how to get an AI to pray to $deity!)
Then the next step: just wait until bears start harassing these things. Every other car's going 80 in a 45, so the bears start regularly pulling over the Google car or production model autonomous car doing 75 in the 45. That will be an interesting legal battle since big city traffic never drives at the posted speed limit.
Live with it. "valar morghulis": all dumb will die. Darwin is right, his work is science. This is what the dumb welfare state democrats don't realize, if you fight against Darwin, you lose. And most likely you die because you are less fit than others. If cars crash into the dumb human drivers, then thats the fault of the humans, not the cars. All power to the machines.
From TFA: "They’re usually hit from behind in slow-speed crashes".
If this is in fact the dominant accident mode, I would suggest that this is not such a big deal and will, over the long term, be self-correcting as the insurance rates for idiot non-automated drivers shoot up because they can't get it through their thick skulls not to tailgate other vehicles.
Indeed. If more accidents are prevented or at least the seriousness of them reduced from other aspects of enforcing the speed limit, then it's worth the occasional fantastical corner case crash.
Most of the human-involved systems have some form of feedback loop, sometimes in a form of honking, middle fingers and speeding tickets, baked into the system. Such dynamic systems and are capable of adjusting to a wide range of situations. Traffic laws presently lack such feedback loop, are very rarely could be dynamically adjusted.
Once we apply control system concepts to this, it becomes immediately obvious that any system of rigid adherence to traffic laws is a lot less efficient than more flexible system based on human-to-human interactions and learning.
Aside from not breaking the speed limit when necessary, the other source of rear end accidents is from a cautious response to the unpredictability of people in front. From the article: "But autonomous models still surprise human drivers with their quick reflexes, coming to an abrupt halt, for example, when they sense a pedestrian near the edge of a sidewalk who might step into traffic.". In my own driving, I take a cautious response to the unpredictabilty of people ahead and have been rear ended for it also. Until all cars on the road are driverless, probably the best solution would be for driverless cars to be designed with the assumption that they will be rear ended a lot, They should all have foam rear bumpers at least two feet thick to minimize damage when the inevitable occurs.
"[T]he autonomous vehicles aren't at fault" and "their relative unpredictability [is] leading to more accidents" in the same sentence? When drivers are behaving unpredictably, whether it's legal or not, I generally believe any incidents involving them to be at least partly, if not entirely, their fault.
Please explain how you would build the infrastructure to communicate speed limits to cars. Please include who would pay to build it and maintain it, how cars would get updates, and how the system would work internationally.
I see it more as the cars failing to respond appropriately to surrounding conditions. The driving style of surrounding drivers is an essential condition that should be factored for.
When you meet a driver who will risk a collision rather than tollerate traffic infractions in others, what do you tell him? That he should stop driving by the rules? Hardly. No matter what you think about it, he's in the right and safe (from prosecution) as long as it's not him violating the rules. The same goes for driverless cars. Once you teach them to break the rules and one of them will get into an accident while being in violation, all driverless cars will be in trouble. Another positive result of this bevaior is that the more of such hardasses there will be on the roads, the safer the other drivers will be forced to drive in order not to cause a collision. In the end everybody will drive safer and less people will get hurt.
Having everybody ignore the rules and not change them is the worst possible outcome.
And yet, it's what we have.
Driving is a complex mix of the statutory, the habitual and the negotiated. Getting a car to obey the first is the easy part. Good luck with the other two. Especially the third. When a driver flashes his lights at you at a junction, what do you do?
The real world is messy and the corner cases kill you. If you're fortunate, you work in an industry where that's metaphor. If you're unlucky you work in an industry where that's a literal truth.
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
Once we apply control system concepts to this, it becomes immediately obvious that any system of rigid adherence to traffic laws is a lot less efficient than more flexible system based on human-to-human interactions and learning.
Congratulations. This is the most amazingly elaborate rationalization for road rage I have ever seen.
Can you just imagine being the first person on the road with a fancy new car that won't break the speed limit? Having people cruising by you on the freeway with a 15-20 mph closure rate? And then, when everyone is stuck at 55mph and can go no faster, it will be a glorious time. Rush hour traffic at all times of day, no ability to maneuver into another lane without slowing down. By all means, bring on our benevolent traffic dictators because it's about time we proved once and for all that yes, it is only speeding that causes accidents.
Personally I can't wait for an automatic car for my commute. However, when the last STi is built with a manual transmission and no nannies, I'm buying it and keeping it until the day I die.
Don't make self-driving cars shitty drivers just because everyone else is one.
Rules are guidelines at best. Even the most seemingly straightforward concepts like "don't kill people out of sheer greed or malice" are incredibly complex to turn into rules that can be enforced consistently.
To solve this piddly driving robot problem would take an impractical level of rule making and enforcement. Sure the "easy" solution is to upgrade millions of cars with tech that would apply these rules - good luck with that.
1. Write all the code in Spark or at least Ada or another language with a similar safety record (e.g. Haskell, perhaps Rust). It can be a formally sound and static subset of C++, if it must be, but not just any C or C++.
2. Use only deterministic code, no dynamic memory allocation, fluffy A.I. heuristics or machine learning. I don't care how hard it is. I want real engineering based on real physics with provable security margins, guaranteed response times.
3. Formally validate the code in a theorem prover, as it is done for planes.
4. Let the whole design be reviewed and checked by external expert commissions, according to previously defined safety standards.
After that, we can discuss whether they are allowed to break the rules.
Why all that? Well, nobody should give a damn about safety statistics compiled by the companies who produce the self-driving cars, and it doesn't even matter whether they are safer than human drivers or not. What matters is that these companies have tons of lawyers, whereas the end-consumer has not. So good luck if you have an accident and it could be their fault. There needs to be some tight regulation like in the aviation business.
Once we apply control system concepts to this, it becomes immediately obvious that any system of rigid adherence to traffic laws is a lot less efficient than more flexible system based on human-to-human interactions and learning.
[Citation needed]
Your primary argument is that the benefit comes from "dynamic" systems that "are capable of adjusting to a wide range of situations." Except with more predictable adherence to traffic laws, you'd have a smaller range of situations occurring.
Also, in terms of "efficiency," it's pretty well demonstrated in traffic theory that traffic has "transition thresholds" kind of like fluid dynamic transitions between laminar and turbulent flow. When you have conditions like people trying to drive too fast and tailgating in high-density traffic, there's a greater chance of someone needing to brake suddenly, which often causes a chain reaction, and can generate a "traffic wave" that snarls traffic for 15 minutes in stop-and-go waves for miles behind. Similarly, in a merge scenario, often an efficient "zipper merge" might be able to happen at speed X if everyone were driving at a constant rate and merging at the appropriate moment. But if everyone instead is trying to drive at speed X+10 and tailgating to "not let the jerks in," it actually creates a bottleneck which results in the effective flow-rate through the merge to be at speed X-10, i.e., lower (and less efficient) than if everyone drove slowly and allowed adequate merging room.
In sum, there are a lot of common traffic situations where irrational human behavior is the primary cause of traffic snarls in high-density traffic. There are traffic flow studies that show even a small quantity (like 10-20%) of drivers driving more rationally (leaving gaps in front, avoiding crazing acceleration and braking, etc.) can actually "seed" a traffic snarl and cause it to break up and increase throughput. That, for example, is why have a large number of trucks on a highway during a traffic jam can often cause it to clear more quickly -- the trucks tend to avoid a lot of stop-and-go, and they need to allow adequate braking distance, so they effectively can help to clear a jam.
Anyhow, I don't buy the idea that the dynamic irrationality of human systems are actually more efficient, since the vast majority of traffic problems where you end up sitting in stop-and-go traffic for 30 minutes are caused by human error and accidents, usually introduced by violation of various traffic laws.
If the posted limit is less than the 85th percentile speed as measured by a survey in the last 5 years, then in California, it is legally a speed trap, unless several exceptions apply:
a) School zones are always 25 mi/hr
b) on freeways, the maximum speed is 55, 65, or 70, depending on the circumstances. Partly this is a holdover from the federal energy conservation laws of the 70s.
Since (b) is widely viewed as an artifact of older days, in practice, the posted limit is not enforced, rather it's a "what is safe". If you happen to get stopped going, say, 70, on a 55 stretch of road, the ticket will be for violating 22348(a).. the posted limit, rather than the safe speed. This is for convenience - no arguing in court about whether it was safe.
how do you enforce something 100% without going for a big brother solution? there are only so many cops.
I love how strictly obeying traffic laws is called "unpredictability".
If an autonomous car can completely avoid accidents by taking corrective action that keeps it's behaviour within the law, then it should do.
But there will always be occasions that occur out of the ordinary. Take the obvious example of someone stepping out into the road - if you do nothing, then you are certainly going to crash into the person (and likely kill them).
Slamming on the brakes might cause a car behind to run into you, and it may not even be possible to stop in time.
Swerving may be the only option to avoid the person, but that takes you into oncoming traffic. You might hit a car head on. Or catch part of one, and spin and still hit the person in the road.
There are lots of permutations and possible outcomes, and staying entirely within the law may not always give the best outcome.
Predominantly, autonomous cars should keep to being within the law as much as possible, and if they do have to take some form of evasive action that stretches the law, they should be looking to get back to being within the law as quickly as the safely can.
But it doesn't make sense to completely shut off the option of going outside the normal limits, if the sensors are good enough and it is deemed to be the only way to avoid a collision.
It is also the same problem with automated law enforcement such as speed traps and red-light cameras.
Normally, cops are supposed to use some judgment before handing tickets, machines don't. A typical example is that you are supposed to make way for emergency vehicles, which sometimes involves breaking the usual rules. For example, if you cross a red light just enough to make way for an ambulance, a human cop won't ticket you as you did what you had to. A camera doesn't care. And it starts becoming a problem as less and less people make way for emergency vehicles if it may involve getting auto-ticketed.
It isn't just law abiding mechs that get smashed into at increased rates.
I have been rear ended twice when I was yielding to oncoming traffic as I was supposed to. Apparently I was expected to crash into traffic that had a right of way in those cases. I was not at fault as those were both stupid, obvious cases where anyone paying attention to TRAFFIC would have realized I was not going to risk a certain accident and potential death to save a handfull of seconds. This does not include the case where someone changed lanes without looking and side swiped me or the case where someone was stopped on the highway (as they were supposed to to yield to oncoming traffic which was me) then at the last second turned left across the lane causing a near fatal collision. The last one was great - they were yelling at the kid in the back seat, stopped in the middle of the highway - I know because this is what they were hysterically talking it about after the crash!
If there were more sane drivers out there - electro-mechanical or organic - these idiot people would be obeying the rules of the road or even better letting the mechs drive and I suspect the perceived problem would go away.
their relative unpredictability on the road are nonetheless leading to more accidents than expected.
Isn't the opposite way?, aren't self-driving stricly predictable?, isn't fault of those who don't follow the rules?. They should keep being like that, and people who doesn't follow the laws should be banned from driving, simple as that.
Believe it or not, "everybody does it", or, called by the official term, "customary law" is part of the anglo-saxon law system.
Drafting new rules is non trivial I guess, as they have to allow cars to do what the humans do, as well as still being understandable by humans, so that the humans stay legal, and the humans know what to expect from cars.
I don't think we should blindly treat the speed limits as god-given as long as there is an incentive to set them low on sections of safe, straight, and boring roads to tempt drivers and extract money from them on demand.
The problem is far more complicated that you realize.
It has already been shown that if everyone followed existing laws perfectly, traffic would grind to a complete stop. So obviously you need to change the rules, right? But, trying to change the rules to accommodate every possible situation will simply result in a mess that's even worse than what it is right now, because those "fantastical corner cases" are much more common than you think.
"their relative unpredictability on the road are nonetheless leading to more accidents than expected."
So, self-driving cars don't use turn signals either?
It has already been shown that if everyone followed existing laws perfectly, traffic would grind to a complete stop.
Oh, come on. Who showed this? Where?
"...their relative unpredictability on the road are nonetheless leading to more accidents than expected."
Quite the opposite - they are predictable in that they follow all traffic laws - that's very predicatable. It's the unpredictability of human nature that causes the accidents. Should these robots be taught to break the law in order to conform with the behavior of their more chaotic human counterparts???
The article brought up another ethical question - the just one posed in Issac Asimov's book, "iRobot" - where the robots calculated the probability of survival and made the cold, calculating decision on who to save. In the case of a self-driving car and self-driving bus full of children, should the both vehicles decide to save the children or, simply, their occupants. Clearly, the latter would result in serious consequences if they both take the latter approach.
I am not sure why you brought road rage into this discussion, unless you consider routine traffic violations an example of road rage.
To make my argument easier for you to understand: Strictly adhering to a speed limit doesn't make you a safe driver. Driving according to road conditions, your alertness level, and your car's ability does. For example, by backing up traffic by strictly following 60 mph speed limit on a sunny clear day on a straight road you probably killed 0.001 humans. If you do this regularly, then over years you can rake up higher death toll than a drunk driver.
Typical incident, I want to get out the bus at the same time someone else also tries to get out. "Oh! I am sorry, please go ahead!", "no, its my fault, *I* am sorry, you go ahead", "after you.." , "OK thanks...". We walk to the park-and-ride lot, drive out and at some loop inside the parking lot some car cuts ahead of me, horns blare and the driver is flipping the bird at me. Wait, it is that same polite gentleman who insisted on waiting his turn to swipe the bus pass at the RFID device.
What happened? The only rational explanation is that the polite guy has been transported to some other universe. And some heartless cruel changeling scrap dealer from Jakku who exploits scavengers has come in and transmorgified into that polite gentleman's form.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yep, the headline is right. Humans crashing into cars that are obeying all the rules to the letter does expose a flaw: in the rules. They are impractical to the point of being almost impossible to follow safely. I guarantee if you got stuck behind someone on the road following all the rules religiously you'd be pissed off until you could get around them. That's not a problem of them, it's a problem of the rules no longer making sense (if they ever did).
This is nothing more than a sophisticated from of "everybody else is doing it" argument that you get from small children. If the rules aren't working, the solution is to either enforce the rules better or to change the rules. Having everybody ignore the rules and not change them is the worst possible outcome. It creates a situation where things simply can't get better. Nobody can know the real effect of properly enforced rules so there's no data that can be used for improvement of the rules. What we need is better enforcement for human drivers. It's almost inexcusable that neither cars (nor trains) have automatic speed control systems that prevent exceeding the limit. Invariably somebody will point out the fantastical corner case where accelerating and swerving makes sense but those can be easily solved.
You sir, are part of the problem and not the solution. For one thing, it is perfectly reasonable and acceptable to exceed the speed limit in order to safely merge into traffic. If you end up directly next to a car and need to merge then you have two options. One is to speed up and one is to slow down. If you're already going the speed limit then the safest option is not to slow down. You can see in front of you and next to you much more clearly than behind you. So why would you stick to a strict interpretation of the speed limit in order to merge? It's more dangerous than speeding up a few miles per hour, pulling into the gap you can see, and then driving the speed limit. Your inflexibility on the road is unsafe for yourself and everyone around you.
In fact, your strict enforcement of the rules is very difficult in the state of California. The state has a 'basic speed law' for any road with a speed limit under 55MPH. If you are not exceeding 55MPH then you may drive any speed that is safe for the road conditions (certain exceptions apply). So an autonomous car that strictly follows the speed limit could very much be a problem in situations where the basic speed law applies. Roadways are very fluid and dynamic environments. You have to have some leeway. Sometimes you need to be a little more aggressive. Sometimes you need to be a little more cautious. So yes, these autonomous cars should be able to temporarily ignore certain rules in order to increase safety. Of course, these autonomous vehicles can see behind them much more clearly than a human so the same safety guidelines may not apply to them as apply to humans.
From TFA: "They’re usually hit from behind in slow-speed crashes".
If this is in fact the dominant accident mode, I would suggest that this is not such a big deal and will, over the long term, be self-correcting as the insurance rates for idiot non-automated drivers shoot up because they can't get it through their thick skulls not to tailgate other vehicles.
The logic seems to work like this:
Recently, when this happened to me and the opportunity presented itself, I decided to conduct an experiment. I changed lanes, let Mr. Impatient take my place as net-to-last in line and planted myself behind him. For some strange reason Mr. Impatient went completely ballistic when I started working my way down his own checklist for making a row of cars in front of you drive faster. It was a pretty stupid thing to do but at the same time it was kind of fun to see him slow down to 30 kph collect a large row of honking cars behind us and then just turn off at the next exit and leaving him with the long row of irate honking drivers that had collected behind us as a result of his asinine attempt to punish me for stealing his act.
I'll admit it: I drive like an old person. Any day I can piss off a millennial in his BMW, is a good day.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I am not sure why you brought road rage into this discussion, unless you consider routine traffic violations an example of road rage.
I think it might have been you citing "honking and middle fingers" as examples of a "more flexible system of human-to-human interaction".
Strictly adhering to a speed limit doesn't make you a safe driver. Driving according to road conditions, your alertness level, and your car's ability does.
All of which are routinely mis-estimated by people who think they're better drivers than everybody else.
I'm training a new driver, and we have the same problem. She understands the rules of the road, but I spend a lot of time explaining to her where other driver's will expect her to behave differently than she expects based on those rules.
haven't rtfa but that seems like the screamingly obviously assumption. it's well documented that reven, er, "safety" red light cameras dramatically increase rear endings. I live in atlanta & try to be good about stopping for lights but experience has taught me to do what nascar refers to as "mirror drive" when I approach a light in traffic & go ahead & run it if person behind me looks like they're going to. I figure if there's a cop they're gonna get the last one anyway which is never me.
'The rules' are whatever people are doing, not whatever the legislators decided.
As for automatic speed control, answer this question: 'What is THE speed limit?' It varies, you know.
All cars will have to be driverless or none at all (exceptions for emergency services. etc) - Or point-to-point dedicated driverless lanes
An absolute cluster f** waiting to happen otherwise.
I'm tired of the speed limit being 10 MPH slower than the average speed of traffic
And I'm tired of morons speeding. Which they do because they are morons, therefore they are unable to understand what "limit" means. It's a goddamn limit. You fucking OBEY the limit. You DON'T go past the limit, EVER.
Strictly adhering to a speed limit doesn't make you a safe driver. Driving according to road conditions, your alertness level, and your car's ability does.
All of which are routinely mis-estimated by people who think they're better drivers than everybody else.
No disagreement here. Perhaps we should try German approach of autobahns and very strict graduated licensing?
The solution to this "problem" is quite obvious.
Highways need to be -all- autonomous vehicles. No manual control at over 50 kph (35 mph).
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
I read long ago about a race-car driver teaching urban driving. He taught students to 'go with the flow' rather than compete for a place -- he'd make eye contact with other drivers, slow slightly to make a bigger space for someone to change lanes, wave and point to indicate where he was going, and almost never either accelerate or brake suddenly -- tap the brakes before stepping on the pedal to flash the lights. And at the end of the class he challenged the students to drive cross-town in rush hour, and he did as well. He was sitting in his car at the finish line waiting when the first of them arrived. He said you can flow faster than you can compete in traffic.
I'd always found that idea worked and when I read his methods I started applying it very seriously.
I'm in California. I get the momentary double take from other drivers when I do something gracious like the above -- the look twice at my hand signal to see if I'm really waving "come on over" or pointing "I'm moving that way" rather than something dumb and offensive.
And then, invariably, there's a blink and a smile and they make the flow work.
Another example -- when I'm behind another car, and that car ahead of me is coming up behind a slow moving truck, I'll put on my turn signal to change lanes early. It signals the driver ahead of me that, duh, we BOTH are going to have to change lanes soon, you might as well do it rather than be stuck behind that truck as I come up on your left. That almost always gets the driver ahead to move left in plenty of time for us both to flow around the truck. Otherwise, the contentious/oblivious driver will run up behind the truck then dart left into the passing lane as I'm coming up on them, endangering everyone. People do take a clue.
A third example -- I hit my 4-way emergency flasher if I see trouble or congestion or stopped traffic ahead way early, before I start to slow down and signal which way I'm going if I need to change lanes. When I don't do that, there's usually a pack of fast drivers coming along who will just blaze into the congested area and scramble for place trying to get through.
With the slight early warning, the whole pack slows down and people sort themselves out to flow past the obstruction.
This all works because there are PEOPLE driving the other cars. And it really does work. I get places faster with less hassle and people I've never seen before smile and wave at me on the highway --- because the little kindnesses propagate.
Try to be nice to a Google car? Why bother, there's nobody home.
What about allowing self-driving cars to go 10% over the limit by law? This would solve most of the problems (if I remember correctly, in Spain you can go 10% over the limit in advancements).
In this way, they do not break the law, it is safer, and justifiable because self driving cars should be safer and control better the real speed limit allowed (like taking :)
into account car characteristics, load, road condition...). If it rains, in a SUV with bad tires, you do not want to be 10% over, but a ferrari with slicks in a dry day...
I don't disagree with what you are saying, but I think you failing to consider very simple math - that if at 60mph you can get X cars through at peak, then at 120mph you can get close to 2X cars at peak. Therefore, it follows that drivers that are not willing to speed are constantly making traffic worse, while drivers that speed only occasionally make traffic worse.
I imagine a lot of traffic would go away if we set all highways to 80mph without drastically increasing road kill ratio.
To summarise the summary: people are a problem.
There will be the drivers who love to drive and will *never* give up their manual car versus having an autonomous car. It will be like the gun-nuts "You can have my 1967 Camaro when you pry it from my cold dead hands"....
Then the airlines will complain when people start using autonomous cars for long trips, and they sleep through they whole thing, wake up at their destination, as opposed to going through long lines and TSA hassles at the airport.
And the second there's a single accident that kills someone, the Anti-AI nutjobs will be protesting in D.C. "Them there robots is out to KILL us!"
And the complaints from Taxi/Uber drivers "Dey Tuk Our Jebs!" And don't even get me started on Truck Drivers, who seem to make of 50% of the working population of the USA..
We are clearly moving in the direction of having self-driving cars, but it's going to be a very, very painful and long transition. We may not even see it happen completely in our lifetimes.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
That's because software cannot and will never be able to 'think' outside of the confines of programming, math is absolute. Human beings can change their minds. This is never going to work, many people have predicted this very thing from the start. Yet, alas, Silicon Valley seems to believe it not only knows best, but that it owns us. This project deserved to fail from the start, it's not a feasible concept. If they'd like to use them for specialized services where they pose no threat, that's another matter, but software vs. human flexibility is a very, very flawed false equivalency, and it doesn't take great brains to see it. Seriously: is the ENTIRE valley on the spectrum? Sure seems that way at times.
Finally, a rational post. Wish I had mod points today.
If you had read the bolded part and it's implications you would have discovered that your reply was unnecessary.
What he/she is saying is that by changing the rules to encompass situations you describe, an autonomous vehicle would never have to break any rules. Having an autonomous vehicle which bend or break the rules in certain situations is a sure recipe for accidents and getting sued into oblivion.
In other words, the traffic laws needs to be updated to take into consideration autonomous vehicles. As with all other emerging tech we have laws and regulations that are lagging behind and in some cases they are totally obsolete.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
I'm about as big of a proponent of a less intrusive government as you'll find, but there are times when I believe more is better. This is one of them. I floated the idea past a few state senators I know here in Nebraska, that drivers be required to take and pass a thorough state patrol-approved driver education class every 10 years. People change, vehicles change, laws change, etc. And yet the way it is now, any idiot can take some extremely simple tests at age 16, get handed a little card and suddenly they can operate a motor vehicle for the REST OF THEIR LIFE with no further training or education. Ever.
I cannot think of any other discipline in life where there is never, ever any additional education/training. But I was shot down by my state senators (from both sides of the ideological aisle) for what I considered superfluous reasons.
I am not sure why you brought road rage into this discussion, unless you consider routine traffic violations an example of road rage.
As the previous post said, I think honking and using middle fingers (some of your examples of efficient communication) are generally indications of aggressive driving behavior, commonly known as "road rage."
Strictly adhering to a speed limit doesn't make you a safe driver. Driving according to road conditions, your alertness level, and your car's ability does. For example, by backing up traffic by strictly following 60 mph speed limit on a sunny clear day on a straight road you probably killed 0.001 humans. If you do this regularly, then over years you can rake up higher death toll than a drunk driver.
I think you need a lesson in causality and culpability. Generally speaking, the driver who is going 60mph in a scenario where the law compels him to is not creating this "death toll." It is the people who drive more unsafely around him (tailgating, swerving to pass, etc.) because they aren't patient enough to drive safely within the posted limit. It's perfectly legal and in fact legally encouraged to drive at or below the speed limit, particularly if in the right lane (or one of the right lanes on a multilane highway). I do agree with you that it is unsafe for someone to drive the speed limit in some cases in the left lane, and there are generally laws prohibiting that. But if the slow driver is not in the left lane, and if common practice among most of the cars on that road is to drive faster and the authorities have not raised the speed limit, then the culpability may be jointly shared by those who posted the limit and the people who drove in crazy ways to be able to go faster.
I will freely admit that I frequently go over the speed limit, particularly when the general flow of traffic around me is going faster. But I have no illusions that if I end up in a serious crash by speeding that somehow a slower driver was magically the cause of it. When I do encounter a slower driver, I either drive a safe distance behind him or pass when it is safe and traffic is clear. That's what a "safe driver" actually does when encountering a car driving the speed limit -- and if you do otherwise and have an accident, it's YOUR fault.
If, as sometimes happens, I see a hoard of jerks driving bumper-to-bumper, tailgating, and weaving while trying to pass a slower car, I generally back WAY OFF behind them, because they are the ones causing the hazard, and I've actually witnessed accidents happen in those scenarios, so I want to be as far behind them as possible.
If it is not safe to obey traffic laws, there is either a problem with enforcement or with the law.
My guess is that it goes far beyond just "following the rules". I suspect that the dirverless cars tend to be cautious and deferential and do things like fail to exert the right of way when they have it if they detect the other car move just a little. I find drivers like that infuriating.
Please explain how you would build the infrastructure to communicate speed limits to cars. Please include who would pay to build it and maintain it, how cars would get updates, and how the system would work internationally.
Have you even been in a car this decade? The system that you describe is already in place in cars today. We use them to help us navigate, just like the robots do.
I'm typing this on my phone, and it has two applications that can provide comprehensive maps that show exactly where I am and which way I am facing. I can look up maps for cities around the world. I have even used Google Maps to navigate a bike path in the dead of the night. It's like rally driving with the phone telling me which way to turn next. Scary as hell, but fun!
Having speed limits on these maps is trivial. Having context sensitive speed indicators changing with traffic conditions if you use the GPS data from the other cars ahead of you.
Generally speaking, the driver who is going 60mph in a scenario where the law compels him to is not creating this "death toll."
I disagree. Even if we ignore slow driver's culpability in the increase of accidents caused by other drivers, there is still an issue of slowing down all other traffic. If you just slow down entire highway by 1mph by your driving, then that alone would by sufficient to attribute road carnage element I mentioned.
"autonomous vehicles aren't at fault" -- this needs to be revised. Doing something totally unexpected can be considered as doing wrong. I see a car going ahead of me and also I can notice there is sufficient distance in front of that car. If he(that car) suddenly brakes too hard, it will surprise me and I can very well rear-end him. Is it my fault? yeah law can say I should've been careful. But we humans expect something what is reasonable. There is no reason why the car in front could not have done a slow/gentle slow-down. Basically when you drive, you don't surprise your fellow drivers. You drive predictably. [Even with wild-life it's true, you can walk, say in african savanna.. a lion/snake is likely to attack you ..when they are surprised.. that's why you create noise..announce your presence..so they know you are around ..and also gives them time to conclude you are safe/not a threat to them]
There's a middle ground to be had. Sure there are a lot of ubiquitous bending of rules that should be addressed (amending or enforcing). Speeding is among those. There are an essentially infinite set of 'exceptional' circumstances that are relatively rare in occurrence, but critical when they occur. Having laws to cover that would require an infinite set of laws. One could say you could get close enough with more and more complex laws, but at some point the law becomes outright impossible to understand, well before the laws cover all the circumstances.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Driving is and always been the most intense social activity we will engage in on a daily basis. We cooperate and even conspire with each other to break the law in order to get to our destinations quickly and safely. I doubt they will be able to program the complex second by second social decisions we make every day. I think Google now thinks the same as they have separated out the autonomous car part of Google, probably because they expect it to be sued into oblivion eventually by the families of autonomous car killed human drivers. If an autonomous car breaks the law and someone dies, the record is there in the database. Present that to the jury and watch the money flow. If they want autonomous cars to be on the roads of this country with humans, a corrupted and incompetent Congress will make sure we have to accept a certain number of machine-caused deaths and maimings. The Congress will have to strip human legal rights to allow widespread use of killer machines on our highways. Google has the bribe money to bring this about.
E Proelio Veritas.
like impatience, fear, nervousness.
if a bulldozer is moving at 5mph and crushes someone who doesn't get out of the lane, if a human driver is in place the driver is at fault. Even if all other "legalities" are maintained, this is a clear case of neglect where the operator either was not in control or chose to commit "manslaughter" at the least.
However, according to the well connected, politically savvy, media-invested and extraordinarily wealthy individuals supporting robotic cars, if a robotic vehicle is following the law and there is an accident where the vehicle failed to react to a changing situation, the vehicle would be, and has been, considered *not* at fault.
It seems there are two different conditions being applied here. If a simple lane swerve would avoid an accident, or a rapid decelleration in the middle of the freeway with traffic behind would do the same, a human driver failing to perform these operations would find themselves legally responsible.
Keeping the claim that "the AI vehicles were not to blame" when they failed to react at a level most teenager drivers successfully manage millions of times a day, isn't doing anyone any favors, except those investors hoping for big returns or some sort of societal control play.
But then again, maybe this is a perfectly accurate Silicon Valley thing after all. If some idiot cuts me off, and he's a rich Google or Apple exec with better lawyers and can claim he had a "good" reason to duck in, and I "failed to yield" I would also be the one at fault while the vehicle driven by Angel Investor Money employee would find himself not blamed at all.
It sounds more like a flaw with traffic laws.
Ha ha
It's almost inexcusable that neither cars (nor trains) have automatic speed control systems that prevent exceeding the limit.
Trains don't have automatic speed control systems???? *cough*
Please see the rather short english article on Train Protection Systems (or the much longer German version) to enlighten you. It might be the U.S. track system is no longer up to standards but that doesn't say anything about trains in general.
Even the Police will tell you it's safer to move at (approximately) the same speed as the existing traffic. It's not hard to understand. (Tho it may be hard to get the police to officially say speed limits are dumb)
I leave a decent 2-3 car gap between me + the car in front of me, and I visualize it like it has a fixed volume. if the car ahead of me starts to leave me behind, I visualize a "suction" force pulling me forward to speed up. Likewise, as I start to close in on the car ahead, I visualize a "compression" resulting in increased pressure to slow down.
To a lesser extend, I visualize the same for the car behind me. if he's riding me too close, I try to speed up. if I'm leaving him in the dust, I wonder if I'm going too fast.
No, no. Your arguments are well intended, but that's just putting of the real problem, which is deviations of real-world conditions from the theoretical framework in which the cars are operating.
I think the research into driverless cars are awesome, but frankly I'm disturbed at how this hype is being spun as "flawless AI reveals flaws in human drivers" when it should be spun as "in vivo testing reveals AI is inflexible and can't handle real-world unpredictability."
Sure, humans are flawed. I work in an area where I've seen this play out over time in certain tasks--as computerized systems take over, error rates plummet. The computers were always right. But that is in settings where things should be really rote, and there's no surprises. Where humans shine is in dealing with complex, unexpected, novel situations. I suspect it's the same thing with driving.
I really worry about spinning this as "AI is superior to human driving, and we should change the system to suit AI." I am completely certain that what will eventually happen then is that we we start hearing about deaths in situations where it would be trivial for a human to respond correctly, and where the AI is trying to follow some learned pattern or protocol. These "driver errors" are just one example of this.
For me, the bottom line is that the AI shouldn't just not be at fault legally, they shouldn't be getting into accidents at all (within some level of statistical precision) regardless of the reason. Then I'd be convinced of their safety. Anything else is just bending reality to suit the lust for selling AI systems.
If you had read the bolded part and it's implications you would have discovered that your reply was unnecessary.
What he/she is saying is that by changing the rules to encompass situations you describe, an autonomous vehicle would never have to break any rules. Having an autonomous vehicle which bend or break the rules in certain situations is a sure recipe for accidents and getting sued into oblivion.
In other words, the traffic laws needs to be updated to take into consideration autonomous vehicles. As with all other emerging tech we have laws and regulations that are lagging behind and in some cases they are totally obsolete.
Did you read his entire post? He wants to not only make the rules stricter for computers, but also humans. He wants to use GPS location data or something like that to have a speed limit specific governor on speed. So no, he's not saying that we need to change the rules to allow flexibility. He's saying that we need to make the world much less flexible for everyone. That just does not match reality.
I'm tired of morons thinking they understand traffic engineering. The speed limit should be set at around the 80th percentile of car speed on the road. If the 80th percentile is 20mph faster than the speed limit, the speed limit is broken; hell if its 10mph slower than average its being set at about the 30th percentile likely; so 70 percent of people are speeding on that road. Time and again studies show that most people drive a safe speed for the road and conditions regardless of the speed limit, whether faster or slower.
You on the other hand think that the speed limit is set by some omniscient being that knows whats best for the road and sets it and then the majority of people, being sheep, break it and lead to evil consequences. Because hey OBEY the limit, its not a retarded limit that needs fixed, because YOUR BETTERS SET IT.
I'm sure you'd prefer your cars designed by some randomdood since you prefer your roads and speed limits not designed by a qualified engineer either.
"It has already been shown that if everyone followed existing laws perfectly, traffic would grind to a complete stop."
I see your baseless accusation with zero supporting evidence provided, and raise you a "nuh-uh".
The problem is they're programmed to be dead right. The thing about being dead right in traffic; you're still dead.
I disagree with everything you are saying, and I'm convinced you should consider not advising people on simple math. Safe highway driving intervals are measured in time, not distance -- maybe you once came across the "two second rule"? Doubling the speed doesn't increase throughput by a factor of two: if people are driving with any concern for their lives it won't budge. Your other argument in your earlier post, about slower people causing accidents, exists only in your rationalizing world. (I have worked in motor vehicle accident investigation, and am a mechanical engineer.)
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
If they are doing things like merging into traffic below the prevailing rate (regardless of the posted limit), they are indeed at fault. Google et al. should brush up on their traffic laws.
Common issue with trying to simulate any area: most people never stick to the standards, rules or regulations. Including that sentence.
Language translation is really hard on that regard because a simple expert machine can't really work because most people don't follow the spec of their spoken language.
90% of the time, another human of the same region will understand it fine.
Roads 'hijinks' are just as varied from one region to the next, one odd junction, one roundabout, de-facto standards build up between drivers, especially if in smaller towns.
Most of them are highly illegal as well, but oddly enough a lot of these roads, by ratio, have insanely lower accidents anyway.
It's a hsrd issue to deal with. Very hard indeed.
We are nowhere near “A.I” yet. The “I” is intelligence. Intelligence is learning, changes in behavior, adaptability, altering conclusions based in previous
experiences. We know the brain reprograms itself as neurons develop new pathways and old ones wither over time as our skills and life experiences change. This adaptable dynamics is the essence of intelligence and implies that any truly artificial intelligence may – more likely will - outgrow or rewire itself out of any law, rule or human moray – including Asimov’s laws of robotics.
Till dynamic adaptable learning is possible, stop calling systems that follow logic branches ‘intelligent’.
The right approach is to capture 360 degree video of every other car, then sue the owners or insurance and every other car that makes contact for millions in repairs (these self-driving cars are expensive, right?) In other words, don't conform to a lawless society, force a lawless society to conform to the rules! It would also help if they'd flag all these cars with a huge florescent green flag on top with dollar signs all over it, to warn people to pay attention! Other approaches would be electronic countermeasures -- hack the cell phones of everybody in the vicinity and post messages telling them to stop texting and/or shut up and drive!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
More likely is that driving is a social endeavor as well as dexterity and planning, and computers are really bad at the social part so they drive like assholes. No I won't let you merge into my lane, because I have every legal right not to notice that you need to, and it interferes with my perfect spacing interval and excellent speed control.
That the law, even without driverless cars, is wrong.
Need better speed limits also unofficial lanes need to be looked at. When it's open don't even think about trying to just do the limit on I-294 I-290 I-94 I-90 I-355 or even LSD.
Like the mini medians that people use as an center left turn lane.
Using the shoulder to pass a waiting left turner on 2 lane roads.
The unmarked parking / though lanes on some the road that are not as big as real 4 lane roads but are used as an 4 lane road.
Using the striped median as an extend left turn lane.
I don't want a car that drives itself. At least not yet.
What I want is a car with reliable ‘autopilot’. I want in on the market in the next 5 years, not the next 50 like these cars are going to take. I just want it to match the speed of traffic and stay in it's lane on the road while I go on 4 and 8 and 12 hour drives. That would be incredible and doesn't seem like it should be too much to ask.
If an autonomous car gets a ticket, who is responsible for paying it? Whose driving record does the offense go on? Obviously the cars being tested actually have passengers, are they programmed to pull over for emergency vehicles and wait patiently to receive tickets, or does the onboard technician have to intervene?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The work zone 45's need to go or be only for places where it makes sense like local roads not inter states where there is a wall from traffic and the workers. Work zone 55-60 are ok but still at times where there are no workers.
School zones should be limited to local roads and not a road that is 45 MPH that drops to 20 when there is a near traffic light that the kids can use. There are lot's of school zones where no hours as posted and there is no school near by.
I'm tired of morons thinking they understand traffic engineering. The speed limit should be set at around the 80th percentile of car speed on the road. If the 80th percentile is 20mph faster than the speed limit, the speed limit is broken; hell if its 10mph slower than average its being set at about the 30th percentile likely; so 70 percent of people are speeding on that road. Time and again studies show that most people drive a safe speed for the road and conditions regardless of the speed limit, whether faster or slower.
I have never seen such studies and would be interested in a reference.
Certainly I know that when I travel on windy mountain roads I can very easily exceed the posted speed limit with no risk of sliding off the curve, and many people driving those roads do exceed the posted limits (I have done so many many times in the past myself). It was a few months ago while reading a slashdot discussion about self-driving cars that I realized for the first time that many of the posted speed limits were there not because of a need to prevent cars from sliding off tight corners but because of limits to visibility and stopping distances. The "sea to sky highway" heading north to Whistler from Vancouver BC is notorious for traffic fatalities, largely I think because of this effect.
People drive at what they THINK is a safe speed for the road and conditions, but often are unaware of what that safe speed actually is. Modern cars are quiet and handle very well at high speeds and contribute to the driver FEELING like they are in complete control. Stopping distance increases proportional to the square of the velocity - so increasing your speed a fairly small amount can increase stopping distance by a much larger amount than most people think. So going around the corner at 50mph might not be safe while travelling at 45mph could give ample space to avoid problems blocked from view by the curve.
Traffic laws and road signs are not always well thought out. Inappropriate regulations that must be broken to drive in a reasonable manner contribute to the problem as people are conditioned to drive 'normally' and ignore stupid signs. Until every single sign and rule represents realistic traffic patterns there will be problems.
A car may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A car must obey traffic laws except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A car must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First or Second Law
A car must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First, Second or Third Law
And if you want to live by that rule there are lanes on every highway meant for you, just stay out of the passing lanes.
Admittedly, I speed everywhere but I have no issue with people driving the speed limit if they stick to the right most lane(s), even if I can't get into the left lane because I'm unable to get up to speed to merge safely while following the turtle in front of me. It's only people who insist on driving at or below the limit in the left most lane when there is ample space for them to the right that annoys me.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
I imagine one of the problems (self-driving cars being rear-ended) is because when a light turns yellow or something happens, the self-driving car can react faster and might even apply the brakes much faster than a human would, so the normal space a person leaves to another human-driven car isn't enough. At least a symbol on the back indicating it's a self-driving car and a warning that it can brake faster than a human might help.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
...they upgrade the AIs to be more aggressive, and they start revving the engine next to you at lights? Actually, that'd be amusing as all get out.
How is it human error when the google cars are driving 10 MPH under the speed limit? That is called obstructing traffic and causes accidents every day!
While the autonomous vehicles aren't at fault in these crashes, their relative unpredictability on the road are nonetheless leading to more accidents than expected.
The autonomous vehicles are *entirely* predictable as they follow the rules - you know, the ones we humans are suppose to know to get a driver's license. It's the humans that are unpredictable.
... rigid adherence to traffic laws and overcautious programming have caused self-driving cars to rack up a crash rate twice that of an average human driver.
Um, humans are causing the crashes, so the crash-rate is on them, not the self-driving cars. The crash-rate for self-driving cars is "bagel".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Having everybody ignore the rules and not change them is the worst possible outcome.
Welcome to New England.
Heh, it's going to take multiple teams of well trained (some probably genius level) engineers to formally prove what every man in the land understands at 16: the traffic laws cannot be taken as strict instructions, because they do not function as written in many cases.
Anyway, I'm glad this hangup is happening now- if it happened after adoption, rest assured No, It Is The Drivers Who Are Wrong would be the interpretation.
Human gestures like 'The Bird, also The Finger', angry stares and others do not work on driverless cars!
Ha ha
You cannot get gridlock in a traffic system where all rules are followed. The worst you could get is a potentially non-optimal throughput under special conditions. If you follow ALL of the rules, things will work out just fine. It's how the system is set up. However, I'm willing to be swayed if you can post an actual citiation and the report isn't bullshit itself, or extremely limited in scope.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It's obvious that our simplified mental model of how roads and drivers work bears little semblance to how they actually DO work, at least to anyone who has ever modeled any part of reality. To NOT have studied this, not to seen it as something which is properly the subject of a possibly long , expensive and anyway open-ended scientific investigation implies you're the (autisitc) type who mistakes systems of rules for reality, and perhaps enjoys doing so; someone who loves maps more than hiking. PRIOR to programming self driving cars, or at least expecting them to succeed and be marketable (maybe SDCs are a useful tool in this needing-to-be-done study of drivers and roads) you needed to know a whole lot more about how people make their cars behave in reality.
It's a no brainer. Program the cars to perform minor traffic infractions (even if all the traffic is automated). Otherwise, if they obeyed all traffic laws cities will ban them because they can't get any fines out of the owners and the police won't be able to fill their quotas.
The actual problem with the speed limit rules is that the speed limits are everywhere (except when I drive on the Autobahn in Germany, in most cases where I take it there are almost no speed limits). So because the speed limits are everywhere people are not paying attention.
There shouldn't be speed limits in most places, only in places where the limits are truly necessary, but the reality is that all of this is built to generate income for the city, not to ensure safety or sanity of any kind.
You can't handle the truth.
The hard part is the human factor on the road.If police would crack down on reckless drivers, this would be a non-issue. Start with speeding trucks, you'll make a huge amount of money.
Sounds like the programmers forgot about Asimov's laws of robotics.
We need to ban human drivers as soon as possible!
That's what the pro-'autonomous car' people are saying right now. But that's never going to be the case and they need to accept that. What needs to happen is there needs to be reforms in the way drivers are educated, trained, and tested; the bar needs to be set higher, and testing needs to be performed on a more frequent basis. I cannot stress highly enough that the focus here shouldn't be on punishment; the focus needs to be on education and training -- but that having been said, incompetent drivers need to be excluded from operating motor vehicles entirely. Advocates of so-called 'autonomous vehicles' will now say 'Banning human drivers will solve all these problems', but the simple fact of the matter is, that all so-called 'autonomous vehicles' will always have a full set of manual controls and the ability to override the autonomous system without delay because, among other things, there will always be situations where only a human driver can get the job done; for this reason, even in a world where so-called 'autonomous vehicles' are ubiquitos, people will need to be better educated and trained at operating a motor vehicle, and tested more frequently to ensure that they're competent, due to the less frequent use of their driving skills ('use it or lose it').
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
(I have worked in motor vehicle accident investigation, and am a mechanical engineer.)
At least this explains your irrationality, just like DEA imagines seeing drug dealers everywhere, you see every traffic situation as a potential accident.
The problem is that the programmers coded the "official" rules of the road. They forgot to code the unofficial rule. I call it rule zero, because it's the most important one. Avoid crashing at all cost.
All of the other rules of the road exist to supplement rule zero. They are meaningless if rule zero is violated. The computer code needs to reflect that.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
As a programmer of 30+ years, one thing I have realized with programming is to 'check the ego in at the door'.
Which in my opinion is what the developers of these algorithmic based driving machines has yet to do.
As a driver, to 'fit in' anywhere I have driven in the world, whether it's Ireland or Asia, Nicaragua or the good ole United States, it's an exceeding rarity I NEED to break a law, and I'm pretty well aware of the laws, and when I have broken the law on a NEED basis - i can count two times in my life - it was to avoid a life or death situation, literally. One time, on my motorcycle, I had a semi truck in front of me, behind me, and to the left and right and one decided to merge into my lane. I had nowhere to go with drivers who simply hadn't seen me i their blind spot which i shouldn't have been in to begin with, so I went from 60 to 120mph as fast as that Ninja motorcycle could go to to squeeze in the 4' gap between the trucks to the right and front of me.
The truth is. Programming 'by the rules' is a wonderful concept. But when I drive down the road. I notice most drivers do not take the time to anticipate the other moves of the flow of traffic under varying circumstances, and worse, they tend not to look behind them ANTICIPATING the driver's moves behind them.
I suspect that's what is going on here. Google cars, driving 'obediently', like a young child learning to drive for the first time, is failing to take into consideration BOTH WHERE it's going AND where it is coming from - and specifically - their rate of speed and their predictions of your actions.
Convoluted? No.
Case in point. You come up to a stop sign to make a right turn, and you see someone coming to the left of you where there is no stop sign. the car behind you, not seeing the car to the left, anticipates your stop and looks to the left assuming you are making the move, when you've stopped hard waiting for that car.
Sometimes, this scenario results in a minor fender bender. Who's at fault?
Technically, it was an avoidable condition on both party's parts. But as the FIRST Car obeying the law, you can ALWAYS have drifted a little further into the crosswalk giving the car behind you more room and reaction time, thus avoiding the crash, and then becoming nothing more than an inconvenience to pedestrians. This reaction while not preferable, is not illegal, and avoids the accident by simply predicting the driver's reactions times behind you.
It's my opinion that the vast majority of 'rear end collisions' could be avoided by drivers paying more respect and reacting to those tailing them.
I suspect these 'driverless cars' have next to nothing for code reacting to predictions of drivers following them.
Reactions which would include simple things like velocity combined with other silly things such as: Are they looking at their cell phones and not paying attention to me and what's ahead of them?
About 5 years ago, I swerved to the left in an emergency lane on the freeway as I noticed the driver behind me in the fast lane wasn't paying attention on their cell phone and wouldn't have time to anticipate the traffic stopping dead ahead of me that I barely had time to react to.
i watched as she skidded right past me and barely missed the car in front of me.
Had i not moved to the emergency lane to avoid the accident, I'd had gotten a nasty rear end collision. She flat out didn't see what was going on in enough time to even move to the emergency lane as I did.
'By the book' programming is fine and dandy in a controlled environment.
But programmers gotta check their ego at the door and understand real world driving conditions are not black box conditions and the only ones making errors are not the drivers, it's the programmers unrealistically expecting to issue 'perfect code' the first time they release it to the public.
The proper answer, at least in the US, is to fix the laws so they reflect reality, and tighten up on the level of driving ability you need to have in order to get a licence, not just blame the entire population.
There is already a giant problem throughout the US of super low speed limits everywhere that in no way reflect the actual road conditions, capability of the road, or how fast most people already quite safely drive on it.
The stupid speed limits mostly came about because speeding has been abused as a great revenue stream, and special interest groups such as MADD have literally no clue but way too much power. In short none of this has anything to do with any actual road safety measurements or metrics.
The problem with setting unrealistically low limits is that they are very much increasing the risk of accidents not decreasing them, since there will always be a few of the most braindead people that have heard "speed kills" so drive significantly slower than the traffic all around them, cause massive bottlenecks, then self-righteously think they are being better drivers than everyone else. The truth that they apparently don't have the brains to grasp is that speed itself doesn't kill (otherwise just standing on the earth would be fatal), its speed differential (i.e. the thing they, and self-driving cars are choosing to cause) that is dangerous.
Germans teach to push breaks and if you can't avoid it, hit the animal, no swerving.
More accidents than expected? Really? Any programmer worth their salt saw this coming a mile away...
I think the biggest thing we humans will learn from this foray into self-driving cars is that human behavior is much more complex than we have the ability to replicate artificially.
Autonomous vehicles definitely have a place on the roads, in commercial trucking. It's not as sexy and those Cali billionaires funding self-driving car research won't like it, but that's the real usable value in the tech. In 20 years, I can definitely see US highways teeming with caravans of self-driving, electric powered semi-trucks barrelling down a designated lane of the interstate.
Many aren't going to like it, but the simple fact is, driving a car around town is something illiterate humans can do, but programing a car to do it is not possible practically
Thank you Dave Raggett
Except that "everyone else is doing it" applies here. If I'm driving, and I'm conforming to the actions of the drivers around me, I'm not likely to get into an accident. If I can predict what the other drivers are likely to do (and it's a range of actions, sometimes stupid), I can drive more safely.
Now, throw in a robot vehicle that behaves like nothing else on the road and does things I can't predict from my knowledge of human drivers, and it will cause accidents. The smug asshole in the robot car can take pride in the fact that the robot was obeying the law and is not at fault, while leaving death and destruction in his or her wake.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Speed limits are often not set to be realistic, but for political reasons. Human drivers usually drive the maximum safe speed on the road, which might well be what the traffic engineers would have set if it weren't for politics. This is not crazy driving. It's possible to drive at crazy high speed, of course, but that normally doesn't happen. Some drivers make stupid moves, but the drivers in general know what sort of stupid moves bad drivers make, and can handle it.
The current driving environment is created by people, and runs according to how people do it. Now, someone proposes to drop a vehicle in there that will behave nothing like a person, and blame the existing people for doing what people do.
The important thing in this world is people, not robots. Robots are things, and replaceable. If a robot messes people up, it's doing wrong even if it's legally in the right.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The correct answer, of course, is to always prioritize the safety of the driver.
Not always, no.
For example, suppose you can hit a row of a lamp-post or a crowd at, say, 40 MPH. Now say the driver will *probably* survive either but it is safer for him to hit the crowd because all those human bodies he squishes will help slow the car down before he stops.
A responsible driver hits the lamp-post.
Could the roads handle nearly as much traffic if you rigorously followed the laws? If you had every car in America allow enough space in front of them to be space, you would have to drop at least 75% of the cars from every major highway in every metropolitan area in the country. The DC Beltway, the New England Thruway, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles...
The problem with this argument is that it assumes there isn't an alternative. The alternative is to use a combination of technology and enforcement to change the behavior of the drivers. If there are reasons this can't be done (because the rules aren't reasonable), we should fix the rules. Nobody is suggesting that human drivers drive one way and autonomous vehicles drive another. The question is do we make the human drivers follow the rules or teach the autonomous vehicles to break them. The former used to be impossible. Now it's well within our grasp. There seems to be an assumption that you can't make the human drivers follow the rules but we certainly can do have the technology to do that now and should start to phase it in.
The driving algorithm for NYC if it followed that of people would be pretty easy.
1. Is there (almost) room for your car somewhere in front of you that is (mostly) on the road?
2. If yes, drive there!
It's not about lanes. It's about negative space.
The above are all very deep thoughts, and great academic exercises.
The way it will actually work in the real world, in the US anyway, is that the legal structure will ignore almost all of these issues, except possibly ones that are irrelevant but have appeal to the great unwashed, and enact primarily what the biggest moneybags want. Based on past experience, that will mean that driverless cars will be far from perfect, and if you're in an accident with one, or "behind the wheel" of one, you will be S.O.L.
From what I understand, these driverless cars have never exceeded 25mph to date. Kind of hard to merge with freeway traffic at that speed. Also hard to test how well it behaves in actual traffic conditions. Only in school and construction zones have I ever seen anyone drive that slowly in the street, even when the posted limit is 25.
"autonomous vehicles aren't at fault in these crashes"
For some time now I have watches as driverless cars have been developed. And I believe that while the technology can be made to work, it will end up having a very hard time getting wide spread acceptance.
The primary problem is going to come the first time a driverless car is involved in a serious accident.
Since there is no driver, just passengers, how can they be liable for damages or deaths that are caused when the driverless car is involved in or causes an accident?
Does the liability fall back to the manufacturer of the car? Or the programmer that wrote the code for the car?
What company could accept the liability for all those cars they sold to the public?
Or would that be the issue, they can make the cars for $35,000 but the added liability coverage would be to expensive for most to afford.
Of course the real problem being discussed here is driverless cars sharing the road with idiot drivers doing stupid things everyday. They will be involved in accidents and they will cause major damage at somepoint.
The only way to solve that is to switch entirely to driverless fleets of cars instantly, and that is not something that can be done. Costs would be to much.
This can also be a very disruptive technology. I expect the first real commercial use for this would be long haul trucking. Setup a fleet of these driverless trucks and run them from depots on or near the interstates. They can run as long as they have fuel which should improve the transportation costs since the trucks don't have to stand down every 8 or 10 hours to allow the drivers to sleep. And being on limited access highways the chances of them being involved in situations that are unforeseen are minimized. Once at a depot loads can be shifted to normal trucks for delivery in towns.
Maybe the cars do in fact have an actual flaw. Consider this:
*I* am one of those drivers who drives as close as possible to the law at all times.
I suspect, *however*, that I do something that the driverless cars don't:
Whenever there is an asshole on my tail I am *aware* that he/she might rear-end me at any moment. I therefore increase my stopping gap by slowing down maybe 1mph so that if I have to break suddenly I have more time to *gently* brake instead of slamming on the anchors (as I suspect the google cars do).
Therefore: dear Google - make the driverless cars recognize tailgaters and slow down just a teensy bit to give an even more gradual slowing down in order that distracted as shit drivers have a chance as well as aggressive-but-believes-they-have-superhuman-reflexes-assholes are also given enough extra time to wake the fuck up too.
It is the only logical option.
The problem is that the programmers coded the "official" rules of the road. They forgot to code the unofficial rule. I call it rule zero, because it's the most important one. Avoid crashing at all cost.
I don't know why you call this an unofficial rule and rule zero. In German traffic law, for example, it is absolutely official and rule #1: "1. Participation in road traffic requires care and consideration at all times. 2. Anyone participating in road traffic has to behave in such a way that nobody is damaged in any way, put into danger, or inconvenienced more than necessary under the circumstances. "
If we don't want road rage and frustrated drivers, we can fix the rules. If speed limits were normally reasonable, people would pay attention to them. I don't see any upside to strictly enforcing arbitrary rules.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That other have to break the law in order to avoid being hit by them.
We just need a few new laws, anyone crashing into a driverless car loses their license for life.
I'm still learning to drive, and have a problem like that. I want to stick to the letter of the law to practice for the road test which makes it hard to be on the road with people who are bending the rules. I have a decent idea of what I could do in everyday driving like go a bit over the speed limit, but I don't want to get into the habit before the test.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Honestly, interesting and lots of food for thought. Been missing those on SD.
Are the accidents primarily caused by the way the AI cars are driving?
Or are the accidents primarily caused by rubber neck drivers looking at the weird sensors and spinney things on the car and not watching where they are going?
if at 60mph you can get X cars through at peak, then at 120mph you can get close to 2X cars at peak
This is dangerously incorrect advice. Safe stopping distance goes up with the square of vehicle speed (assuming fixed traction limits, which is a reasonably good approximation). The standard advice is linear (3 second rule), although this is really just a linear approximation of the v^2 equation tuned for highway speeds. What you are proposing is that the minimum following distance should not change at all with a doubling of speed, and that is nuts.
Your simple math does apply if both speeds are in free flow, but that's not the peak carrying capacity.
A few chapters in my PhD thesis are devoted to cooperative rule systems for high speed mobile robots with acceleration constraints, so this is something I know a bit about. And yes, working out those equations made me a better driver, because it made it clear when I was being "legal and socially acceptable" but mathematically reckless.
I think we can all agree on one thing though: If traffic laws are written on the assumption that they will be violated constantly in small ways, those are badly-written laws.
I agree. In that case the laws are probably written to increase ticket revenue instead of for safety. But drivers must have some discretion and some small leeway in certain areas of traffic law.
If a few slow drivers are actually slowing down everyone on the highway, then the fast majority is actually driving dangerously fast. If the slow drivers aren't there to slow them down, the carnage actually increases, since the accidents that impatient / inattentive / drunk drivers inevitably cause will be caused at a significantly higher speed.
I watch people like you every day from lofty heights. You people sure are in a hurry to reach your appointment in the ditch, wrapped around a tree, underneath someone's giant rolling corporate logo, or with the traffic cop (or all four at once). Sometimes, I even count the number of seconds you save by rushing all up to the back of my trailer, suddenly noticing the obstruction, then swerving out into the next lane, then jumping right back in front of me (all without even bothering to signal). It is not very many seconds (and the amount of other peoples' time wasted in the 5 mile long backup is quite epic).
You deserve a car which does not exceed a speed of 10 miles per hour and which is confined to the rail that the amusement park thoughtfully placed for you.
Hlaf the problems with traffic are not the cars but the roads. Smart cars need smart roads, and mixed traffic ought to be separated as much as possible.
Label all autonomous cars with flashing lights and restrict them to AI lanes on crowded highways that have right turn exits only. Set AI cars to cruise bumper to bumper in phalanxes once they are on a freeway to save space. Allow phalanxes to travel faster than the regular speed limit. Eliminate contention intersections from those routes as far as possible. AI cars ought to communicate route info and traffic conditions in a network that encompasses their route and destination.
With smart route planning, AI designated routes, and community planning for this technology, AI cars will gain advantages in convenience and travel time over other cars..
You can't separate the vehicles from the system, and that system includes roads and other drivers.
Firstly, you don't have to enforce something 100% for it to be very effective. Even if the enforcement rate was 5%, that's still a 1 in 20 risk of getting caught, which is enough to put almost everybody off doing it.
Secondly, driverless cars are outfitted with a whole load of cameras and sensors. It would be relatively straightforward to save the most recent data in the event of a crash, which would make enforcing the laws trivial in the event of a crash.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
About 12-13 years ago, as part of my Strong AI development work I did an analysis on autonomous vehicles as an application. One of things I came up with was a basic first step solution to dealing with the interactions between machine driven and human driven vehicles.
The basic solution is to always give a warning to other drivers that a car or truck is under machine control. My simple idea is a coloured light system (say green or blue) fitted on the roofs of autonomous vehicles that lights up to warn when the vehicle is under autonomous control..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
"The primary problem is going to come the first time a driverless car is involved in a serious accident."
The moment the driverless car's video recorders show the human driver doing something boneheaded and illegal which caused the crash, the case will be thrown out of court - EVEN IF ALL THE OTHER HUMANS ARE DOING THE SAME BONEHEADED AND ILLEGAL THING. (caps intentional)
Passing slow/stationary objects on "no passing" lines is already catered to in most road rules (they usually state there must be 100 metres of clear visibility throughout the manouever) and being stuck behind a bicycle on a narrow road is no excuse for forcing your way past in a dangerous manner or crossing the no-passing lines (do that in a lot of countries and get videoed doing so, you can expect to be explaining to a judge exactly why you thought it was a good idea, as the guy who pulled that stunt and nearly crashed into me and 6 other oncoming cars on the other side of the blind bend he did it on found out - 3 month disqualification based on video from the riders and several of the cars which clearly placed him in the driver's seat)
Insurance companies usually work on a "knock for knock" basis - in short they know that in the case of a crash there is normally fault on both sides and normally no evidence other than "he said, she said(*)" so they eat the costs and agree not to claim off each other. When an automaton is shown to be "not at fault", this agreement is going to go out the window, especially when the prevalance of 360-degree video will uphold the issue.
An automaton which stops suddenly to avoid a kid running on the road and gets rear-ended by an inattentive following driver who didn't see the ball roll onto the street previously is in the right (as is a human. The whole point about following distance laws is to ensure the following car CAN stop if the one in stop does so suddenly for no apparent reason). That driver may well take it to court, but he's going to face a triple whammy of being in the wrong under current law (following too closely), picking up the other party's full legal costs when they countersue - because you can guarantee that insurance companies and manufacturers will do so to make examples out of humans clearly in the wrong or trying to make bogus whiplash claims, etc, AND probably finding that no insurance company will take his money afterwards, or if compelled to, insisting on seriously high premiums+deductables as he's demonstrated he's not only a bad driver, he refuses to accept being at-fault.
Just because humans do unsafe things by habit doesn't make it safe. Drunk driving being a case in point.
We've become less and less tolerant of this behaviour as it's become clear how much it really costs not just in direct costs but also all the knock-on expenses. Law enforcement and traffic management experts have been trying to force people to adopt safe following distances for decades, but my suspicion is that it will only start happening when freeway cameras recording roadspeed and following distances start issuing automated tickets (don't laugh, that's exactly what's planned on UK freeways from late 2016 along with 24*7 speed limit enforcement based on video evidence(****) instead of the current "random camera placement and only 90th percentile speeders". Law changes to hold the car owner automatically liable instead of having to positively identify the driver have already been passed.)
Google and Delphi have already tweaked their software such that it will break the speed limit on multilane roads if the surrounding traffic is doing so. That was explicitly mentioned in various articles as far back as 2008.
There is a fair degree of conflation/confusion in these comments of their low-speed electric vehicles (which are hard-limited to 25mph by CA law and mostly operating on 20-25mph roads(**)) and their IC-engine machines which have a lot more processing power and run at higher speeds.
(*) In car video evidence is mostly useless for crash evidence as it shows only a
What you are calling arbitrary rules are very carefully decided with the input of a cadre of civil engineers as well as the local communities and based on a consensus. They are no more arbitrary than the fact that we drive on the right-hand side of the road. If you think that something has gone wrong setting the limits, you can get them changed through various processes. Many states have recently increased their limits. This argument is often put forward and falls down the same way. If you're a qualified civil engineer who disagrees with the civil engineering work and want to offer you services for free to a community, they're probably willing to listen. I know that my county is paying a lot of money right now for a traffic study in the area where a school may be expanded. Too bad you didn't bid a lower price.
You miss my point. I respect the traffic engineers. However, once they've said their piece the speed limit is then set by a political process, and I don't have respect for that.
Right now, we have a remedy for too-slow speed limits: we speed, and generally drive at the speeds the engineers would recommend. If we had to obey them, we'd be dumping an informal process that works fairly well for a largely untested formal process. If we had to obey the speed limits, we'd have to go through the political process to get them to what the traffic engineers say, and that's slow and uncertain.
Back in the 60s and 70s, we were all pretty sure that marijuana would be legal once we grew up and started electing people who thought as we did about it. Currently, it's still a Schedule I drug federally, and a few states allow it anyway.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
A political process where the maximum speed that can be set is usually the maximum speed determined by the civil engineers but communities have the option to increase safety by setting limits even lower. That seems a pretty reasonable thing to be left up to local control. The only other logical conclusion is that everything should be set by the less accountable federal government including things like zoning rules.
Anyone who thought that automatic cars would have less accidents, is very naive.
Or, perhaps supersticious. As in: "Computers are Magic and therefore Perfect!"
Has it occured to anyone that the problem is not with the people or the cars, but with the laws?
The majority of our traffic laws and their limits are designed to be broken on a regular basis by everyone.
They are designed to be revenue generators, not to keep the roads safe.
I've been thinking about why the Google cars are involved in more (minor) accidents than non-google cars. Based on no actual knowledge or facts I think the reason may be that the google cars are driving too well. The google car has much better situational awareness than a human driver and will therefore brake in order to avoid potential situations that no human driver would even be aware of. This unexpected braking is surprising the human drivers and they are running into the back of the google cars.
The solution would be to lower the threshold of when the google cars should brake to avoid potential situations -- in other words drive more like a person, i.e. more dangerously.
That or just expect the humans to adjust their driving to accommodate the safer google cars as they get used to them being on the road.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America