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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.
Which is a great theory, but the reality is that if the speed limit is set very low on a road for no apparent reason then a lot of drivers won't respect it, and unless you can and will enforce that limit strongly and consistently, that is unlikely to change. Putting the remaining drivers -- those who do want to be responsible and safe -- in a position where they have to choose between breaking the law and driving as safely as possible, is bad law-making.
Actually, you don't need to enforce it consistently. You get as much compliance, but at a lower cost, if you haphazardly enforce it. If the driver doesn't know when it will be enforced, they will comply. It only takes the possibility of being caught that triggers the behavior.
Really, when will idiot philosophers get over their wet dream of getting people to condone murder? There are more important and useful questions to ask, but all I keep hearing about is some stupid variant of the trolley scam.
The trolley is a thought experiment, but the situation is not totally out of the way. Nearly every time there is a drone strike, or an air strike, or an encounter between a US cop and a dark-skinned person, plenty of innocents are killed. One can only hope that the people responsible at least convince themselves (if nobody else) that in the long term this saves lives, instead of acting purely reactively.
Michael Sandel's Justice course at Harvard is online, and is full of interesting discussions of moral dilemmas. There is not always a perfect solution, but there is a lot of value in thinking about the problem.
Stephan
If you're not overtaking, you have no business being in that lane. That's what the outer lanes are *for*. It's people who don't understand that simple rule that cause accidents. Undertaking is illegal e.g. in the UK for a reason.
Oh there is a reason, it just has nothing to do with safety.
Or there is a reason, it has to do with safety, or with optimising throughput, or some other valid concern, but that reason is not obvious to every dummy driver on the street.
The throughput argument bears repeating. Many drivers don't understand this, but sometimes you can get more people through a bottleneck (AND have fewer accidents) if everyone drives more slower at a constant speed than if everyone is trying to drive faster at the same traffic density. This is particularly true when you have a high variability of vehicle speeds, like in a mountainous area where trucks are forced to go slower or in an urban area where frequent incoming and outgoing traffic at exits often travel at different speeds from the rest of the highway.
For example, if you're driving on a highway through an urban area and they lower the rush hour speed limit to 45 mph (some areas now are adopting such dynamic speed limit signs), the idea is that if cars actually go 40-45 mph, the road will actually be able to handle the amount of traffic while also allowing all the people merging on, getting off at exits, changing lanes, etc. at a safe speed.
If, instead, everyone tries to drive 65-70 in the same area, what can happen is that the merging or changing lanes will eventually cause someone to cut someone else off, which causes sudden braking, which then causes some tailgaters behind them to brake suddenly, others follow and overcompensate because they were going too fast and suddenly see much slower cars, and within a few minutes you have a "traffic wave" of stop-and-go traffic backed up for a few miles which might take a half-hour to resolve, where throughput is dramatically reduced. (How many times have you gotten to the end after sitting through 10 minutes of such stop-and-go traffic waves, and there's nothing there -- no accident, no merge, etc.? This is often the kind of thing that happened.)
At a slower speed, the slower car may not have been forced to "cut someone off" in the first place, or if he does, the impact of a bit of braking may not cause such massive changes and overcompensation. Traffic thus recovers faster and throughput is maximized.