Slashdot Mirror
NHTSA Gives Green Light To Self-Driving Cars
New submitter tyme writes: Reuters reports that the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) told Google that it would recognize the artificial intelligence in a self-driving car as the "driver" (rather than any of the occupants). The letter also says that NHTSA will write safety rules for self-driving cars in the next six months, paving the way for deployment of self-driving cars in large numbers.
If I don't have to lose an hour each way on maintaining moderate concentration, moving out of the suburbs into the country suddenly becomes feasible. Sweet! NHTSA approval is a major milestone in this becoming a reality.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
I wouldn't be surprised if the "driver" was considered a "minor", and the person in the driver's seat was considered to be in an overseeing position with overall responsibility for ensuring that an accident did not occur. Obviously, that would require that the "adult" have the ability to take over safely and at least get the car pulled over to the shoulder or to evade a problem. More to the point, the "adult" would have to be paying attention to some degree.
I doubt that anyone is going to allow the driver to be completely off the hook for this, although they could simply set it up so that the owner was responsible if they were not keeping their car patched.
But with the consequence that the first accident of note will result in all kinds of problems for EVERY instance of that model running in EVERY model of that self-driving car, rather than just a single driver being an idiot.
Assuming that accident is the fault of the AI, then you can reasonably expect a patch within a week, a month if the issue is extremely complicated. Good luck fixing human drivers this efficiently.
That's my major problem with this technology: there's an awful lot vague answers to specific questions.
A "self driving car" means you put little Timmy in it, send him to school, and monitor it on your cell phone to confirm he gets out in the right place and a teacher has collected him ... or it means you come out of a bar, fall into the backseat, and say "home, James" ... or it means grandpa who has lost his vision and his driver's license can get in and say "take me to my doctor's appointment".
No driver's license or legal responsibility for operating the vehicle at all. You are livestock being transported. You're not driving or operating, you simply told it your destination.
This bizarre model in which the car drives, except when it doesn't, and with no clear demarcation between is damned near impossible to make sense of.
If the car decides it's got no idea what to do, and it just says "you're in charge", and before you even know what's happening you're in an accident .. and the logs say "human was driving, his fault", you're screwed. Or, worse, someone builds in code which lies and just says "human was driving" 5 minute before any crash is triggered (so they can avoid liability).
There can't be a gray area between who is in charge and who isn't. And paying for liability insurance when the computer is in charge sounds moronic to me, why would you do that? Are you accepting liability on behalf of the computer or something?
Self-driving-ish cars? Autonom-ish cars? It just seems like everybody is pretending this is a solved issue, and I don't believe it is.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Maybe at first, but in the long term humans will not even know what it means to drive a vehicle. Ultimately it will come down to safety... once they get all this figured out it will just be too risky to have humans manually driving. Software can be buggy but humans are reckless. Software bugs can be fixed but we have not figured out an effective way to keep people from being reckless.