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Self-Driving Features Could Lead To More Sex In Moving Cars, Expert Warns (www.cbc.ca)
An anonymous reader writes: According to CBC.ca, "At least one expert is anticipating that, as the so-called 'smart' cars get smarter, there will eventually be an increase in an unusual form of distracted driving: hanky-panky behind the wheel." Barrie Kirk of the Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence said, "I am predicting that, once computers are doing the driving, there will be a lot more sex in cars. That's one of several things people will do which will inhibit their ability to respond quickly when the computer says to the human, 'Take over.'" Federal officials, who have been tasked with building a regulatory framework to govern driverless cars, highlighted their concerns in briefing notes compiled for Transport Minister Marc Garneau. "Drivers tend to overestimate the performance of automation and will naturally turn their focus away from the road when they turn on their auto-pilot," said the note. The Tesla autopilot feature has been receiving the most criticism as there have been many videos posted online showing Tesla drivers engaged in questionable practices, including reading a newspaper or brushing their teeth.
Inclement weather is not accident avoidance. Especially ice.
That is "Oh shit, I lost traction control on three of my tires!"
The autonomous system cannot determine if the road 100 meters ahead is covered in a thin sheen of black ice or not.
People ARE dumb enough to be fucking behind the wheel while the autonomous system tries to navigate iced up roads.
The best an autonomous system can do is aggregate road data from other autonomous cars nearby to attempt to determine if there is ice ahead. -- a fat load of good that does if your autonomous vehicle is the one that skids out on it first, or if your vehicle is not receiving such telemetry for whatever reason.
I trust the idiot fucking behind the wheel of an autonomous vehicle about as much as I trust a politician not to lie. That is to say, not at all.
Automation makes the driving experience more predictable by removing human error. This is both good and bad. It leads to conditions where the vehicle will make predictably bad choices, but the occupant will believe otherwise.
(why cant autonomous systems detect ice 100 meters ahead?) IR cameras detect if the road is reflective or absorptive of IR spectra. Water in general is IR absorptive. IR cameras cannot tell the difference between a wet surface and an icy one. Likewise, it cannot tell ice from snow, or slush, even if it has a thermometer to tell it that it is below the freezing point outside. (which would itself be prone to anomalous temperature readings from wind chill, or from engine heat.)
It's photons. Surely the human eye is not magic.
The issue with antilock brakes you mention is only partially correct. Most drivers do not know how to properly brake on ice. For drivers that do, they consistently perform better without antilock brakes.
If humans can do a good job of maintaining traction on ice, then we just need to transfer whatever it is we are doing right into an algorithm, so a machine can do the same thing, but with many of orders of magnitude higher precision.
Most drivers are just bad drivers. So, the antilock brakes save lives overall. That does not mean human drivers that know how to actually drive on inclement surfaces are inferior.
The same logic can be applied to autonomous cars.
For starters, they can instruct the vehicle to drive with more caution-- avoiding going 75mph on the icy highway, for instance.
I don;t really trust people to make this decision. I would fully expect idot drivers to tell their cars to go the maximum speed allowable at all times. For that reason I would rather the car decide when conditions are potentially unsafe (i.e. cold, wet, foggy, etc).
Distracted occupants (and I dare say, a person fucking in the car is going to be quite distracted, or else the sex will have to be really bad.) are not going to be so mindful, until the vehicle mistakes an icy road for a wet one, loses traction and either puts them into the center wall, flips them over, or puts them in a ditch.
On the contrary, I'd say that an autonomous vehicle that realizes it's cold and wet and drives more cautiously as a result, might very well drive better than this same douchebag getting a BJ driving down an icy road.