Nobody is going to tax you for not using something, but taxes that are currently being used to pay for infrastructure or other government services will need to be recovered somehow. In this case it will most likely come from a use tax on your car powered by your electricity, but on a public road. But there is no guarantee that it won't come from somewhere else (e.g. taxing solar panels, property tax, income tax,...), although that would be less efficient.
You do realize that stopping a few inches behind the line is also okay, don't you? You don't have to know the 'exact amount', but if you can't stop before a clearly marked line (or pedestrian or wall or whatever) and often go a few inches past that line (or pedestrian or wall) then you shouldn't be driving. Are you really that out of control with your vehicle?
You yourself admitted the jaywalking laws are stupid at times, so how do you get off criticizing me for it? So yes, we both agree the law, as written, is not useful. The law is certainly not for my convenience because I know how to walk around traffic and while driving how to avoid any pedestrian who doesn't have a death wish. So the law should be that pedestrians can't cross where and when they impede traffic.. Likewise, if it were so hard to stop before a fixed line then the law should be that you have to stop before X inches past the line.
There's a reason most of the speeding cameras don't trigger until you've done some percentage above the speed limit.
Yes, the reason is that a cars speedometer is not a finely calibrated device and the average driver doesn't really know if they're going 44 or 53 when their speedometer says 50.
How many judges do you think would throw out a speeding ticket if you were doing 50.5 km/h in a 50 km/h zone? Would you even be able to tell if you were going 1% over the speed limit? Shall we also have police start handing out fines for jaywalking on empty streets?
See, you answered your own question, so you know your analogy is absurd. Drivers CAN tell that their car is in the intersection and they CAN tell whether their car has a speed of zero (i.e. come to a complete stop). If the law is not going to be enforced then it shouldn't be a law.
Shall we also have police start handing out fines for jaywalking on empty streets?
Yes they should. Then maybe those poorly written jaywalking laws would be repealed rather than be an opportunity for the police to hassle whoever they sort of feel like shaking down that day. If YOU don't think the law is useful then your solution is to just violate it when it suits you? Why not advocate for a clearer, more useful law instead?
What difference does that make, other than you nitpicking the nitpicker? Failure to completely stop before the intersection, even by inches, is an infraction and can be finable.
Reread the original article. While not associated with Uber, you will find insight as to the reason for the NDAs and whether or not I know what I am talking about or not. For record, I know more about self-driving cars and taxi services than you could possibly imagine.
I grant that you may indeed have some insight or special knowledge, but it's really a shame because the only thing that you might possibly have an informed opinion on is the one thing you can't talk about. Darn the luck.
Too much said already. Go wait for consumer grade self driving cars or whatever. That's not where the money is and Google knows it, at least not yet.
Once again you flaunt your victory over your strawman. Good job proving us all wrong that consumer ready self-driving cars are not coming out in the next model year. But apparently YOU still think that the reason for this is that Google can't figure out how to enter an address into a computer and that they will have to wait for perfect speech recognition and a universal translator. You're right, but I hope this kind of lucky guess is not the secret to your VC business.
Nothing you say in your post contains any insight nor is it relevant to what I've posted or anything else any reasonable person has stated in this thread. If you think Google is smart because they are not claiming their cars will be uncrashable then you have an extremely low bar for smart.
BTW, today I can have a car pick me up after just keying something in my phone and I can even have it drop me off where I want to go without ever saying anything to the driver. So your definition of "any time soon" is also way off.
so don't assume by my re-voicing concerns already raised by other VCs that this somehow means I am anti technology...
That's not why I think that that and that's probably not why many of your posts have been modded down. It's that your comments are either ill-informed or poorly thought out. In the few cases they have been accurate they have been obvious. You keep trying to sound like a reasonable knowledgeable person, but the only person you're successfully debating is the strawman you've constructed to make yourself sound impressive.
Are you going to tell us one more time that rushing designs is not a good thing? You preach the obvious as if it were insightful and/or relevant. It's neither, so unless you are going to create a compelling argument that these cars are being rushed to market too soon you might consider dropping this redundant argument. Hint: presuming that nobody will solve the problem of how to input an address into a computer within the next 20 years is probably not going to help your position.
by Google's estimate, it will take 20 years before there are enough of such vehicles on the road to effectively mitigate the risk from drivers not driving these cars. Don't like the 20 year number, go talk to Google.
Do you have a reference for that? I'm guessing that you are totally misunderstanding or misrepresenting what they've said, as you have in just about every post you've made here.
And if, as you believe, that 1/2 the posters to slashdot could solve the remaining problems Google is facing before going live, well, maybe Google should hang out here more often and pick their brains. One would think, though, that their engineers are better equipped to deal with the issues than the average slashdotter. But who knows, maybe you are right. If so, it's time to unload some Google shares.
Yes, the Google engineers working on the project are much, much smarter than the average slashdotter, but once again you have completely misunderstood what's been said to you. This happens so often it seems like it must be willful ignorance on your part. But to be even more abundantly clear, those Google engineers are indeed going to be hard at work solving the problems that you haven't even considered. NOT the ridiculous problems you've pulled out of your butt that hardly deserve mentioning other than indicating that (despite the mysterious inside info you have which requires multiple NDAs) you have zero technical knowledge on self-driving cars work, taxi services, or car sharing services work.
So I'm not shorting Google, I'm shorting your company. Although I will have to consider the possibility that your business model is just to pretend to be incredibly dumb on slashdot so that other slashdotters will give you all their clever ideas for free.
According to the poster you are replying to there are no such things as small accidents - every accident results in a total loss of the vehicle and the maximum liability damage. But let's ignore that for now.
It's a valid question regarding the different spreads of the amount of damage, but nobody worth listening to will just say that car X is safer than car Y simply because it has fewer accidents per mile. But the 1 in 300,000 stat for Google cars is pure speculation. The current driving record is simply a promising indication of how safe the car currently is (better than people think) and how much better it can be in 5, 10 or 20 years.
It's also speculation that accidents in a self-driving car would be more serious. Certainly some minor accidents like you mentioned will be avoided a self-driving car, but there will certainly be some (at least in the short term) that a human driver would have avoided that a Google car does not. But even more important is that it's quite reasonable to surmise that many accidents that would be considered serious would be far more catastrophic with a human driver at the wheel. A self-driving car will often be able to minimize an accident even when it can't outright avoid it (e.g. it might prevent the car from getting pushed into an intersection in a rear end collision or it might drive into a sign post rather than get t-boned by a previously undetected car).
Only in your head is 20 years off a "rush to production." But yes, many of the problems will take many years to solve, however, not the FUD you're throwing out there. Those "problems" are in some cases actually benefits, others of your "problems" have already been solved and the rest can be solved by half the posters to slashdot if they are not afraid of trying (which obviously you are). What's next, are you going to complain that the animatronic driver is not lifelike enough?
Yes, modeling the effect of speed limits on the economy would be a terribly complex problem. But probably not as complex as modeling global climate, and lots of people are enthusiastically tackling that problem.
I'm certainly not saying that those setting policy shouldn't factor in every possible variable, nor that they couldn't do a halfway decent job at it (eventually). But I am saying that we (you and I) right here and right now in this discussion can't do so and thus you continue to make assumptions that not only haven't been proven, but are highly questionable, IMO.
The opposite can also be asserted, with at least as much validity: there's no logical reason why a driving algorithm, which is a very different animal than a human driver, should be equally unsafe as a human driver.
Either you didn't understand what you quoted or you are making an impossible statement. If you want to assert that self-driving cars should have their speed limited lowered so that they are much, much safer than humans, I think the burden is on you to come up with at least a compelling argument for why that should be. You make that statement as if it were obvious and I'm once again simply asking what rational (non-emotional) reason do you have for that?
You know how a barber sometimes nicks your ears with his clippers or scissors? Suppose a robot barber is invented, and its astute sensors and precision control make nicks a thing of the past. Would ColdSam be out there saying, "speed the thing up until it nicks my ears just as often as my old barber did! Any other course of action would be illogical."
Absolutely, wouldn't you? If I could get a haircut in one minute and it cost 1/4 of the price then I would certainly accept the same risk of nicking as I get from my human barber. Once again, what rational reason would you have for not taking that option? How much extra would I pay and how much longer would I be willing to sit there to reduce the nicks by 100 fold? Very, very little. If I were that concerned about nicks then I would tell my current barber to slow down even further and pay him extra for his time. Exactly as I would a human driver.
But will that scenario (drivers getting bored) be any worse in terms of total number of accidents? I don't think so.
I think a far more likely scenario is that an alert (or semi-alert) driver will overreact to a situation that the self-driving car is safely in control of. No doubt part of the driving algorithm will not just to to make the car drive safe, but to make it always appear safe to the passengers (which might actually sacrifice some safety or speed).
These problems are only solvable if you bother to spend a minute to think about them. Who has time for that? I'll believe self-driving taxis can work the day they're finally able to put a man on the moon.
Jeez, Joe. How many dumb excuses are you going to manufacture in a feeble attempt to discredit self-driving cars? Just about every circumstance you mention happens today with regular taxis and current drivers. Do you think NYC taxi drivers today get 100% fidelity in understanding the destinations of their passengers? It's far more likely that the driver himself will have an accent, but even then you are not accounting for the millions of passengers who speak little or no English. The reality is that even with real taxi drivers the destination will increasingly be communicated non-verbally. You punch in where you want to go on your smart phone and the car picks you up, drops you off and you get charged automatically. No struggling to understand which Hyatt you mean, or who gets which cab.
For whatever reason, you don't like change, but please try a little harder to come up with some plausible problems that don't exist today. Just about every post you've made on this thread is filled with faulty assumptions and bad math.
Which just goes to show how ridiculous the current DUI laws are (or at least how they are enforced). By this same logic you should not be allowed to drive a drunk home, you never know when they're going to yank on the steering wheel, throw on the emergency brake,....
Now you are bringing in cost as another factor. I thought about mentioning that, but it was obvious and yet another tangent to the core discussion. I am quite willing to entertain the economic discussion about putting a price on human life (last I checked about $10M for the average american, which your hypothetical seems to support). However, this makes the problem almost impossibly complicated. In a world where Google Drive 4.2.3 is controlling all cars and the top speed is 137.339 we also save millions of hours of productivity wasted on the road and possibly a lot of fuel by not hanging out in traffic, etc. That alone may offset the extra cost of a self-driving car. So let's not bring that into the discussion.
The bottom line is that, all other things being equal, there is no logical reason for a machine driven car to have a lower fatality rate than a human driven car. If you want to write a law that allows variable safety laws based on the cost of the vehicle, I'd listen to it, but that is a slippery slope.
Care to tell me how it went when you tried explaining to one of your friends how self-driven cars can't evade potholes and won't be able to within the next 20 years? How long did it take for them to stop laughing? You're clearly grasping at straws if you are going to continue to defend such utter nonsense. This alone is enough to make your position ridiculous. (For further laughs tell them your fears of your self-driving car swerving into a tree because it was avoiding a squashed squirrel. You truly live in your own little bubble, don't you?)
BTW, there is a huge difference between accepting everything in this report and your claims that no self-driving cars will operate on regular roads in the foreseeable future. The latter WILL happen and it won't take 20 years. However, it might take 10, 20 or 50 years to have truly autonomous and passengerless vehicles on every significant road, but that will happen too.
Really? Why should the calculus differ whether a human is driving or a machine is driving? There is no logical reason for it, just emotional reasons, and do we want to kowtow to ignorant public opinion at the expense of human life (any more than we already do)?
Put another way, let's say that we are currently willing to accept 1 fatality for every 100M miles driven. If a self-driving car can drive 100mph with the same risk we should let it. Of course, knowing this new standard of safety is possible may mean that the public is now only willing to tolerate 0.1 fatalities per 100M miles which may limit self-driving cars to 65mph. BUT this also means that we should drastically lower the speed limit for human driven cars until they get to the same safety levels or ban them outright if it can't be done.
You might want to talk to one of those people who have followed AI for the last 50 years, they have some valuable insight to teach you. The initial promises of AI were indeed unrealistic which is why very few are tackling the problem of forcing computers to think like people, instead they focus on particular finite problems and solve those. And they've had amazing success, which you've seemed not to have noticed. Self-driving cars is one of these finite problems that you naively seem to think they're trying to solve by making cars think like humans.
Your pathetic example of a simple pothole shows how fearful you are of change and your general lack of knowledge and vision. Find the smartest person in the room you are in right now (someone, unlike me, who you respect and trust) and try to make the case to them that driverless cars can not now and will not in 20 years be able to detect and avoid potholes. Good luck with that. The reality is that not only can they do a decent job of it now (probably better than the average driver on an average day), they will continue to get better with every revision and they will do things that few or no human driver will be able to, e.g. they WILL be able to detect potholes that are hidden under water (unlike the superhumans you imagine are driving today) and they will be able to avoid those potholes without clipping the cyclist you didn't see next to you and without overreacting causing traffic nearby to freak out and they will be able to notify other cars that the pothole exists (especially if it's one of the rare cases that it couldn't detect it without driving over it) and it will be able to notify the city about the pothole.
You think you found a few examples today that driverless cars won't be able to handle? In the same amount of driving, the Google self-driving car detected 1000 possible threats that YOU didn't have a clue about. However, it's more humble than you are and doesn't rub your nose in it.
You can cling to your imaginary scenarios that you think self-driving cars will be unable to handle, there are actually some (albeit not the ones you mentioned). You can keep changing the definitions to make your predictions seem reasonable (your definition of "minor" road will become ever narrower, e.g.). This is one of those happy cases where you don't have to take my word for it, you'll see it slowly happening in the next few years (although your memory of this and your other conversations on the topic) will have been rewritten in your head.
Your fear is understandable and all too common which is why it will take longer than it should to get driverless cars on the road. But hey, a few hundred thousand lives is a small price to pay for keeping things the same as they ever was for as long as possible without scary robots taking our lives in their hands.
And I agreed with you, giving an example of how it would work with self driving cars "in the real world." However, this tangent was still totally unnecessary since the original post never stated that faster is always better - it was just an excuse for someone to flaunt their meagre knowledge of aerodynamics.
You clearly know little about self driving cars and perhaps technology in general. Just about every one of those situations the current best self driving cars could handle relatively gracefully, certainly better than a significant number of drivers. You seem to feel that it has to do better than the best possible driver (of which you are the one, apparently).
In at least one of the cases (possibly more) you are OVERreacting and causing a dangerous situation (while being the asshole you claim to think the auto might be). You absolutely should not stop for a random person standing by the side of the road because you think they might want to cross.
But hey, I have no doubt that you'll keep thinking that self driving cars will never be practical no matter what evidence is put before you, the same way you think machines won't ever be able to build products as well as humans, or that computers can't beat humans at problem solving in such as chess or say, Jeopardy!....
This is an excellent point, although I would state it more simply as "the top speed of a driving algorithm should be the speed at which it can drive as safely as a human driving the established speed limit." The established speed limit presumably reflects the amount of carnage we are willing to accept, which will no doubt change over time. Also, the top speed should be dependent on the car and its current condition - that is true whether it's autodriving or not, but will be easier to enforce in the future.
I especially love the idea that cars will be sold (or rented) based on these limits, which in fact spurs competition to make the cars safer. Most consumers could get their heads around that, whereas understanding the difference in 1 in 10,000,000 chance of fatal accident vs. 1 in 12,000,000 is incomprehensible.
Presumably the driver would have either direct control over such a preference (time vs. economy vs. safety) or the car would adjust to the route and or requested timing. But the post was merely referring to the speed limits and not the actual speeds so this is really an unnecessary tangent.
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Nobody is going to tax you for not using something, but taxes that are currently being used to pay for infrastructure or other government services will need to be recovered somehow. In this case it will most likely come from a use tax on your car powered by your electricity, but on a public road. But there is no guarantee that it won't come from somewhere else (e.g. taxing solar panels, property tax, income tax, ...), although that would be less efficient.
That was quite obviously a faulty edit. Your math skills are great, your reading comprehension not so much.
You do realize that stopping a few inches behind the line is also okay, don't you? You don't have to know the 'exact amount', but if you can't stop before a clearly marked line (or pedestrian or wall or whatever) and often go a few inches past that line (or pedestrian or wall) then you shouldn't be driving. Are you really that out of control with your vehicle?
You yourself admitted the jaywalking laws are stupid at times, so how do you get off criticizing me for it? So yes, we both agree the law, as written, is not useful. The law is certainly not for my convenience because I know how to walk around traffic and while driving how to avoid any pedestrian who doesn't have a death wish. So the law should be that pedestrians can't cross where and when they impede traffic.. Likewise, if it were so hard to stop before a fixed line then the law should be that you have to stop before X inches past the line.
There's a reason most of the speeding cameras don't trigger until you've done some percentage above the speed limit.
Yes, the reason is that a cars speedometer is not a finely calibrated device and the average driver doesn't really know if they're going 44 or 53 when their speedometer says 50.
How many judges do you think would throw out a speeding ticket if you were doing 50.5 km/h in a 50 km/h zone? Would you even be able to tell if you were going 1% over the speed limit? Shall we also have police start handing out fines for jaywalking on empty streets?
See, you answered your own question, so you know your analogy is absurd. Drivers CAN tell that their car is in the intersection and they CAN tell whether their car has a speed of zero (i.e. come to a complete stop). If the law is not going to be enforced then it shouldn't be a law.
Shall we also have police start handing out fines for jaywalking on empty streets?
Yes they should. Then maybe those poorly written jaywalking laws would be repealed rather than be an opportunity for the police to hassle whoever they sort of feel like shaking down that day. If YOU don't think the law is useful then your solution is to just violate it when it suits you? Why not advocate for a clearer, more useful law instead?
What difference does that make, other than you nitpicking the nitpicker? Failure to completely stop before the intersection, even by inches, is an infraction and can be finable.
Reread the original article. While not associated with Uber, you will find insight as to the reason for the NDAs and whether or not I know what I am talking about or not. For record, I know more about self-driving cars and taxi services than you could possibly imagine.
I grant that you may indeed have some insight or special knowledge, but it's really a shame because the only thing that you might possibly have an informed opinion on is the one thing you can't talk about. Darn the luck.
Too much said already. Go wait for consumer grade self driving cars or whatever. That's not where the money is and Google knows it, at least not yet.
Once again you flaunt your victory over your strawman. Good job proving us all wrong that consumer ready self-driving cars are not coming out in the next model year. But apparently YOU still think that the reason for this is that Google can't figure out how to enter an address into a computer and that they will have to wait for perfect speech recognition and a universal translator. You're right, but I hope this kind of lucky guess is not the secret to your VC business.
Nothing you say in your post contains any insight nor is it relevant to what I've posted or anything else any reasonable person has stated in this thread. If you think Google is smart because they are not claiming their cars will be uncrashable then you have an extremely low bar for smart.
BTW, today I can have a car pick me up after just keying something in my phone and I can even have it drop me off where I want to go without ever saying anything to the driver. So your definition of "any time soon" is also way off.
so don't assume by my re-voicing concerns already raised by other VCs that this somehow means I am anti technology ...
That's not why I think that that and that's probably not why many of your posts have been modded down. It's that your comments are either ill-informed or poorly thought out. In the few cases they have been accurate they have been obvious. You keep trying to sound like a reasonable knowledgeable person, but the only person you're successfully debating is the strawman you've constructed to make yourself sound impressive.
Are you going to tell us one more time that rushing designs is not a good thing? You preach the obvious as if it were insightful and/or relevant. It's neither, so unless you are going to create a compelling argument that these cars are being rushed to market too soon you might consider dropping this redundant argument. Hint: presuming that nobody will solve the problem of how to input an address into a computer within the next 20 years is probably not going to help your position.
by Google's estimate, it will take 20 years before there are enough of such vehicles on the road to effectively mitigate the risk from drivers not driving these cars. Don't like the 20 year number, go talk to Google.
Do you have a reference for that? I'm guessing that you are totally misunderstanding or misrepresenting what they've said, as you have in just about every post you've made here.
And if, as you believe, that 1/2 the posters to slashdot could solve the remaining problems Google is facing before going live, well, maybe Google should hang out here more often and pick their brains. One would think, though, that their engineers are better equipped to deal with the issues than the average slashdotter. But who knows, maybe you are right. If so, it's time to unload some Google shares.
Yes, the Google engineers working on the project are much, much smarter than the average slashdotter, but once again you have completely misunderstood what's been said to you. This happens so often it seems like it must be willful ignorance on your part. But to be even more abundantly clear, those Google engineers are indeed going to be hard at work solving the problems that you haven't even considered. NOT the ridiculous problems you've pulled out of your butt that hardly deserve mentioning other than indicating that (despite the mysterious inside info you have which requires multiple NDAs) you have zero technical knowledge on self-driving cars work, taxi services, or car sharing services work.
So I'm not shorting Google, I'm shorting your company. Although I will have to consider the possibility that your business model is just to pretend to be incredibly dumb on slashdot so that other slashdotters will give you all their clever ideas for free.
According to the poster you are replying to there are no such things as small accidents - every accident results in a total loss of the vehicle and the maximum liability damage. But let's ignore that for now.
It's a valid question regarding the different spreads of the amount of damage, but nobody worth listening to will just say that car X is safer than car Y simply because it has fewer accidents per mile. But the 1 in 300,000 stat for Google cars is pure speculation. The current driving record is simply a promising indication of how safe the car currently is (better than people think) and how much better it can be in 5, 10 or 20 years.
It's also speculation that accidents in a self-driving car would be more serious. Certainly some minor accidents like you mentioned will be avoided a self-driving car, but there will certainly be some (at least in the short term) that a human driver would have avoided that a Google car does not. But even more important is that it's quite reasonable to surmise that many accidents that would be considered serious would be far more catastrophic with a human driver at the wheel. A self-driving car will often be able to minimize an accident even when it can't outright avoid it (e.g. it might prevent the car from getting pushed into an intersection in a rear end collision or it might drive into a sign post rather than get t-boned by a previously undetected car).
Only in your head is 20 years off a "rush to production." But yes, many of the problems will take many years to solve, however, not the FUD you're throwing out there. Those "problems" are in some cases actually benefits, others of your "problems" have already been solved and the rest can be solved by half the posters to slashdot if they are not afraid of trying (which obviously you are). What's next, are you going to complain that the animatronic driver is not lifelike enough?
Yes, modeling the effect of speed limits on the economy would be a terribly complex problem. But probably not as complex as modeling global climate, and lots of people are enthusiastically tackling that problem.
I'm certainly not saying that those setting policy shouldn't factor in every possible variable, nor that they couldn't do a halfway decent job at it (eventually). But I am saying that we (you and I) right here and right now in this discussion can't do so and thus you continue to make assumptions that not only haven't been proven, but are highly questionable, IMO.
The opposite can also be asserted, with at least as much validity: there's no logical reason why a driving algorithm, which is a very different animal than a human driver, should be equally unsafe as a human driver.
Either you didn't understand what you quoted or you are making an impossible statement. If you want to assert that self-driving cars should have their speed limited lowered so that they are much, much safer than humans, I think the burden is on you to come up with at least a compelling argument for why that should be. You make that statement as if it were obvious and I'm once again simply asking what rational (non-emotional) reason do you have for that?
You know how a barber sometimes nicks your ears with his clippers or scissors? Suppose a robot barber is invented, and its astute sensors and precision control make nicks a thing of the past. Would ColdSam be out there saying, "speed the thing up until it nicks my ears just as often as my old barber did! Any other course of action would be illogical."
Absolutely, wouldn't you? If I could get a haircut in one minute and it cost 1/4 of the price then I would certainly accept the same risk of nicking as I get from my human barber. Once again, what rational reason would you have for not taking that option? How much extra would I pay and how much longer would I be willing to sit there to reduce the nicks by 100 fold? Very, very little. If I were that concerned about nicks then I would tell my current barber to slow down even further and pay him extra for his time. Exactly as I would a human driver.
But will that scenario (drivers getting bored) be any worse in terms of total number of accidents? I don't think so.
I think a far more likely scenario is that an alert (or semi-alert) driver will overreact to a situation that the self-driving car is safely in control of. No doubt part of the driving algorithm will not just to to make the car drive safe, but to make it always appear safe to the passengers (which might actually sacrifice some safety or speed).
These problems are only solvable if you bother to spend a minute to think about them. Who has time for that? I'll believe self-driving taxis can work the day they're finally able to put a man on the moon.
That is not the point you were trying to make and it it wouldn't be relevant anyway. But everyone else already knows that, so I won't elaborate.
Clearly, whatever you say will be twisted into some unrecognizable distortion by this guy. Everyone else knew what you meant.
Jeez, Joe. How many dumb excuses are you going to manufacture in a feeble attempt to discredit self-driving cars? Just about every circumstance you mention happens today with regular taxis and current drivers. Do you think NYC taxi drivers today get 100% fidelity in understanding the destinations of their passengers? It's far more likely that the driver himself will have an accent, but even then you are not accounting for the millions of passengers who speak little or no English. The reality is that even with real taxi drivers the destination will increasingly be communicated non-verbally. You punch in where you want to go on your smart phone and the car picks you up, drops you off and you get charged automatically. No struggling to understand which Hyatt you mean, or who gets which cab.
For whatever reason, you don't like change, but please try a little harder to come up with some plausible problems that don't exist today. Just about every post you've made on this thread is filled with faulty assumptions and bad math.
Which just goes to show how ridiculous the current DUI laws are (or at least how they are enforced). By this same logic you should not be allowed to drive a drunk home, you never know when they're going to yank on the steering wheel, throw on the emergency brake, ....
Now you are bringing in cost as another factor. I thought about mentioning that, but it was obvious and yet another tangent to the core discussion. I am quite willing to entertain the economic discussion about putting a price on human life (last I checked about $10M for the average american, which your hypothetical seems to support). However, this makes the problem almost impossibly complicated. In a world where Google Drive 4.2.3 is controlling all cars and the top speed is 137.339 we also save millions of hours of productivity wasted on the road and possibly a lot of fuel by not hanging out in traffic, etc. That alone may offset the extra cost of a self-driving car. So let's not bring that into the discussion.
The bottom line is that, all other things being equal, there is no logical reason for a machine driven car to have a lower fatality rate than a human driven car. If you want to write a law that allows variable safety laws based on the cost of the vehicle, I'd listen to it, but that is a slippery slope.
Care to tell me how it went when you tried explaining to one of your friends how self-driven cars can't evade potholes and won't be able to within the next 20 years? How long did it take for them to stop laughing? You're clearly grasping at straws if you are going to continue to defend such utter nonsense. This alone is enough to make your position ridiculous. (For further laughs tell them your fears of your self-driving car swerving into a tree because it was avoiding a squashed squirrel. You truly live in your own little bubble, don't you?)
BTW, there is a huge difference between accepting everything in this report and your claims that no self-driving cars will operate on regular roads in the foreseeable future. The latter WILL happen and it won't take 20 years. However, it might take 10, 20 or 50 years to have truly autonomous and passengerless vehicles on every significant road, but that will happen too.
Really? Why should the calculus differ whether a human is driving or a machine is driving? There is no logical reason for it, just emotional reasons, and do we want to kowtow to ignorant public opinion at the expense of human life (any more than we already do)?
Put another way, let's say that we are currently willing to accept 1 fatality for every 100M miles driven. If a self-driving car can drive 100mph with the same risk we should let it. Of course, knowing this new standard of safety is possible may mean that the public is now only willing to tolerate 0.1 fatalities per 100M miles which may limit self-driving cars to 65mph. BUT this also means that we should drastically lower the speed limit for human driven cars until they get to the same safety levels or ban them outright if it can't be done.
You might want to talk to one of those people who have followed AI for the last 50 years, they have some valuable insight to teach you. The initial promises of AI were indeed unrealistic which is why very few are tackling the problem of forcing computers to think like people, instead they focus on particular finite problems and solve those. And they've had amazing success, which you've seemed not to have noticed. Self-driving cars is one of these finite problems that you naively seem to think they're trying to solve by making cars think like humans.
Your pathetic example of a simple pothole shows how fearful you are of change and your general lack of knowledge and vision. Find the smartest person in the room you are in right now (someone, unlike me, who you respect and trust) and try to make the case to them that driverless cars can not now and will not in 20 years be able to detect and avoid potholes. Good luck with that. The reality is that not only can they do a decent job of it now (probably better than the average driver on an average day), they will continue to get better with every revision and they will do things that few or no human driver will be able to, e.g. they WILL be able to detect potholes that are hidden under water (unlike the superhumans you imagine are driving today) and they will be able to avoid those potholes without clipping the cyclist you didn't see next to you and without overreacting causing traffic nearby to freak out and they will be able to notify other cars that the pothole exists (especially if it's one of the rare cases that it couldn't detect it without driving over it) and it will be able to notify the city about the pothole.
You think you found a few examples today that driverless cars won't be able to handle? In the same amount of driving, the Google self-driving car detected 1000 possible threats that YOU didn't have a clue about. However, it's more humble than you are and doesn't rub your nose in it.
You can cling to your imaginary scenarios that you think self-driving cars will be unable to handle, there are actually some (albeit not the ones you mentioned). You can keep changing the definitions to make your predictions seem reasonable (your definition of "minor" road will become ever narrower, e.g.). This is one of those happy cases where you don't have to take my word for it, you'll see it slowly happening in the next few years (although your memory of this and your other conversations on the topic) will have been rewritten in your head.
Your fear is understandable and all too common which is why it will take longer than it should to get driverless cars on the road. But hey, a few hundred thousand lives is a small price to pay for keeping things the same as they ever was for as long as possible without scary robots taking our lives in their hands.
And I agreed with you, giving an example of how it would work with self driving cars "in the real world." However, this tangent was still totally unnecessary since the original post never stated that faster is always better - it was just an excuse for someone to flaunt their meagre knowledge of aerodynamics.
You clearly know little about self driving cars and perhaps technology in general. Just about every one of those situations the current best self driving cars could handle relatively gracefully, certainly better than a significant number of drivers. You seem to feel that it has to do better than the best possible driver (of which you are the one, apparently).
In at least one of the cases (possibly more) you are OVERreacting and causing a dangerous situation (while being the asshole you claim to think the auto might be). You absolutely should not stop for a random person standing by the side of the road because you think they might want to cross.
But hey, I have no doubt that you'll keep thinking that self driving cars will never be practical no matter what evidence is put before you, the same way you think machines won't ever be able to build products as well as humans, or that computers can't beat humans at problem solving in such as chess or say, Jeopardy!....
This is an excellent point, although I would state it more simply as "the top speed of a driving algorithm should be the speed at which it can drive as safely as a human driving the established speed limit." The established speed limit presumably reflects the amount of carnage we are willing to accept, which will no doubt change over time. Also, the top speed should be dependent on the car and its current condition - that is true whether it's autodriving or not, but will be easier to enforce in the future.
I especially love the idea that cars will be sold (or rented) based on these limits, which in fact spurs competition to make the cars safer. Most consumers could get their heads around that, whereas understanding the difference in 1 in 10,000,000 chance of fatal accident vs. 1 in 12,000,000 is incomprehensible.
Presumably the driver would have either direct control over such a preference (time vs. economy vs. safety) or the car would adjust to the route and or requested timing. But the post was merely referring to the speed limits and not the actual speeds so this is really an unnecessary tangent.