Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’
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Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’
#2I'm a big self-driving cars skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art, and it's full of edge cases. So many edge cases.
I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...
Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’
#3I'm a big self-driving cars skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art, and it's full of edge cases. So many edge cases. I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...
except driverless cars have been driving around in California for a couple of years thanks to Google (and the fact that it's legal). Soon the term "driverless" will be like "horseless". Why would you keep your eyes on the road when a machine will do it for you, and with more awareness of its surroundings at 360 degrees, and the ability to judge the position and trajectory/velocity of any object to within a couple of m/s instantly, or react to anything in milliseconds?
Don't kid yourself: humans aren't some kind of perfect driver. A bit of sleepiness, a text message, a tiny distraction in the car, and their responsiveness plummets.
Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’
#4I'm a big self-driving cars skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art, and it's full of edge cases. So many edge cases. I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...
> Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned.
Or until there is a critical mass that people adapt their expectations of how many drivers violate minor road rules, like running a red light or running through a crosswalk.
Also, even if self-driving cars aren't perfect, from the data we have so far, they're still several orders of magnitudes better than regular cars. If every self-driven car today were replaced with a regular car, we would see more crashes, not fewer, overall.
Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’
#5'“It’s always going to follow the rules, I mean, almost to a point where human drivers who get in the car and are like ‘Why is the car doing that?’” said Tom Supple, a Google safety driver during a recent test drive on the streets near Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.'
This is a drum that, like privacy and encryption, we techies need to start banging hard before it's too late. The fact that laws are fundamentally limited by our abilities to enforce them, and that laws are fundamentally written to be enforced by humans with some discretion, is such a deep assumption for us that we don't see it. We irrationally tend to conceive of a law that says "It is a felony to wear your hair in a ponytail on a Tuesday" as an absolute, even though what it really means is "If a police officer spots you with your hair in a ponytail on a Tuesday, and by their discretion arrests you, and at the discretion of a prosecutor charges you, who at the discretion of a judge and jury convicts you, you will be guilty of a felony." All laws actually say that, but that's not how we humans speak or conceptualize them. Also note the importance of a human even spotting the violation in the first place.
So, naturally, when we get technology that can rigidly enforce law, we don't program them with the "real" law, we program them with the text of the law. But the truth is, the text was never passed as a law. When the law was deliberated, everybody was really deliberating the version that involves all the human discretion, and prior to the introduction of computers, the law that was really enforced was the one with all the human discretion. A rigidly-enforced-by-computer law is a fundamentally different law, in the most concrete way possible; actions that you would never have been penalized by the human law result in immediate penalty in the computer world. There's no more concrete way to prove the point that it is a fundamentally different law.
We CAN NOT simply translate the text of the law into computer programs. If we are going to do computer enforcement of laws (and I'm going to drop the question of whether that's a good idea, feel free to debate in replies), we must write new law. By that, I do not merely mean that society has an obligation to write new laws, but that the very act of programming a law is writing a new law into existence, one never deliberated by the processes of democracy. We literally can not simply translate laws into programs. It is impossible. The result is not the same law.
Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’
#6I think the accident statistics are a little misleading because as far as I'm aware (and please correct me if I'm wrong) Google only operates its driverless cars in good weather conditions.
Not that Google doesn't have good reasons for doing so, but the safety of these vehicles might look different if they were operated in the rain and snow.
Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’
#7I'm a big self-driving cars skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art, and it's full of edge cases. So many edge cases. I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...
A huge number of those edge cases are caused by other Human drivers though. The superior solution is to get rid of the human driver. Safety goes way higher and things like highway congestion go way lower. It's clearly superior.
It's only in the near term that it gets a little dicy.
Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’
#8I'm a big self-driving cars skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art, and it's full of edge cases. So many edge cases. I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...
Pretty much. All the summon-a-robocar with an app in 5-10 years predictions seem to merrily ignore all the edge cases having to do with weather, direct driver interactions (e.g waving someone out into traffic), construction, parking in unmarked spaces, etc., etc. I have little doubt that autonomous highway driving for example is both achievable and desirable but a lot of folks extrapolate that to the more general case which is much, much harder.
Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’
#9I think the accident statistics are a little misleading because as far as I'm aware (and please correct me if I'm wrong) Google only operates its driverless cars in good weather conditions. Not that Google doesn't have good reasons for doing so, but the safety of these vehicles might look different if they were operated in the rain and snow.
And mostly on highways.
Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’
#10I'm a big self-driving cars skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art, and it's full of edge cases. So many edge cases. I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...
I think you're making an invalid claim. If half the cars were self-driving and we had just as many accidents, we're still better off because half the people would be freed from driving.
Personally, I would guess that there would still be a reduction in accidents, thus fewer deaths and injuries.