Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian
1–10 of 107 posts
Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian
#2The thing that worries me about semi-autonomous cars is that we might end up in the same place we've ended up with aircraft. Aircraft are sufficiently autonomous in nominal conditions that pilot skills atrophy, and then when the plane encounters adverse conditions, these de-skilled pilots simply do not respond correctly to the problem, crashing the plane. Specifically, I'm thinking of something like Air France Flight 447, where it turned out that the pilot and co-pilot had lost familiarity with how the Airbus A330 behaved while at cruising altitude.
Similarly, I'm worried that auto-drive and smart cruise control systems will take care of highway driving in the normal case, but when things go wrong and the auto-driver disengages, the human at the wheel will have forgotten that a car traveling at 60mph behaves differently than one traveling at 25mph. With aircraft, we can mitigate this risk by forcing pilots to spend extra time in the simulator, keeing their feel for the aircraft from decaying too badly. I'm not sure what the solution is for drivers. Maybe we can force everyone to play a racing sim for a few hours every month ;)
Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian
#3I must be missing something, because it seems like Mr. Mindell is saying cars shouldn't be fully driverless because they can't be. He cites numerous examples of other promised automation technologies that seem to have become a pipe dream over the past several decades.
Except, Google's driverless cars have now logged over a million fully automated miles. It is a proven technology. These aren't exploratory machines going where no human has gone before, they're out there on the road doing what we've all been doing for a hundred years already.
I get the impression this article is just a shill for his book.
Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian
#4The thing that worries me about semi-autonomous cars is that we might end up in the same place we've ended up with aircraft. Aircraft are sufficiently autonomous in nominal conditions that pilot skills atrophy, and then when the plane encounters adverse conditions, these de-skilled pilots simply do not respond correctly to the problem, crashing the plane. Specifically, I'm thinking of something like Air France Flight…
This danger will be avoided in automobiles by making human control impossible as soon as that makes any sense. There will be no steering wheel, the front seat will face backwards to facilitate conversation, and accident rates will plummet. The thing that robocars can do, which roboplanes cannot, is slow down or stop completely when faced with vexing situations.
Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian
#5The thing that worries me about semi-autonomous cars is that we might end up in the same place we've ended up with aircraft. Aircraft are sufficiently autonomous in nominal conditions that pilot skills atrophy, and then when the plane encounters adverse conditions, these de-skilled pilots simply do not respond correctly to the problem, crashing the plane. Specifically, I'm thinking of something like Air France Flight…
Silly suggestion: have the copilot pilot spend the flight playing crash-recovery scenarios that reset every `random.randint(30,90)` minutes. When there is an actual emergency, plug him in to the actual avionics. It would be kinda like [work of fiction you probably should have read by now].
Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian
#6The thing that worries me about semi-autonomous cars is that we might end up in the same place we've ended up with aircraft. Aircraft are sufficiently autonomous in nominal conditions that pilot skills atrophy, and then when the plane encounters adverse conditions, these de-skilled pilots simply do not respond correctly to the problem, crashing the plane. Specifically, I'm thinking of something like Air France Flight…
I thought the pilots got confused because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_control_modes#Alternate... not, particularly, because of de-skilling. I'm going to use a stupid metaphor, that's perhaps ton totally apt. In that case it's kind of like reversing the gas and break pedals. 99.9% of the time, practically all your time behind the wheel the car behaves one way, but in this one special circumstance, the 'normal' emergency reaction becomes exactly the wrong thing to do. Hit the brake not the gas, but the pedals are backwards.
Yeah, maybe drivers will deskill. cars will fully automate much faster than planes. google's little fleet has racked up a million miles. The 80% solutions will turn into 95% solutions in a few iterations, then 99.99% solutions in a few more, then a long tail of fixing edge cases as they are discovered.
Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian
#7The Apollo program is hardly as convincing an example as TFA seems to think. That was early days for computing power. Humans have landed scores of other craft on various other bodies in the solar system, and that landing has been fully automated in every other case. If a manned moon mission were planned today it would probably be completely automated.
Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian
#8The thing that worries me about semi-autonomous cars is that we might end up in the same place we've ended up with aircraft. Aircraft are sufficiently autonomous in nominal conditions that pilot skills atrophy, and then when the plane encounters adverse conditions, these de-skilled pilots simply do not respond correctly to the problem, crashing the plane. Specifically, I'm thinking of something like Air France Flight…
Silly suggestion: have the copilot pilot spend the flight playing crash-recovery scenarios that reset every `random.randint(30,90)` minutes. When there is an actual emergency, plug him in to the actual avionics. It would be kinda like [work of fiction you probably should have read by now].
Closest that comes to mind is Ender's Game. Ender doing simulations that abruptly increase in difficulty.
Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian
#9He is comparing situations where human decision makers are highly trained professionals such as astronauts and passenger plane pilot to daily driving situations where the average human decision maker is more likely to be an idiot(people switch off while driving) distracted by his smartphone.
Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian
#10The thing that worries me about semi-autonomous cars is that we might end up in the same place we've ended up with aircraft. Aircraft are sufficiently autonomous in nominal conditions that pilot skills atrophy, and then when the plane encounters adverse conditions, these de-skilled pilots simply do not respond correctly to the problem, crashing the plane. Specifically, I'm thinking of something like Air France Flight…
I thought the pilots got confused because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_control_modes#Alternate... not, particularly, because of de-skilling. I'm going to use a stupid metaphor, that's perhaps ton totally apt. In that case it's kind of like reversing the gas and break pedals. 99.9% of the time, practically all your time behind the wheel the car behaves one way, but in this one special circumstance, the 'nor…
While the confusion over normal mode and alternate mode did play a role in the crash, the BEA report investigating the crash found the following six proximate causes [1]:
- temporary inconsistency between the measured speeds, likely as a result of
the obstruction of the pitot tubes by ice crystals, causing autopilot
disconnection and reconfiguration to alternate law;
- the crew made inappropriate control inputs that destabilized the flight
path;
- the crew failed to follow appropriate procedure for loss of displayed
airspeed information;
- the crew were late in identifying and correcting the deviation from the
flight path;
- the crew lacked understanding of the approach to stall;
- the crew failed to recognize that the aircraft had stalled and
consequently did not make inputs that would have made it possible to
recover from the stall.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Final_re...