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Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

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Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#71

Post by Animats »

hguant wrote: post #15
jessaustin wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pulling over to the side of the road and putting your blinkers on is (almost) always an acceptable solution to an automotive error. Much harder to pull that off at 35,000 feet.

If you have a problem at cruising altitude, there's usually time to deal with it. Transport planes can glide 100-200 miles from that altitude if they have to. Most aircraft accidents happen during takeoff, approach, or landing. See NTSB reports.[1] High-altitude accidents are mostly in-flight fires, including two events involving lithium batteries.

There is, however, one commercial aircraft crash from problems at altitude (no passengers, ferry flight) worthy of a Darwin Award.[2]

[1] http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/avi... [2] http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/A...

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#73

Post by Lewton »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #68
Lewton wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not completely clear. It depends entirely on how often the human is expected to take over

Basically, the less often the worse. If it's like once every 5 seconds it's fine. Once every 5 minutes, it's dangerous and annoying. Once every hour is a lethal idea.

I was thinking more like once every month

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#74

Post by TeMPOraL »

Lewton wrote: post #73
TeMPOraL wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, the less often the worse. If it's like once every 5 seconds it's fine. Once every 5 minutes, it's dangerous and annoying. Once every hour is a lethal idea.

I was thinking more like once every month

At this point you have to consider the thing 'Karunamon pointed out upthread. If, for some reason, you can't go full-self-driving and such system is safer on aggregate than having humans drive, then it's a good idea to implement it, even if suddenly handing over control once a month is an incredibly dangerous prospect (because with such timespans, the human will not really be expecting to drive and their skills will have atrophied).

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#75

Post by Lewton »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #66
snowwrestler wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree; I think sandworm nailed an essential issue. At the top of this subthread, Zikes claimed that Google's cars are a "proven technology." Not even Google claims that now, and legality is indeed part of that. Driverless elevators are an example of an actual proven technology. There's no human operator standing by to jump on the manual brake in case the automation fails. And if a driverless elevator does fail a…

I agree with you here. Also, the example of "driverless elevator" is excellent; I'll be remembering it for consideration in further discussion about self-driving technologies. Thanks for bringing this up. Also, wtf is with downvoting in both Tesla threads today? Especially 'sandworm101 is taking a heavy hit for bringing up reasonable counterpoints (with most I disagree, but it doesn't change they're reasonable).

His points really are not reasonable at all. He's completely ignoring that humans are generally pretty bad at driving cars and implying that AI driven cars need to be perfect before they should be replacing humans.

If we banned human driving today and replaced it with the current tech (which probably isn't near being ready for actual use), we would still be far better off than we are now.

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#76

Post by icebraining »

snowwrestler wrote: post #31
zhanwei wrote: post #9

He 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.

Even a "switched off" human is benefiting from the supervision of a brain that is far more complex than any computer yet constructed, and has, on average, been trained in driving by decades of experience, and in recognizing patterns of movement by millions of years of evolution. Meanwhile, computers in cars today cannot even reliably translate human throttle inputs into throttle actuations (see: Toyota).

A human brain is also more complex than a computer that can play chess, does that mean the average chess player can generally beat a good chess-playing software? More general complexity does not necessarily imply being better at a specific task - in fact, it can be detrimental.

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#77

Post by pgodzin »

I think the difference between self-driving cars and Apollo program/subs examples is that the cars can be tested much more thoroughly. No matter how good your simulators are for space conditions, you're never going to really know how it's going to work in actual conditions. Self-driving cars can and are logging millions of miles in a variety of conditions, and every common and almost every remote case will be dealt with before launched to the general public.

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#78

Post by icebraining »

snowwrestler wrote: post #52
TeMPOraL wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In context of this discussion we're evaluating the technical drivelessness, not legal one, so Google cars and the hours they logged qualify.

I disagree; I think sandworm nailed an essential issue. At the top of this subthread, Zikes claimed that Google's cars are a "proven technology." Not even Google claims that now, and legality is indeed part of that. Driverless elevators are an example of an actual proven technology. There's no human operator standing by to jump on the manual brake in case the automation fails. And if a driverless elevator does fail a…

When the current elevator models were being tested, they probably had someone ready to press the STOP button if they went awry. Yet they were still the exact same driverless elevators you're talking about, just in a test environment. And so are Google cars currently.

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#79

Post by icebraining »

Animats wrote: post #22
jessaustin wrote: post #7

The 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.

The first moon landings (Surveyor, Lunokhod) were robotic and were completely automated. The boost phase has been completely automated all the way back to the first manned space flights. After all, a monkey made the first flight. Other than lunar landing and some older docking operations, just about everything in space flight has been automated.

Automated or remotely controlled?

Re: Should cars be fully driverless? No, says an MIT engineer and historian

#80

Post by RealityVoid »

snowwrestler wrote: post #31
zhanwei wrote: post #9

He 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.

Even a "switched off" human is benefiting from the supervision of a brain that is far more complex than any computer yet constructed, and has, on average, been trained in driving by decades of experience, and in recognizing patterns of movement by millions of years of evolution. Meanwhile, computers in cars today cannot even reliably translate human throttle inputs into throttle actuations (see: Toyota).

That is not fair. The cars these days can and do it reliably, Toyota was an exception, not the rule. And the state of the art can only get better. A "switched off" human is useless and that creates suffering around it, why not avoid it if we can?
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