91–100 of 107 posts
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I wouldn't worry too much - a lot of people already die on the roads in fully non-autonomous cars. We only need fewer people to die and it's worth it.
That's a rational approach, I'm not sure that many politicians think like that though.
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.
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True, but cars can already navigate traffic autonomously. And there is much more to landing men on the moon than physics. Check out Tesla's live shipping code: http://jalopnik.com/teslas-autopilot-system-is-awesome-and-c... Are you predicting that cars will never be fully autonomous?
As a website commenter I'm not sure I should predict anything. To explain a bit more my previous message, as complex as going to the moon was, it seems a problem scientists knew how to define. One vehicle, 2 planets, the system is describable. Traffic with lots of agents potentially interacting with every other agent, hence my chaos analogy, lots and lots of variable, ... is blurry. There's successful research to des…
Different aircraft are by and large keeping to the same standard routes, altitudes and holding patterns, which is why mid-air collisions are a thing. (The reason they keep to standards is to make air traffic control easier.)
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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.
So how is the vexing situation resolved? Either the onboard computer must be able to manage 100% of all situations, or the human driver must have an option to take control to resolve it themselves. You can't have a car that makes human control impossible, and then gets itself into vexing situations. You'll be stuck there forever.
It could be a remote pilot (sort-of call center, except the people are trained to remotely drive cars, much like drones are piloted right now).
Then, the situation (and the remote pilot reaction) are sent to the engineering team, analysed and the software is improved.
Rinse and repeat until the need to solve situations is reduced to zero.
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That assumes the tech is crap though, doesn't it? I think there's a case to be made that once the tech has progressed enough, there will be fewer deaths/injuries overall even if some of the number has moved from the "human did something dumb" to "human couldn't take over from autopilot fast enough"
I think the danger is that semi-self-driving with occasional human intervention will be more dangerous than pure human driving. If the interventions are so rare that the average deaths/injuries fall below the current level, then of course we've made some progress. But hopefully by this time we'll be able to go full-auto. It's hard to imagine an extremely unexpected dangerous situation, in which giving control to huma…
I think the mistake people are making is thinking the vehicle is just going to be like 'welp, death imminent in 5 seconds, hairy pink skinned passenger, here ya go! do somefink abooot it!'.
In reality the vehicle is going to be assessing potential risk and let the passenger know when they need to be more attentive, even to the point of simply refusing to operate without the passenger signaling their attentiveness in some manner.
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As a website commenter I'm not sure I should predict anything. To explain a bit more my previous message, as complex as going to the moon was, it seems a problem scientists knew how to define. One vehicle, 2 planets, the system is describable. Traffic with lots of agents potentially interacting with every other agent, hence my chaos analogy, lots and lots of variable, ... is blurry. There's successful research to des…
> Even if flying is inherently complex in itself, there's almost no traffic and almost no obstacle in air. Different aircraft are by and large keeping to the same standard routes, altitudes and holding patterns, which is why mid-air collisions are a thing. (The reason they keep to standards is to make air traffic control easier.)
While the article doesn't actually use the word "never", neither does it hedge and say "anytime soon". The central logic seems to be that humanity is starting from scratch building self driving cars, versus all the years of experience decades ago trying to automate spacecraft and submersibles. Oddly, I reach entirely the opposite conclusion. The article reminds us that even decades ago, with rudimentary computers, en…
Landing on the moon is to physics what car traffic is to chaos theory.
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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 alt…
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Which only strenghtens the argument for self-driving cars. Hell, we even make those highly-trained professional aviators and astronauts depend on auto-pilots because it's much safer this way.
So long as the self-driving car can cover every situation. What doesn't work is a system that expects the human to sit idle for hundreds of hours, then suddenly throws him/her the wheel and jumps ship. (Like the autodrive system in that simpsons episode where homer becomes a trucker.)
Well, that's the problem. Everything the author says is supported by the last N decades in engineering. That argument is so flawed it is astounding that it is coming out of someone from MIT. In looking at his bio it seems he has dedicated quite a bit of time to teaching and researching the history of engineering. It might just be the case that he isn't fully up to date on topics relevant to automation. Does he have an up-to-date CS/AI background? How about computing or chip design?
Saying that automation has failed to deliver in the past N decades is like the Wright Brothers saying "let's not bother because powered flight has failed to be developed in the past N decades". That is not how engineering works.
Today hundreds of millions of people have phones in their pockets that are orders of magnitude more powerful than the computers decades ago. We have better, smaller, cheaper sensors of all kinds. We have accumulated knowledge in relevant CS and AI fields. Today we have cars that can actually drive themselves to various degrees under their own computing power (without having to communicate with a supercomputer in a building). And this is just the beginning.
Fully auto-drive cars will happen. Of course, they will retain the ability to be human driven as well for some time, probably decades. There are many reason for which that makes sense. I am fairly confident we will get to the point where the average self-driver will be safer than the average human driver. All you have to do is point at a teenager behind the wheel. Commutes will be shorter (due to driving efficiently using data) and safer and, with electric cars, healthier (you won't have to breathe the crap coming out of all those exhaust pipes).
Besides, think of the wasted potential of millions of people staring at a road for hours rather than doing something more useful. If you commute one hour per day you'll get back 250 hours per year.