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Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

nytimes.com

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Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

#101

Post by baddox »

ghaff wrote: post #97
baddox wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can appreciate the claim that driving is an art, full of edge cases. But that claim on its own conceals the reality that humans are extremely bad at it. A ludicrous number of people die in automobile accidents. While it may be a long while before self-driving cars can match the prowess of an excellent driver, much less a professional one, I doubt we're far off from being able to exceed the ability of the average dr…

Define ludicrously bad. Yes there are a lot of accidents and fatalities every year. However the rate of fatalities in the U.S. Is 1 per 100 million miles driven which isn't intuitively a ridiculously high rate.

I don't think that fatalities per miles driven is that useful of a statistic, except for the other conversation of how to enable people to drive fewer miles (which I certainly approve of). It's still just abysmal that 30,000 people each year die doing something extremely routine that is virtually required to live in most areas. That's something like a quarter of US deaths from accidents/injuries. And, of course, there are presumably far more injuries than there are deaths, plus property damage.

Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

#102

Post by dTal »

joeclark77 wrote: post #92
linkregister wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the current electorate in the United States, I think it would be nigh-impossible that human-driving cars would be banned. Notwithstanding the fact that the cost to equip every vehicle on the road with self-driving technology would be wildly expensive in the short term, Americans respond vigorously to threats to freedoms that are ingrained in their culture (visceral freedoms, not freedoms that are less tangible,…

If the car is driven by a computer at Google, then it can be "hijacked" by the computer. A few years after mandating that everybody have self-driving cars, the argument will be that certain roads don't need to be in the system because there's far too little traffic. After that, it'll be argued that Google should be able to divert you away from certain areas of town where there's been high traffic or other hazards, wi…

>city planners who want to control noise, pollution, etc

I would predict electric cars before self-driving cars, so they won't have that excuse at least.

Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

#103

Post by danharaj »

Retra wrote: post #99
danharaj wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different people have different idea what the actuality of law is. Most people (as Baudrillard would argue) don't ever work with the actuality. Others, mainly the powerful, are quite happy enough to fix failures of the law with copious amounts of force. The abstraction tends to leak bullets. It is very important to emphasize that the law is less than sacred, even an annoyance, to undermine those who will enforce it w…

I fail to see your point.

Attempting to maintain the abstraction of law by fixing it when it leaks has the hazard of bad actors sneaking undesirable elements into our social structures, like violently maintained hierarchy. Adopting a mindset that law is fundamentally flawed and its language is essentially incoherent helps mitigate this possibility.

An example of such incidence is when people trust the police to the point that they prejudge conflicts involving the police on the basis that they represent the law, and the law is good, therefore the police are good. This is still happening.

Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

#104

Post by brownbat »

Driving can easily end up as a competitive game where safety is traded against efficiency. The big versions of this are terrible, assholes weaving in and out of lanes at +20 mph. But it happens in little ways too, the rolling stops at 4-ways from the article are probably a tiny example.

Someone should host a programming competition where every entrant writes the AI for a fleet of simulated driverless cars, each with random starting and ending destinations. Collisions mean you instantly lose. Your score is based on how quickly you can get through traffic generated by all the other AIs.

I think the results would tell us a lot about where things are heading, or maybe where they should or shouldn't be allowed to go.

(Of course, if you could control the whole fleet, all the cars could just ignore all the rules and dodge each other while tearing through intersections.)

Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

#105

Post by joeclark77 »

dTal wrote: post #102
joeclark77 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the car is driven by a computer at Google, then it can be "hijacked" by the computer. A few years after mandating that everybody have self-driving cars, the argument will be that certain roads don't need to be in the system because there's far too little traffic. After that, it'll be argued that Google should be able to divert you away from certain areas of town where there's been high traffic or other hazards, wi…

>city planners who want to control noise, pollution, etc I would predict electric cars before self-driving cars, so they won't have that excuse at least.

I would predict that I'll never drive one of those deathtraps either!

Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

#106

Post by chrismcb »

jerf wrote: post #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 fundamentall…

It seems to me that this is less about "following" the law, and more about being safe. The car that was rear ended might have stopped for any number of reasons, the tailgater is going to hit the stopping car. And the google car actually didn't follow the letter of the law at the 4 way stop. It also has been programmed to wait for others, in case they are breaking the law. If everyone followed the law 100% everyone would be safer. I'm not saying the laws are perfect, but the issue discussed here is more about what the self driving car is doing that isn't covered by law
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