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Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

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Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#21

Post by avdempsey »

apsec112 wrote: post #10
ebbv wrote: post #7

No thank you. I am very dubious about other people's driving skills, I tend to assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me and will do the dumbest thing possible at any given moment. But even so, I am also an experienced software developer, and I know that software is only as good as the author(s). Bugs happen. It's inevitable. And I don't want to die or be injured because of software errors. I'd rather it be…

"I'd rather it be human error." Eventually - not this year, maybe not this decade, but eventually - technology will be better than human drivers. How many lives, then, would you be willing to sacrifice, on the grounds that human error is somehow better than (less frequent) machine error? Six? Sixty? Six hundred? Six thousand? Since 1985, nine hundred thousand people have died in car crashes in the US alone. That's mo…

Brad Templeton (EFF board member and prolific robocar blogger) calls this the "humans hate being killed by robots" effect.

If you're into robocars you can do a lot worse than checking out his robocar page: http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#22

Post by venus »

ebbv wrote: post #7

No thank you. I am very dubious about other people's driving skills, I tend to assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me and will do the dumbest thing possible at any given moment. But even so, I am also an experienced software developer, and I know that software is only as good as the author(s). Bugs happen. It's inevitable. And I don't want to die or be injured because of software errors. I'd rather it be…

I am under the impression that safety is already at least one order of magnitude better than a human driver. Frankly, I can't wait until the majority of cars are under computer control; it will be much safer.

> I think this is a terrible, terrible idea and misuse of technology

What a bizarre attitude you have there. What possible rationalisation could you have for this extreme, arbitrary prejudice?

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#24

Post by stephenhuey »

ebbv wrote: post #16
apsec112 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'd rather it be human error." Eventually - not this year, maybe not this decade, but eventually - technology will be better than human drivers. How many lives, then, would you be willing to sacrifice, on the grounds that human error is somehow better than (less frequent) machine error? Six? Sixty? Six hundred? Six thousand? Since 1985, nine hundred thousand people have died in car crashes in the US alone. That's mo…

As I stated to the reply above yours; we're not talking about replacing all cars on the road with automated cars overnight. We're talking about selling automated cars alongside regular cars. So your argument doesn't really hold water. Yes if we had an automated car ready to replace everyone's normal car, we'd start saving tons of lives tomorrow and I'd be a monster for opposing it. But that's not reality, that's not…

You're not alone, but the reality is that the automated cars might react to the human drivers much more quickly than the other way around.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#25

Post by schabernakk »

daeken wrote: post #8
ebbv wrote: post #7

No thank you. I am very dubious about other people's driving skills, I tend to assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me and will do the dumbest thing possible at any given moment. But even so, I am also an experienced software developer, and I know that software is only as good as the author(s). Bugs happen. It's inevitable. And I don't want to die or be injured because of software errors. I'd rather it be…

Have you seen car accident stats? I'll concede that bugs do occur, but it would take some serious failure to make it any worse than the average driver. Even decent or good drivers are not that great, especially when you factor in distraction, tiredness, poor judgement of road conditions, etc.

You're right, but the software of an autonomous car will be held to much higher standard than just 'has be to better or equal to a human driver'.

The whole thing gets interesting when you look at the judicial side of it: Who is responsible in the case of an accident? The car manufacturer (if it was a software failure)? Then even one accident triggered by it is too much.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#26

Post by _ea1k »

ebbv wrote: post #7

No thank you. I am very dubious about other people's driving skills, I tend to assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me and will do the dumbest thing possible at any given moment. But even so, I am also an experienced software developer, and I know that software is only as good as the author(s). Bugs happen. It's inevitable. And I don't want to die or be injured because of software errors. I'd rather it be…

Here's a little comparison:

Computer - Can see 360 degrees, 100% of the time - Can read the movement of obstacles in real-time, with very accurate estimate of each surrounding vehicle's speed - Can run 100s of simulations per second to estimate the odds of an impact - Can react almost-instantly with correct inputs to the brake and steering based upon real-time instant of surface conditions

Human - Can react within .7 seconds with correct inputs to the brake and steering based upon real-time instant of surface conditions in ideal conditions - Can see ~180 degrees, with significant focal-point limitations - Can guess other vehicles reactions based upon experience

Which do you think will have a better reliability rating in many typical driving scenarios?

I'm not saying which way I lean on this. :)

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#28

Post by stevesearer »

hnriot wrote: post #4
wayne_h wrote: post #2

Meanwhile... California is trying to build a 100 billion dollar bullet-train boondogle that will be ready in 20 years. By that point our efficient electric cars will be able to link together in high speed freeway 'trains'. What if that money was invested in developing the autonomous cars? The public thinks everyone else is going to ride the train and free the highway up for them... what a waste.

Obviously the bullet train is going to be a disaster, but if there were a high speed train (as in Europe) from SF to LA, I would definitely leave my car home and use the train. I'm only to happy to free up I5 for you.

I take the train from Santa Barbara to San Francisco from time to time and would even put up with a train with decent internet connectivity. Even if the train is slow, I could at least be doing some work on the ride. Unfortunately the train is currently more expensive, less productive, and slower than driving.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#29

Post by schabernakk »

hobs wrote: post #19
tbrownaw wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars cost something like $15+ per (calendar) day, and cause congestion when used in big cities. Making them autonomous won't help with either of those, but replacing them with usable mass transit does.

Automation will certainly help with congestion by optimizing who is doing what when. I am not a network engineer, but I cant imagine that people are driving the most efficiently to even attempt to maximize throughput.

especially when you think about the fact that a lot if not most traffic jams are ghost jams, where a slight overreaction ripples through the following cars causing them all to stop for no apparent reason.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#30

Post by corin_ »

ebbv wrote: post #13
daeken wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen car accident stats? I'll concede that bugs do occur, but it would take some serious failure to make it any worse than the average driver. Even decent or good drivers are not that great, especially when you factor in distraction, tiredness, poor judgement of road conditions, etc.

If you were to replace every human driven car on the road with only autonomous cars, I will agree with you that the accident rate would likely be much lower over all. But there's two problems here: 1) We won't be replacing all the cars overnight. The problem comes with the interaction between terrible human drivers doing wildly unpredictable, insane things and the inflexible, unadaptable automated cars. And 2) I'm no…

> I'm not comfortable with dying or being injured due to a software error regardless of whether its likelihood is higher or lower.

Why on earth is dying due to a software error worse than dying due to a human error if you can chose one or the other, and the chance of a software error is lower?

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