Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#71

Post by alextgordon » Sat, Oct 09, 2010, 9:18 PM UTC

ajju wrote: post #53

alextgordon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civil liability is only half the issue. What about criminal liability? If your autonomous vehicle runs someone down because of a bug, who goes to jail?

What happens when this is due to a hardware bug, like with the Toyotas recently? I don't think criminal liability is involved except in special circumstances. Why should software be any different. IANAL however.

I think the difference between this and the Toyota incident is that the driver still maintains absolute control over the autonomous google car. So it could be argued that anything the AI does is still ultimately the driver's responsibility.

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#72

Post by jedc » Sat, Oct 09, 2010, 9:21 PM UTC

mortenjorck wrote: post #41

mjfern wrote: post #25

The key question is why would Google produce this technology and enter the autonomous driving market? I think one of the key issues for Google, from a corporate strategy standpoint, is "freeing up people's time." Driving is one of last places where we spend significant time awake without being able to use the Internet and hence any of Google's services (except if you use a smartphone, which is now illegal in some sta…

Dr. Thrun is known as a passionate promoter of the potential to use robotic vehicles to make highways safer and lower the nation’s energy costs. It is a commitment shared by Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, according to several people familiar with the project. It sounds like this may be as much an idealistic pet project as it is any kind of corporate strategy.

That's probably what Google Translate and speech recognition and text-to-speech probably all sounded like ten years ago. But now all of these are able to work together to make a universal translator, turning speech in one language into speech of another language. Pretty fking cool, I'd say!

A company like Google can turn an idealistic pet project into something truly game-changing with consistent time and resources.

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#73

Post by pbw » Sat, Oct 09, 2010, 9:22 PM UTC

jackowayed wrote: post #61

In Google's blog post, they said that they think automated cars will "significantly reduce car usage". I have no idea what they're basing that claim on. Automated cars eliminate many of the costs of driving--lost time, frustration, etc. When you decrease the cost of an activity, people are going to do it more , not less. In fact, if you ask people that can afford cars but commute by train why they do it, many will sa…

It doesn't say "significantly reduce car usage" it says "reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use".

In the PR post two savings mentioned are "highway trains" and car sharing. Car sharing gets interesting if the car can drive by itself to pick up the next person, to leverage all the normal downtime in a typical day where your car is just sitting there waiting for you to use it next.

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#74

Post by andrewljohnson » Sat, Oct 09, 2010, 9:23 PM UTC

mortenjorck wrote: post #41

mjfern wrote: post #25

The key question is why would Google produce this technology and enter the autonomous driving market? I think one of the key issues for Google, from a corporate strategy standpoint, is "freeing up people's time." Driving is one of last places where we spend significant time awake without being able to use the Internet and hence any of Google's services (except if you use a smartphone, which is now illegal in some sta…

Dr. Thrun is known as a passionate promoter of the potential to use robotic vehicles to make highways safer and lower the nation’s energy costs. It is a commitment shared by Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, according to several people familiar with the project. It sounds like this may be as much an idealistic pet project as it is any kind of corporate strategy.

Larry's idealistic pet projects _are_ corporate strategy. That's why Google dominates - they are unpredictable and creative.

Crazy stuff Google did:

* mapped all the world's roads using cameras and a mechanical turk, destroying billions in market cap for map data providers

* Android, groundbreaking in both technology and pushing the envelope on patent law

* launched a satellite

* deep tendrils of fiber optics and community oriented wi-fi projects to connect the world

It doesn't surprise me at all Google is building autonomous cars. Search and adwords are not even the most intriguing things to me about Google these days.

Imagine a mad scientist who has $12,000,000,000. That is Google's strategy... also lots of testing.

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#75

Post by jfager » Sat, Oct 09, 2010, 9:24 PM UTC

alextgordon wrote: post #33

tbrownaw wrote: post #10

And in the event of an accident, who would be liable — the person behind the wheel or the maker of the software? The insurance company, just like today. Possibly paid for by the manufacturer and entirely included in the sales price, or possibly paid for by the driver/owner like today.

Civil liability is only half the issue. What about criminal liability? If your autonomous vehicle runs someone down because of a bug, who goes to jail?

We deal with that issue today. Who is liable when brakes fail? It's usually determined on a case-by-case basis. Why would this system be any different?

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#76

Post by Ygor » Sat, Oct 09, 2010, 9:26 PM UTC

It is clear that one day automated cars will make less mistakes than human drivers, and that such systems can reduce the amount of traffic accidents.

There is one big problem - convincing some people this is true, and that cars will make mistakes, but far less mistakes than humans.

The problem is there are many people that fail to see it that way. More than once I was in a situation of explaining the concept of automated cars to others, and always the opposing arguments go something like: "But, can you be absolutely certain that there isn't going to be one single case where a car makes a mistake and kills someone". No, I cannot, and I will not.

And, of course, once the self-driving cars become a reality, such cases will happen. And than there will be an article in some scandal-seeking newspaper how an automated car killed the father of two, and how this is a what happens when you let science control your life and when you let all those over-educated people do what they want... Or something along that lines...

Frustrating.

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#77

Post by Groxx » Sat, Oct 09, 2010, 9:27 PM UTC

andreyf wrote: post #63

Groxx wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they cannot be perfect Two things: 1) neither are people; far from it. (you already knew this though, so...) 2) I wholly agree... as long as other people are driving . Get rid of people's irrationality / drunken behavior on the road, and automated car driving becomes a much easier problem. A computer can take more into account than a human, and decide faster. The transition is almost guaranteed to occur at some poi…

2) I wholly agree... as long as other people are driving. Get rid of people's irrationality / drunken behavior on the road, and automated car driving becomes a much easier problem. A computer can take more into account than a human, and decide faster. Even if you have near perfect data about where the other cars are there's always uncertainty about other objects on the road: tree branches, deer, a child running after…

True, but once you know what other cars are doing, and get data from cars ahead, you should be able to identify things like that before you even encounter them.

A tree falling on a car while it's driving: relatively unavoidable. Cars hitting that car: far less likely with computers. They don't get "shocked", or hit the wrong pedal, and have faster reaction times. And pile-ups due to an accident are often far more deadly than the accident itself, especially in busy areas where automated driving could make its biggest improvement in safety.

Deer / kids / unexpected obstacles: can be detected prior to them even entering the road by cars ahead, and flagged for caution for cars behind. IR cameras will spot living things for you, motion / blockage detection will spot things near / in the road. Once such a thing is flagged, it's reasonable to assume that other cars would leave more room between each other and around the obstacle, and probably slow down. All things which people should do, but only actually do rarely, and never collaboratively except at extreme cost and increased risk over something organized.

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#78

Post by jfager » Sat, Oct 09, 2010, 9:37 PM UTC

zacharypinter wrote: post #9

In the short term, I could easily see the value in a souped up cruise control for driving on interstates. combined with infrared/night vision, this could easily make nighttime driving safer. Also, this has great potential (though would probably generate a lot of controversy) for drunk driving. Imagine if your car had a safety mode that could watch out for potential accidents and prevent them even with a human driver.…

Some cars out today have automated emergency braking systems. There are also assisted cruise control systems that use a variety of techniques for maintaining a safe distance from the car ahead of you, even in low-visibility situations, and sensor systems that will alert you when you start to drift from your lane (or someone starts to drift into yours). Not to mention traction control systems that have been in cars for years...

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#79

Post by tbrownaw » Sat, Oct 09, 2010, 9:39 PM UTC

alextgordon wrote: post #33

tbrownaw wrote: post #10

And in the event of an accident, who would be liable — the person behind the wheel or the maker of the software? The insurance company, just like today. Possibly paid for by the manufacturer and entirely included in the sales price, or possibly paid for by the driver/owner like today.

Civil liability is only half the issue. What about criminal liability? If your autonomous vehicle runs someone down because of a bug, who goes to jail?

My understanding is that criminal liability almost always requires either intent negligence.

If the automated system is less error-prone than a human, the driver can't reasonably be negligent for doing nothing ("it would be incredibly foolish and arrogant for me to think I could handle that situation better than a computer designed by 10 Phds, especially when the insurance company agrees that the computer drives better").

For the manufacturer the reasonable position would be that as long as they followed certain verification/testing standards, and fixed any discovered bugs as fast as reasonably possible (probably not issuing a recall or telling people to turn it off, assuming the system was still safer than a human driver), they should be fine. The industry might need to get together and come up with standards and a certification body for the first part to work, and I have no idea how well the no-recall thing would work without something explicitly permitting it.

Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

#80

Post by eogas » Sat, Oct 09, 2010, 10:03 PM UTC

kijinbear wrote: post #51

eogas wrote: post #30

I wonder if this is legal. I mean, if one of these cars went haywire and mowed down a bunch of pedestrians before the "driver" was able to take control, I reckon Google would have some splainin to do. With autonomous vehicles coming closer and closer to a reality, it's somewhat alarming that there appears to be no legal body attempting to define some guidelines on this subject. At the rate our government works, we'll…

According to the article, Google's lawyers decided it was OK, because a human was sitting in the driver's seat ready to override the system at any time. I guess it's a little bit like student drivers being supervised by experienced drivers, but who knows what a random cop would think?

I guess that will teach me to comment before reading the entire article.

Anyway, I would expect that this issue will be looked into a bit deeper once companies start producing autonomous cars.