I am really worried by the fact that I am the unwilling tester in the Great Driverless Car Experiment.
Tradition has it that when you load-test a new bridge, you put the architect underneath. I feel like this, except I didn't design those driverless cars, somebody else did. Being an experienced software engineer, my trust in the software in these cars is pretty low. And yet they are testing them on me, because I can be the one getting killed.
I think we should set a much higher bar for allowing those cars on the streets, rather than "it kinda works, so let's roll with it".
My wife's 96 year old grandfather still has a driver's license because he passes some ridiculous vision test with 1 of his eyes. He can't read a newspaper or see a television well enough to enjoy sports (previously his favorite thing). He says he's memorized the vision test at his doctor's office and when asked the doctor refuses to file a report (or whatever procedural thing is required to remove his driving abilities). He totaled his car(s) every ~6 months for the past ~5 years. Luckily for other drivers, always doing something like hitting a concrete light pole base in a large parking lot. Although him and wife have been hospitalized each time as 1) age 2) sometimes happens at >35MPH.
All to say, the roads being safe as a core assumption is completely false. I'd gladly share the road with beta AI versus other drivers like this. Being an occupant in beta AI is completely optional.
A huge percentage of elderly drivers shouldn't be on the road. We (the US) seem, as a society, to have decided to just live with that rather than trying to make it easier to live here without a car.
It's more that they vote more than young people and no politician is going to change the driving standards in their state only to be antagonized by the AARP.
If there's one thing that seems the be much more forgiving in the US, it's car insurance. How has his premium and excess not become unmanageably expensive? Or not to have been denied insurance?
UK car insurance feels more like US health insurance. High premiums, and heaven forbid if you get into an accident.
I think it has become expensive by most measurements. Except, for them at 96, the cost and vehicle buys them independence. The alternative is to move into a senior living situation, which is quite expensive as well. I’m pretty sure they only cover him for liability and he keeps just buying new cars every time. He has some minor wealth and mailbox money type arrangements and at this age he’s in a “can’t take it with me” phase of his financial justifications. So he pays the premiums.
Why they keep insuring him with no sense of the danger he imposes to others is an interesting question and it’s because their financial exposure is all that matters. They are betting that he won’t kill anyone and if he causes some property damage they feel protected from a risk adjusted perspective. But no larger corporate responsibility / citizenship is in place.
That teenage driver goes through a training and certification process, and we have ways of stopping them from driving if they fuck up too badly. They also have liability for their actions.
Most of those are lacking or at least inconsistent, for AI driving.
That teenage driver goes through a training and certification process, and we have ways of stopping them from driving if they fuck up too badly.
This is a complete aside, but not having a license doesn't really prevent you from getting in a car and driving it. I was just reminded of this when a buddy's parked car was struck by a drunk driver who was not legally licensed to drive because their license was revoked from having many prior DUI's. Luckily they didn't kill anyone.
Hopefully it will be easier to enforce shutting down unsafe driverless cars.
I've also known teens without licenses who had to drive their irresponsible buddies' cars home after the licensed driver drove somewhere and got drunk. It's not like there's a biometric scanner in each car that verifies the person behind the wheel is a licensed driver...
Kind of a moot point though. You can't really stop anyone from doing anything, the best we can do in a free society is create laws that deter undesirable behavior.
In general, most of our cities (in the US) are very car-centric. Better than passing a law and hoping for the best while waiting to punish people, we can give people realistic alternatives to drunk driving to prevent it in the first place. Likely, these would have a second order effect of giving everyone realistic alternatives to driving too. If driving yourself isn't the norm, then drunk driving becomes more rare.
In Japan, there are taxi-like services that will drive your own car. 2 persons come in a taxi, one of them drives you in your car, and the other follows with the taxi (and picks back the first person once destination is reached).
Off the top of my head, public transportation, ride sharing, making streets more pedestrian friendly, denser zoning.
I had a great bar that was less than a mile from where I used to live. I rarely went because there was no way to walk there. No sidewalks in the neighborhood, no traffic lights, no bus that stopped near it. It's a shame. It closed shortly after I moved away after away. In the paper they said they just didn't get a lot of people coming in.
A great idea that I am in support of, but it's not a "realistic alternative", public transportation is politically fraught, expensive, and slow to build in the U.S. I'm not saying we shouldn't continue to strive towards it, but it's not happening any time soon in the U.S.
> ride sharing
This is the status quo.
> making streets more pedestrian friendly
Same issue as public transportation - slow, expensive, politically fraught, but also of dubious ROI in terms of preventing DUIs; nobody is going to walk 5 miles home from the bar because of streets that are friendlier to pedestrians. Of course, there are other worthy reasons to create pedestrian friendly streets, but they don't really represent a realistic alternative to someone prone to intoxicated driving.
> denser zoning
Again, not really a realistic alternative, zoning issues are politically and economically contentious at a level that transcends concerns about drunk driving and yet the needle on that issue barley moves due to NIMBYism and entrenched special interests.
Driverless cars aren't anywhere near being able to prevent DUIs on a statistically meaningful scale. If lives are what you care about you'd be better off having the government subsidize uber rides.
Two human drivers passed me today in a street where passing me was unconditionally forbidden. In that street no car may pass any bicycle, ever, and there's giant signage. Are you suggesting that we have consistent, reliable ways to prevent those two from driving again?
If I were to send the police a 30-second film showing someone overtaking me illegally, it's near certain that nothing would happen. Unless someone were harmed.
If, however, I were to send the certification authority a film of a driverless car doing the same, my guess is that the vendor would be required to investigate and solve that, even if the film were just a single incident and noone harmed. I base that guess on the authority's past behaviour.
Speaking as someone who's often in harm's way, I find the possibility of getting rid of conscious rule violations very attractive, even if that doesn't affect the number or effect of software bugs at all.
Here in San Francisco you don't actually need to go through any training to receive a drivers license. You just need to pass a computer test (of mostly easily memorizable material) and a road test that consists mostly of turning left and right a few times. They don't even test highway driving, three point turns or parallel parking like they do in some other countries.
Also, didn't the entire Uber fleet get grounded after the Tempe death, with a huge months-long NHTSA investigation?
I don't know where you live, but my "training and certification process" was mom driving with me for a few weeks, then I went to the driver testing office, drove around a closed course, proved I could stay on my side of the road, stop at a stop sign, and parallel park. Then I got my license without ever being tested at over 25mph. Even with the state of today's technology, I'd trust a driverless car more than I'd trust a new teen driver.
> Even with the state of today's technology, I'd trust a driverless car more than I'd trust a new teen driver.
No way. Yes, the driver education in the USA is appalling. It should be much more thorough and cover a lot more ground, particularly emergency manouvers and car control.
Nonetheless, a human driver has self-preservation instincts which are very deeply hardwired into the brain. Software has nothing like it, if it has a bug it will crash and take out whatever and whoever is in the way since it doesn't have, can't have, any emotion or self-preservation.
Feel free to argue that licensing isn't strict enough. I'd agree. But AI driver certification is effectively nonexistent, judging by Telsa's bullshit behavior.
It's not that it's not strict enough, it's that driver certification is so outrageously lenient that "existing" is about all it accomplishes. I would trust any AI on the road today over a "certified" 16-year old or 85-year-old.
The vehicle manufacturer is licensed here, all safety operators involved are licensed, and the DMV will pull the operations permit or vehicle registrations if they fuck up too badly. This has already happened to pony.ai and Uber.
More consistency would be better, but it's a California bureaucracy. You get what you get.
Anecdote: There was an old lady living nearby who despite being 80+ years still driving around in her 20 year old car. She literally ran over traffic cones and ... a child on a tricycle [1] and never got prosecuted.
She recently passed away ... sad, but the streets around here are definitely safer now.
(This was in Germany just for reference)
[1] The child was fine it was a low speed collision ... but still ...
I caution against age as a sole proxy for driving ability. As a contradictory datum, my 80+ year old grandmother (in the USA) maintains a 100+ acre farm. She daily drives a (impeccably maintained) 2006 3/4 ton pickup, to include multiple yearly 10+ hour trips hauling a 10k+ lbs trailer. She almost always brings a passenger on these trips for companionship and safety. I've never heard any complaints, and never personally observed her driving unsafely.
It won't be this way forever, and I'm under no illusion that she is the norm for her age, but I'd hazard she's a better drive
R than most people on the road.
I would like to see a move toward more frequent driver testing for all drivers in the USA, decreasing in frequency after the first few years of driving and increasing in frequency for older drivers. Testing after initial licensing is not the norm in any state I've inhabited, so this would probably require a significant uphill battle on both the individual and government fronts.
This seems too reactive. I agree it is better than nothing, but if someone is going to have the wherewithal to put a law in place around this, I think the goal should should be more about preventing violations than punishment. Maybe you should have to re-take the test when your license expires instead of the license being a lifetime certification. That would be every four years in my state. Not sure if it is different state to state.
The DMV worker that administered my mom's last test definitely fudged things so she could renew her license.
Luckily she basically never drives anyway [edit: because my dad who's still a decent driver drivers her around when she needs it because they both know she's not safe on the road, not because she can get by without a car], but I doubt that was an isolated incident. Because of how we've designed our cities, not being able to drive can represent a huge loss of freedom. In the moment, it seems some (and I'm guessing many) DMV workers take pity on the vulnerable elderly person in front of them rather than some hypothetical future victim of that driver.
I remember doing traffic school about ~15 years ago, and realizing that there were several points of the law which I had not adequately learned when I first got my license. Over the years of driving, I've gotten better at some parts of driving (being safe, etc), but I'm _sure_ there are parts of the law that I have forgotten. (e.g., is it legal in my state to turn through a crosswalk if the pedestrian is past the halfway point?)
I feel like if driver licensing required re-certification, everyone would hate that, but it would have the added value of making sure to reinforce that people knew what the law _was_. Maybe it'd be less painful if our insurance already subsidized the cost. I feel bad even advocating for such a thing.
I'm _sure_ there are parts of the law that I have forgotten.
Or perhaps since laws have changed or new laws were made that you were unaware of (through no fault of your own - these things are hard to keep track of!). I agree people would hate it, but I think there's value in, like you say giving people a refresher about the law.
I also think there's value in reminding people that driving is not an inalienable right and also inviting a person to re-evaluate their situation every so often to think if they still really need a car.
There was recently an accident in Miami Beach. Elderly woman driving a Bentley reversed into a terrace restaurant. Killing 1 and injury 6, including a 3yo [0]. No charges filed because being senile driver (and voter) is not against the law.
I think elderly drivers are probably more dangerous than teenagers. Lately whenever I've seen a really reckless driver, it's been someone very elderly and who looked totally overwhelmed by the experience of driving. I've seen old people struggling to keep up with traffic, driving in bike lanes or just on the side of the road thinking it was a second lane... There should be more frequently driver exams (and car exams) in the US.
One of the more surreal things i've seen is in Naples FL where you have elderly behind the wheel of Lamborghinis, Aston Martin, Ferraris and lots of other very very powerful sports cars. Vallet needs to give them extra help getting in and out but then off they go. A simple muscle twitch blipping the gas peddle on those cars would put them so far out of control it would be funny if it weren't life threatening.
Aside: I'm happy to see that teenage drivers today have a lot more required training than I did when I got my license. At least in this US state, and likely most of them.
I'm also really happy about the continued advances in auto safety technology.
My recollection of learning to drive many years ago was that I took driver's ed, drive my parents around a bit, but then didn't drive much/own a car until after grad school. And therefore, didn't really have much driving experience until later. (And didn't really learn to drive a stick until many years later when I bought a car with one.)
I guess I'm skeptical that having some more classroom time and a more rigorous testing improves young person driving a lot--much less makes much of any difference to how people with a few years of driving under their belt drive.
I think the tests are just the colors under which bureaucratic red tape just happens to sail. Anything that creates barriers to entry will result in people being older before they get their licenses and that is where the bulk of the benefit comes from.
Teenagers aren't known for not putting themselves in dangerous situations.
I don't think teenagers are any less safe than an person with equivalently little experience in normal traffic situations but they are definitively more likely to be less conservative when they do decide to push the limits. There's a difference between navigating a complex intersection and knowing how fast you can/should go on an empty highway.
There is no such thing as "US" driving test standards. Each state has its own requirements. Some are quite weak, and some are very vigorous: For instance, Maryland driving licenses are accepted 1:1 as equivalent to the German driving license, you can exchange them without an exam or test. NY and CA... do not simply transfer.
The interesting thing is that Maryland drivers are among the worst I've seen over a wider spectrum of factors. Sober California drivers seem pretty safe. Virginia drivers are miserable on interstates because they pass one another at 1-3mph differentials (I assume this is a response to the reputed harsh soeeding enforcement there) and are victims of often-wrong signage, but are otherwise uninteresting. South Carolina drivers cause dangerous situations by trying to give away their right of way. Maryland drivers aggressively fight back agaibst merges, change lanes erratically, and crash in a quarter inch of snow at shocking rates, despite the fact that their salt trucks have higher mass-flow-rates than their snow storms. The only drivers who stand out vs Maryland are in big military areas where there's a significant minority of people driving 20mph faster than traffic and merging erratically while doing so.
Having just left VA after a year in residence, VA drivers pass at 1-3mph deltas because they're already doing 15mph+ over the speed limit. Perhaps enforcement is different in southern VA, but I'd estimate only seeing speed traps/vehicles pulled over once every 3-4 weeks.
Maryland (and, to a lesser degree, New Jersey) drivers are legitimately terrible whenever you find them.
I don't think any US state requires you to take several full-day courses after getting your license, for snow and ice handling, as is required in Switzerland for example. Also the road tests I've seen are a joke compared to both the Swiss and South African tests, both of which I've gone through. Requirements to check your mirrors every 10 seconds. Check your blind spot before indicating, then again, before merging. Reverse alley docking and parallel parking in tight spaces. Emergency braking from a fixed speed within a certain distance.
Of course, after years of practice this is how you should be driving. But almost nobody who doesn't explicitly practice for the test can actually pass.
Whether a license is accepted reciprocally is more a political decision than based on test stringency.
That doesn't mean much because most states, including Texas, also have full reciprocity with Germany. There doesn't really seem to be any rhyme or reason to what states they deem "equivalent".
When I got my license I was advised to do it in nearby Kentucky, since they didnt have a driving portion of the test at all, all you had to do was a written quiz
In Texas, I got my license through a self-teaching avenue where my parents just had to sign off on a form that they taught me. IIRC the form had fields where they log the times they took me driving.
All of my friends were doing these driver's ed classes after school and a bit jealous that I got my license without a single test.
When was that? KY requires a road test now. Also, it requires you to prove KY residency. I'm surprised people were able to get KY licenses without being residents before.
Yeah, after asking my earlier question, a quick google found the 2006 driver's manual which indicates you must be a KY resident, and discussed the road test.
It's difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison with this statistic because the US has more sprawl.
Like sure, per-kilometre fatalities may be down, but that says nothing of:
1. The number of non-fatal crashes
2. How much of this incorporates driving on large highways
3. When not on a highway, the degree of traffic in which fatal crashes can't occur (can't get in a high-speed accident in high traffic in New York, for example)
Needless to say, the roads of Japan and New Zealand are so different from the US that it isn't exactly clear that this statistic is really informing us of much, really.
A teenager is worried about: getting killed, killing someone else, hurting someone, wrecking their parents' car, losing their permit. I don't trust engineers working on the models that drive these cars to teach a computer the difference between a human and an open road. A teenager can discern these with no effort. I trust a teenager to care about not hitting me and try their best, and to choose a ditch over hitting someone when the decision time comes.
Was it an "if" in yours when you were a teenager? There are lots of strong statistical differences that are visible in the teenage population and trickle their way into insurance tables.
Basically we could do a better job engendering concern from teenagers, its not some kind of inherent mental lack of capability.
My point was that worrying about hypothetical outcomes is not usually at the forefront of a teenager's mind. Sure, they will regret wrecking their parents' car, but that doesn't mean that they will avoid actions that might wreck said car.
Female teenagers are way less likely to have wrecks (1) and if we assume its not driven by one's genitalia and rather by their conditioning - an assumption I hold, its something that can be taught.
"In 2019, the motor vehicle death rate for male drivers aged 16–19 was over two times higher than the death rate for female drivers of the same age."
To add to your point: it doesn’t bother me so much that the AI system doesn’t share these priorities. What I worry about is that the companies designing them are not incentivized to.
No, because they can benefit even more from recklessness than the expected profit/PR damage. Someone already mentioned Tesla, but there is also the Volvo emissions scandal, Boeing's safety failures, and many more examples.
At the extreme end, picture a company that manages to get an okay from the city of SF for public testing, but whose internal tests show there is a small but significant risk of serious accidents and the product needs another two years of development to be safe. Their funding runs out in one year.
Depends on the country, but here teenagers are drilled so much during their L phase and on the cars with a manual transmission, so they are probably the safest drivers on the road.
The teenager's ability to drive safely isn't just a mechanical ability of driving a car or of just being aware of the laws/rules. Safe driving comes from years of experience on being able to decide how long it will take to stop at certain speeds in certain conditions. Being able to recognize their car's brakes are a little soft and might not stop on a dime any more. Being able to recognize that the driver in front of them is potentially impaired, so best give them some space.
There are plenty of things that come with experience vs book learning that makes a safer driver. A freshly licensed teen comes with none of that. They also have the natural tendency of having high risk tolerance which makes decision making different than an older/exeprienced driver that is more risk averse.
Hearsay is that you have to drive more than 100 000 km in diverse conditions with the right mindset in order to become a fluent and experienced driver. With an average mileage, that will take most people around a decade after beginning to drive. Most people never seem to become fluent, experienced drivers, because they lack the practice, or the mindset, or both.
Exactly, except, I'm not sure where the 100,000km condition was established.
I'm in North Texas, so I have a personal rule that if the temps are forecasted to be below freezing with any form of precipitation, I do not leave the house. People make moronic decisions on how to drive in those conditions because it doesn't happen enough and as a collective, proper ability to drive is forgotten every single time.
That is my experience from one visit to the Arlington area years ago. One morning it was below freezing and there were some icy patches especially on bridges. Drivers were either creeping at 2mph or spinning out. There didn't seem to be anyone on the road who knew how to handle it.
How do you drive on icy roads though? Creeping at 2mph sounds like a reasonable choice, at least you won't make a lot of damage when you slowly slide into an obstacle.
It's a trick question. You don't should be the response.
For those that do, my first question is what is so damn important that you have to be driving in icy conditions in the first place? Schools are closed. Most businesses are closed. If my business isn't closed, I use a personal day. This isn't Chicago/Minneapolis where the snow lasts for 3 months. This is N. Texas. It's typically only cold enough for these conditions for a couple of days and typically only at night. Which actually makes it worse as it melts in the day, refreezes overnight, and people forget about the refreeze and drive as if things are normal.
Yes it was. I am of a certain age that we had a certain number of classroom hours as well as a certain number of hours behind the wheel with an instructor as well as certain number of hours in a car as an observer with an instructor.
We had book(lets) that we had to read from to learn the rules/laws of the road. There were quizzes/tests to be taken during those classes in order to pass the class. Once the class was passed, I then had to take a written exam issued by the state. That was followed by an actual driving test with a state official in the car.
So assuming based on my personal experience. I know the times have changed, and you no longer have to do silly things like learn how to drive or be required to wear shoes while driving in today's world.
To a first approximation, I'm skeptical that anywhere in the world a learning supervised driver gains sufficient on-road experience to to count as a skilled experienced driver. Clearly, different places make somewhat different tradeoffs with respect to licensing. However, I'll go out on a limb and say the majority of drivers with 5 to 10 years experience are better drivers than newly licensed drivers.
Lol in Florida I looped around a parking lot and parked head in. From there you’re allowed to get on i95… in south Florida. I guess if you don’t die the first time you get on it it’s like passing a test anyway.
Luckily for me I had been driving for a while and I was tested initially in a more rigorous country, I was just getting my license after I moved to the US, but it explains a lot of what I see in the streets.
You didn't design the aircraft that you fly on, which are incredibly computerized. Also the drugs that your doctor prescribes. Etc.
You put your faith in myriad bureaucracies and trust networks that you have no hope of understanding. Driverless cars are just one more added to the list.
The difference is that airplane software standards are by far the most rigorous in the world and so rigorous that most software developers are shocked at the level of rigor employed where as driverless cars have exactly zero software standards with respect to their safety or fitness for purpose. Comparing the processes in play is a outrageously fundamental category error; the systems have standards that are like 6 orders of magnitude apart.
As a example, just look at the 737 MAX, a airplane viewed as a literal deathtrap and a complete indictment of airplane software development, which had 2 crashes in 400,000 flights. At a average flight distance of ~500 miles, the 737 MAX, a airplane literally multiple orders of magnitude worse than any other and a complete failure of the approval process, only resulted in 1 fatality per 100 million person-miles. That is safer than the driving average of 1.1 fatalities per 100 million person-miles. What is viewed as by far the most atrocious outcome in the airplane sector, a system literally hundreds or thousands of times more dangerous than the average, is above average in the car sector; that is how far the gap is.
And this is ignoring driverless car software which is being developed to even lower standards than regular car software and which has no actual independent quality requirements. In contrast, far more lives are at risk with respect to driverless cars, so they should be developed to standards probably around 1000x better than airplane software which puts them around 0.0001% of the way there to a acceptable level of quality even if the software was already as reliable as regular car software.
> The difference is that airplane software standards are by far the most rigorous in the world and so rigorous that most software developers are shocked at the level of rigor employed...
You mean the standards set by the FAA, which regularly defers to the private industry to regulate itself, due to complexity that it can't afford to keep up with? Those standards?
Yes, those standards that produced a safety regime of 20 years of flights without software being even implicated in a single fatality. Literally trillions if not quadrillions of passenger-miles per software-related fatality. Those same standards which result in a system like the 737 MAX rightfully being excoriated for only being 10% safer than driving and resulted in successful demands for grounding of the entire fleet.
As you note, unfortunately the standards as employed in practice have recently regressed dramatically to allow a system as unsafe as the 737 MAX to fly. So it seems only prudent to go back to the historical, far more rigorous, process which did result in the amazing historical safety regime. And, since self driving cars are a even harder and more dangerous technology with far more downside risk, they should use a standard even more rigorous than the historical airplane standards which are still by far better, from a safety perspective, than any other consistently applied software process, such as cars, by multiple orders of magnitude.
> Literally trillions if not quadrillions of passenger-miles per software-related fatality.
So these were all miles where people were unwilling testers as well. The difference being airplane auto-pilot is primarily focused on keeping the plane in the air, not dodging pedestrians. I think it does a lot of warnings for the pilots as well, but I'm not in the industry.
It's really comparing apples to oranges, isn't it?
> since self driving cars are a even harder and more dangerous technology with far more downside risk, they should use a standard even more rigorous than the historical airplane standards
So this is on The United States Department of Transportation to be far more involved in regulating the software that governs self driving. But the question is, was the FAA as relaxed in governing the aerospace industry 60 some odd years ago as USDT is now, and did they just get lucky that flying planes is actually easier than driving cars? Or is there actually some negligence involved?
Yeah this is how most standards go. I use to work on medical devices, and the safety requirements for them were developed by my company and the other big players in the industry, and those became the FDA standards.
The FDA just wants there to be standards, and the companies have a vested interest in making sure those standards ensure safe medical devices.
The crashes revealed the FAA wasn't doing the job people thought they were. We achieved safety in this case by grounding all of the planes after crashes, which is hardly the ideal method.
It seems that you're trying to suggest either 1) that the standards as mentioned necessarily aren't True Standards - as a blanket statement - because they're set by the industry or 2) that these standards aren't True Standards - specific to this particular discussion - because there is no reason to think they're necessarily more rigorous than the standards for driverless car software. If you're trying to suggest something else, please understand that it is unclear.
I'm all for a dissenting opinion, but when it is not presented in an understandable way the discussion becomes hard to follow.
(I don't mean to suggest that the argument is wrong when I call out the True Scotsman vibes; just that it is the argument I see.)
What is the legal/regulatory difference between the aerospace industry regulating itself vs the auto industry regulating itself in regards to self driving? Besides the obvious that the aerospace industry has a head start.
> Yes, those standards that produced a safety regime of 20 years of flights without software being even implicated in a single fatality. ...
> As you note, unfortunately the standards as employed in practice have recently regressed dramatically to allow a system as unsafe as the 737 MAX to fly. ...
Your point, if I'm not mistaken, being that the FAA has clearly allowed for less stringent regulations in recent years. (Please correct me if I'm wrong. You can ask questions but it does not seem that they lead so immediately to the answers you expect.)
That being said, please consider that I am genuinely trying to understand you:
> I'm all for a dissenting opinion, but when it is not presented in an understandable way the discussion becomes hard to follow.
> The difference is that airplane software standards are by far the most rigorous in the world and so rigorous that most software developers are shocked at the level of rigor employed
Now they are. This regulations are a result of several tragedies culminating in a big disaster:
Neither aircraft nor drug development norms look anything like the norms of software development. I actually find a substantial difference in my trust level between a traditional car company that's building self-driving capabilities (e.g. Mercedes) than a company that fashions itself as a software company that happens to build cars (e.g. Tesla) for exactly the reason of the norms and behaviors that each org would encourage.
Generally agree but also knew people who worked on Boeing QA/SWE and the internal picture sounds dicy. I'm a bit disconcerted flying after learning about it.
Boeing's issues were written on the wall about 2 decades ago when it moved it's hierarchy from an engineer-centric one to a Chicago accountant-centric one. That alone wouldn't have been an issue, but they had an immediate brain drain as half their HQ staff didn't follow the relocation.
Imagine a thousand employees, half your HQ staff, that leave. There are several possible reasons:
- they're older -> more corporate knowledge and knew the "magic recipes"
- skill based mobility -> they're so good they can go anywhere, and Chicago isn't Seattle
This was widely thought on ... what was I browsing back then? Reddit? as a fore-warner of bad stuff to come
The fore-warning came to fruition when the issues at various Boeing plants started developing over the next ten years (insider videos talking with an employee about being on drugs during crucial assembly work and shift mates being similarly high, "get it through your station" attitudes) and the Dreamliner issues that were hand-waved away (no training, 1-hour tablet self directed training, certification delays, and eventually crashes).
Furthermore, at this stage the driverless cars are unlikely to be creating demand. These are replacing human drivers. Most of us have no hand in verifying the safety of other drivers on the road. I happen to believe it is bonkers that we generally test drivers once at the age of 16 and somehow that earns a person driving privileges for at least 50 years before being retested if not their entire life.
If cars were invented today, they would be too dangerous to be allowed to exist. Almost nothing has been invented since 1970 that can cause any harm. Safety first and all that.
They'd have to be built with cow-catcher like devices to push all the horseshit out of their way while traveling down the road. It'd be a different kind of awful.
Not much physical harm and very little liability. I think computers and software was the one place people could make what they wanted and sell it without much worry of getting sued out of existence and that is why there was so much advancement. Software licenses are pretty amazing with the "as is" clause that seems to hold up.
Presumably, you choose whether to ride that airplane or take those drugs. You probably don't get to choose when someone else's driverless car runs you over.
True, but you miss my point in referring to this. You still don't get to choose when someone else's mistake might harm you. Also, we as the public in general routinely trust planes with millions of risky flights despite not knowing anything about how well or safely they work, or how they work at all in detail. We accept that accidents sometimes happen nonetheless because that's how it goes with human technology that we've come to depend on. The important thing is that precautions are taken as much as reasonably possible. The same standard can be applied to driverless cars without getting fearful of them simply because of their newness.
But driverless cars do not go through the same requirements as aviation.
Before an airplane goes into circulation, it has gone through extremely rigorous testing. An airplane also always has a pilot.
The same can't be said for driverless cars. They don't go through extreme rigorous testing, they don't have a driver, and they're controlled by software that is most likely a far cry from aviation standards.
> Driverless cars are just one more added to the list.
As others have pointed out, aircraft certification (while it has its problems) is very rigorous. Driverless car certification, up to date, is basically nothing.
But the other aspect is that aircraft autopilots are solving a far easier problem. Developing a car autopilot for busy streets is many orders of magnitude more difficult than an airplane (or boat) autopilot.
Driverless cars are just one more added to the list
It's a qualitatively different change than any of the above (driven by a messianic view that AI is here and now and about to change everything), plus an instance of the
This is one of the problems with technology that Ted Kaczynski wrote about. You can't opt out.
> Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to
serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note this
important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced
as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the
new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.)
Your problem is the same as the walker's. The walker has opted out of the automobile, but still has to breathe its pollution and risk being hit by it.
The fact that someone did something terrible does not imply that everything they ever said or did was wrong. That's dangerous thinking. The Unabomber's short manifesto makes a number of salient points about the negative interplay between technology and the human condition, and offers a neat potential explanation for why so many people are unhappy despite being surrounded by modern conveniences.
As someone who likes to walk in an urban environment, I'd say it's not good and relevant. It's rather detached from the actual experience of the urban walker.
There's simple road design concepts that mitigate danger, as well.
I don't think his murders invalidate his manifesto. Luditeism has been very popular since the industrial revolution, I think it's reasonably likely we would be talking about Industrial Society and its Future or something similar if he hadn't killed people.
> I don't think his murders invalidate his manifesto
That's not my point though, my point is that quoting his manifesto validates his violence. If his ideas are valid, there should be other sources to quote/promote.
Absolutely his murders invalidate his manifesto. The ideas that he expressed in the manifesto are the same ideas that moved him to murder people. His opposition to technology is why he was bombing computer stores and the University of Utah Engineering Building.
This is why saying "but he's a murderer" isn't an ad hominem. His murders are the working-out of his ideas; his ideas are worth rejecting just on that basis.
That doesn't mean they are wrong in part or in whole.
>His murders are the working-out of his ideas; his ideas are worth rejecting just on that basis.
This is simply saying "if he is right, I would rather be wrong". It also completely ignores that arguments can be valid in part, but not in combination.
Most of us consider murder to be self-evidently wrong. The intersection of "right, and causing murder" is very close to empty for most definitions of "right".
Your question makes me wonder what your definition of "right" is.
>>>> I don't think his murders invalidate his manifesto.
- colinmhayes (the original post I responded to).
And, for your point to be relevant to this discussion, you would have to claim that what the Unabomber did was "killing" rather than "murder". If you claim that, I'd like to see your definitions and where you think the line between killing and murder is.
And if that isn't your claim, it looks like you're just arguing in order to argue.
I have no interest in defending the actions of the Unabomber.
I did feel that you were using the tautology of murder to ignore my actual point.
>You: His murders are the working-out of his ideas; his ideas are worth rejecting just on that basis.
>Me: That doesn't mean they are wrong in part or in whole.
If the unabomber said as part of the manifesto that the sky is blue, would you now reject that the sky is blue?
There is nothing about murder that invalidates the logic, truth, or accuracy of an argument, and especially not the individual components of an argument.
It is fine and fair if you don't personally want to learn or engage with an argument that has lead to violence. But that does not mean that it is internally inconsistent, or devoid of accurate observations about the world (e.g. new technologies can impose externalities on the unwilling).
Whether the sky is blue has no moral component. The Unabomber was saying 1) what he thought was wrong with society, and 2) how we should make a better society.
These judgments ("wrong" and "better") presuppose some definition of "good". But the guy was deliberately killing people. Am I supposed to believe his definition of what "good" is? No, I'm supposed to suspect that it's seriously skewed. (In fact, he's giving me evidence that it's seriously skewed.)
There's something about murder that invalidates the moral truth of an argument.
Could his argument still be internally consistent? Sure. Could it have accurate observations? Also sure. But should his manifesto be regarded as having any overall validity? No. (Recall that the original point I was replying to was whether his murders invalidated his manifesto.)
You need to learn to separate the ideas from the author. A work either has ideological merit or it does not. If he wrote the paper, it had merit, and then he murdered people, that does not change the writing at all. It has the same merit that it had before. Your learning information about the man who wrote the ideas should not have any effect on your assessment of its validity.
Nearly every great thinker and writer you can name from before a certain year owned slaves or wanted to.
I feel that you view his acts of murder as inseparably linked to the manifesto, and that people can not accept manifesto to be true, while condemning the murders.
This ignores the possibility of a completely pacifist implementation of the manifesto's ideals.
My understanding is that a significant portion of it is not necessarily a call to violence, as much as a call to action. It states the technology and collectivism should be rejected, and this could be either a violent or non-violent process.
I think he ultimately suffered mental illness, and it is reflected in both the fact that he murdered and the ideas in his manifesto. It's hard to separate them.
There may be similar ideas expressed by those who don't share his pathology, but his version of it is extreme and fringe.
Maybe now is the time to start raising the bar on human and upcoming automated drivers.
Both could have to pass a driving test that includes challenging, difficult situations. Day, night, rain, snow, fog, heavy traffic, missing lane lines, simulated pedestrians (including small children) leaping out between parked cars, and more.
For further difficulty, both kinds of drivers could have to pass this within a x% margin of the fastest safe speed at which the maneuvers can be completed; no cheating by slowing down to traffic-disrupting speeds.
The reason to hold humans and self driving cars to a different standard is that humans have already "class qualified" under ... well ... every condition that we drive in... with on the order of a billion driving years of total experience to the limitations of human-driving and far in excess of 10 million years of additional driving added per year along with a considerable amount of study across many decades.
Though there are systematic flaws in human drivers they're reasonably well known given the level of experience we have, there are many mitigations in place in both our cars and road designs, and many of these flaws are intuitively modeled by the other humans on the road as well as pedestrians allowing for real-time compensation.
The driverless cars, on the other hand-- we have radically less experience with as a class and there are many reasons to believe that vendor to vendor (e.g. due to sensor modalities) or even version to version will behave less self-consistently than human drivers do as a class. We know of some systematic faults in their operation which cause them to behave in ways that are highly surprising to humans, and we should expect to find many more as we gain experience.
To the extent that the properties of self driving cars have been formally studied at all it's been primarily by their creators which are obviously self interested. Some of the practices used in early supervised self-driving also actively undermined understanding their safety (e.g. executing a hand over to the human once the car was already in an nonrecoverable unsafe state and then attributing the accident to human driving since at the time of the collision the human was back in charge, but maybe only by a hundred milliseconds; or companies committing perjury to use the DMCA to force down unfavorable videos created by others)
This isn't an argument that we might not benefit from more rigorous driver testing or even from testing ideas that originated from self-driving car testing... but parity between driverless car tests and human testing shouldn't be a goal, particularly not when so many orders of magnitude separate our human driving experience from driverless experience.
I suspect that a challenging driver assessment between AVs and humans would be the most rapid driver of AVs possible... Just remember: Most drivers think they're above average.
Curiously, autonomous car technology also makes it feasible for us to rate drivers -- it's like having a professional watching over your shoulder all the time. IIRC, Tesla used something similar to determine rollout of new FSD capabilities.
Personally, any % above "average human driving skill" reliably should start to see more uptake of this new technology. Driverless cars have and will kill people. Sometimes it will be due to programming errors. But on the whole, they are, in many cases, on par or better than human drivers. I think it's good to be cautious, for the industry to be cautious. But I don't want to see people freaking out over a single accident because it involved an AI when there are thousands of non-AI accidents every day. Be consistent in judging them, not against some mythical 100% success rate but against the criteria, is it better/safer than most drivers.
They've been driving for a while now. Can't you go with data from their existing rides to form an opinion? All you're going with is fear right now. Those cars are already better than the majority of drivers.
I agree with your basic idea, but I don't think there's really any way around this - at some point these systems will have to be tested in a real world environment.
I guess the question is: how much higher should the bar be set? And if we set it substantially higher then how much longer will it take to improve the performance and safety of these systems?
This is the most challenging transition with tech in terms of the outcomes and the difficulty defining just what this trend is.
Cybernetics is* ~insertion of a governance layer into our social contract that we didn't agree to relinquish our agency to... It just sort of happened, and we deal with the outcomes. The more disconcerting aspect to me is the latter. Suddenly, QR codes everywhere, good luck getting around without a smart phone, if that driverless car sideswipes you and doesn't stop, call someone I guess?
If this area/trend interests you, there is a lot of reading available from the weird (CCRU, early Nick Land) to the fairly mechanical/academic (MIT, Norbert Wiener), to the openly behavioral governance-themed (Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, B.J. Fogg), to adversarial-to-tech (The Cybernetic Hypothesis).
* so-so definition of the space, but its the best I can sum it up.
> I am really worried by the fact that I am the unwilling tester in the Great Driverless Car Experiment.
You’re basically an non-consenting tester for every piece of innovation that society every has/ever will come up with, in one way or another. It’s an unavoidable feature of living on the same planet as 8 billion other people. Perhaps the safety of this technology does need to improve, or perhaps not. But there’s no level of improvement that would ever be able to satisfy this outrage you’ve expressed at something new existing in the same place as you.
> You’re basically an non-consenting tester for every piece of innovation that society every has/ever will come up with, in one way or another. It’s an unavoidable feature of living on the same planet as 8 billion other people. Perhaps the safety of this technology does need to improve, or perhaps not. But there’s no level of improvement that would ever be able to satisfy this outrage you’ve expressed at something new existing in the same place as you.
Why do you say it's unavoidable? Regulations could certainly keep these tests off of public roads.
Let’s say autonomous cars, once fully implemented, are even 10% safer than existing drivers. And testing in real-world conditions, speeds up the implementation by even just a year. We would need about 3k deaths at the hands of the autonomous drivers before the trade off was no longer worth it. This is only considering the US. And based on very conservative estimates of 10% improvement and a reduction of only a year savings in time to deploy. The more likely scenario will put that number in the 10s of thousands in my opinion.
Personally, I would much rather we slowly develop and deploy these cars in the wild rather than continue testing in some controlled environments. At least this way we can monitor progress and judge their readiness as a society. Plus, the sooner they happen, the better for everyone.
You're trying to do math in a scenario where you have no real numbers. Of course you can pull some stuff out of your butt (+10%, 1 year) to say it's going to save lives but unless you can justify those numbers it's meaningless.
The point is not the exact numbers. It’s to demonstrate that even if we do suffer accidents and deaths from testing self-driving cars on the road, the end result will be many more saved lives (just based on the fact of how many people die from traffic accidents today) Of course this hinges on many other factors to be true, but that’s the case with all kinds of technological advances.
And they did, until they didn't. This is not a brand new, unproven technology. It's been developing for over a decade. The car didn't hurt anyone or crash into anything - it simply did not have its lights on. The behavior to drive to a safer place for the traffic stop was intentional, per Cruise. This is something human drivers do as well. When being pulled over, it's common to pull into a parking lot or other nearby place that isn't in the driving path, for the officer's safety and convenience, in addition to allowing traffic to continue to flow without obstruction.
They are speaking more broadly. Every day you walk past buildings with novel construction features, planes fly overhead without your permission, the ingredients to the food you eat change without your knowledge or consent.
It's a simple fact of life that you test things without explicitly consenting. The driverless cars are no different.
You could say the same for regular cars when they first arrived on the road. Saying there should be a higher bar is useless unless you are able to say exactly what that bar should be.
People did say exactly the same for regular cars. The result was a massive advertising campaign to establish the concept of jaywalking, and to make the street the sole domain of the car.
I can easily imagine a similar campaign to label pedestrians as irresponsible for walking outside without an ultrasonic emitter, or a lidar reflector, or whatever integrates with the self-driving system. Whatever shifts the responsibility away from the car and onto the deceased.
2. Roads existed before cars. This is an extremely American view to think that roads should be exclusively for cars. Roads should be for PEOPLE, regardless of which mode of transport they are using.
Okay, but now cars do exist. Do you think it's reasonable for cars capable of traveling 40mph should be stuck behind pedestrians at walking speed? Our modern transportation infrastructure exists for a reason, and that reason is speed/effeciency. Most areas with heavy pedestrian traffic have sidewalks. If I'm going 60mph down the highway then the presumption that I should be subjected to pedestrians casually strolling across is absurd.
Already today, cars do not travel at 40mph in those areas with heavy pedestrian traffic--the typical speed limit on a city street is 25mph, and even that is probably above typical speeds. If you want cars to travel more quickly, you need to resort to highways that completely cut off pedestrian access, which has seriously deleterious effects on the neighborhoods it travels through.
If you try to compromise, you end up with stroads... which turn out to be just as bad as highways for pedestrians in practice, thanks in no small part to people like you who believe that all of the compromises of street design and urban planning should be borne not by vehicular drivers but by pedestrians.
(I'll add a side note here: a lot of efficiency depends on what you're trying to make efficient. Many people--including you, apparently--define efficiency as moving cars with as high throughput as possible. If you instead want to move people with high throughput, usually step one is to ditch cars, since single-occupant vehicles occupy vastly more space than any other form of transportation.)
Alright, but 25mph is still significantly faster than walking speed. I do think that mass transportation would be nice and we could use a better public trans infra in the US, but that doesn't make the fact that waking is still much less efficient that driving. Even with cars taking up much more space, a bunch of cars traveling at 25 mph are able to carry a many more people through a distance X in a period of time T than the equivalent walking would be able to. The alternative that everyone seems to be forgetting is having roads for cars and sidewalks for people, which already exists in the vast majority of areas with a high potentiality for pedestrian traffic.
LOL, cars don't go anywhere near 25mph in Boston. They'll average 15mph, if they're lucky. Even with ~70% of the right of way allocated to cars, there's still too many of them for the road to handle. I don't know what "efficiency" you think cars have over other modes but I'm not seeing it on my commute. More often than not, my bike is stuck behind cars (because the bike lane disappeared) rather than they're stuck behind me.
15mph is still faster than walking speed. I'm not saying cars are the most optimally efficient mode of transportation, just that they are much more efficient that walking.
That's a completely useless comparison that applies almost no where in the world? You need to compare driving vs pervasive transit and bike networks. I doubt New Yorkers or Amsterdammers would accept your efficient car hypothesis.
In the few places with high 100% walking commutes, I don't see cars being more efficient either. Do you want every college student to drive from their dorm to class? How about poor countries without the money to maintain good road networks?
Are you joking? That applies in the vast majority of the world, the exceptions you named are just that, exceptions that are exceptionally rare.
This entire discussion started as whether pedestrians should/shouldn't be on roads. No, they shouldn't. They should be on a sidewalk, best of both worlds.
Speed, yes, but efficiency is questionable. Efficiency depends both on how fast you're traveling, but also on how far you need to travel in order to reach a destination. With minimum parking requirements, the space required for a shop increases drastically. If there's one shop every 50 feet, you can efficiently visit them at low speeds. If there's one shop every quarter mile, walking past a row of shops is impossible. The car traveling 40 mph can go at a faster speed than a pedestrian, but it also requires the shops to be spaced out such that the car can park. Optimizing for speed reduces efficiency.
Not necessarily. This assessment forgets things like sidewalks. I don't think anyone is going to visit shops on main street and every time they leave a shop drives 5 feet further down the road only to park and visit another one. In tightly clustered areas it's most common to park and then walk via a sidewalk to other destinations on the area.
For 1, this is well established history that I didn't feel was necessary to provide sources for. That said, the vox article linked to by jeromegv does a good job of describing the transition.
For 2, I'd make a distinction between paths built for long-distance travel (roads) and paths built for connecting to destinations (streets). The two have fundamentally different goals that cannot be safely achieved at the same time. To allow for high-speed travel, a road should be as predictable as possible, with limited entrances and exits and barriers to prevent people and animals from wandering onto the road, and should be restricted to vehicles that can maintain a high speed. To allow streets to connect to destinations; such as homes, shops, and workplaces; there should be many entrances and exits to the street. The destinations should be packed as tightly as possible, so that they can be reached with a minimal distance traveled. It's not just that these goals require tradeoffs, but that they are fundamentally antithetical to each other.
The best way to satisfy these two goals is by having separate designs for streets and roads. The roads are pathed around pedestrian areas, and allow branching off into them at limited locations. The streets are mixed use, with rougher surfaces (e.g. brick/cobblestone) to prevent high-speed travel. This doesn't exclude motor vehicles from using roads altogether, allowing for use cases such as delivering food to cornershops or dropping off somebody with limited mobility, but does steer motorized traffic off of the streets and onto the roads wherever possible.
1. Fair enough, but sources should almost always be provided. I hadn't heard that particular piece of historical trivia and I don't think it's necessarily common knowledge.
As for the later, why is that any better than just sidewalks and crosswalks, which the majority of areas with heavy pedestrian traffic already have? It'd be incredibly eco-unfriendly, expensive, and impractical to have two different types of roads for cars and pedestrians when we already have a solution that works just fine - sidewalks.
I do provide sources when something is difficult to find, uncommon, or uses numeric values beyond ballpark estimations. Demanding sources for every statement contributes to Brandolini's Law [0], which states "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it." In the spirit of restoring symmetry, I invite you to provide sources for the following statements made in this thread.
* "Most areas with heavy pedestrian traffic have sidewalks." I am uncertain on this one, as heavy pedestrian traffic is more frequent on mixed-use streets. Sidewalks are only used in places with car-centric design, which discourages walking.
* "Even with cars taking up much more space, a bunch of cars traveling at 25 mph are able to carry a many more people through a distance X in a period of time T than the equivalent walking would be able to." I am uncertain on this, because cars require very large amounts of space both for the physical size of the car, the spacing between cars, and the spacing between groups of cars at an intersection.
* "It'd be incredibly eco-unfriendly, expensive, and impractical to have two different types of roads" I'd be interested in a source for this, as I've generally heard that separating out usage improves the efficiency of each. Cars go faster because there are fewer stops requires. Pedestrians die less often because there are fewer cars nearby.
* "Bike lanes are less common than sidewalks" This is correct by my experience, but I've only lived in places with car-centric city planning. Can you provide a source?
I'm interested in continuing this conversation, but not if it is a conversation between sourced comments and unsourced assertions.
2: Roads are also for bicyclists, motorcyclists, and even pedestrians. It's true though that car drivers often think that roads are a car only domain and behave aggressively towards the other mentioned groups
2. No, sidewalks and bike lanes are for pedestrians and bicyclists. Bike lanes are less common than sidewalks so I think it's reasonable to include them on low-speed/highly congested stretches of road, but to assume they should have a full access to, e.g. and interstate or highway is ridiculous and would hinder literally thousands of people.
OK, let's all take a deep breath here - we might just have a different understanding of the word "road". My definition of "road" is not restricted to interstates and highways, but it includes any larger road, err, street. Of course, nobody wants pedestrians or cyclists on highways. It looks like we agree there.
But I refuse the popular notion that roads (as in larger streets, or any street between villages/towns/cities) should be for cars only. The usual examples of Copenhagen, Amsterdam or recently Paris show that shared roads lead to a higher quality of living. I personally appreciate this, and I'd prefer a world where this sharing would be more common.
There’s an entirety different worldview that you are missing here. Check out this great YouTube channel which goes into a lot of detail about how our cities and towns could be better designed. https://youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes
Sidewalks and bike lanes are not contiguous. Pedestrians and cyclists are not only permitted, but have the right of way, on nearly all roads other than controlled access highways and tunnels, even where sidewalks and bike lanes exist.
Yes but this conversation was about jaywalking and what roads are intended for. No one (I think) is arguing that a bike crossing the rode to go from one bike lane to another is wrong, but that it isn't the intended purpose of roads. Pedestrians do have the right away, but that doesn't make jaywalking illegal, it just makes it so drivers are (rightfully) held accountable for running over pedestrians trying to cross the street. It doesn't give a pedestrian the right to walk down the middle of the street at a leisurely pace
> 2. You don't think that roads should be a car only domain? What do you think roads are for?
You've clearly never had a UPS driver scream "Use the bike lane!" at you after parking his truck in that same bike lane. Drivers have bizarre reflexes for how to use roads.
> 2. You don't think that roads should be a car only domain? What do you think roads are for?
For example for my messanger on my horse so he doesn't get stuck in the mutt on it's voyage to the next city.
... or maybe my zenturie to support my legion?
What makes you think (or suggest) that roads where invented for cars?
I never said they were invented for cars. My question was why don't they think roads, as they are in 2022, shouldn't be a car only domain? This argument of "well their original purpose was for..." is logically incoherent in a multitude of ways. There are thousands of things that we use a bit different than originally as intended due to the advancement of modern tech
Let's start with setting the bar at "the driverless car only operating at night should have its lights on". And since Cruise so effortlessly limbod right under that one, we should probably ask for a root-cause analysis here and stop their operation immediately until then. God forbid they start disabling the brakes like Uber "because they cause disengagements".
What? No, not at all. The bridge has to be able to handle the max load, otherwise it's not safe. If the load test causes any issues with the bridge, that is a massive red flag.
>I think we should set a much higher bar for allowing those cars on the streets, rather than "it kinda works, so let's roll with it".
Indeed. The minimum before any self driving car can be put on the road is that the developers, managers, executives, and major investors and their immediate families have to spend 8 hours running back and forth across a track on which 40 self driving cars per mile of track are running laps at a minimum of 50 MPH. Additionally there need to be things like rains of nails on the road, suddenly floods of water, packs of dogs, tumbling tumbleweeds, and other hazards. If at any point the average speed drops below 50 MPH or if the cars hit anyone or hit each other, the car can't go on public roads.
These robots are massive and fast, they are killers. Yet as long as they look like cars we let them run loose on public streets. It's kinda nuts. (Arguably car traffic as it's set up now is kinds nuts too, but that's a different argument.)
The obvious thing to do is start with something like a golf cart that is limited to, say, 5mph top speed, and work your way up.
When the device is a giant robot arm or a laser cutter, there are huge amounts of regulation-- you may have to get permission from your municipality to operate it even within the confines of your own facility.
Make it look like a car, however, ...
Cars and roads are kind of nuts, but they're established lunacy at least.
It's not really my observation. Bicyclists have a (sick) joke: "If you want to get away with murder just be sure you're driving a car and your victim is riding a bike." The way I see it, the same blind spot (no pun intended) applies to car-shaped killer robots.
Drunk drivers are killers. People that text and drive are killers. People that get kicked by their kid and turn around for a second to yell at them are killers.
I'll take an unfatigable, indistractable, computer that literally has eyes in the back of its head, and on the side of its head, and the front, and can bounce radar under cars, etc over the pitiful example of a "safe (human) driver" we have now.
> I'll take an unfatigable, indistractable, computer that literally has eyes in the back of its head, and on the side of its head, and the front, and can bounce radar under cars, etc over the pitiful example of a "safe (human) driver" we have now.
Yes, friend, and when we have those so will I.
Those (as yet still fictional) robot cars (and can we PLEASE call them "auto-autos"!?) are not the problem.
- - - -
> Drunk drivers are killers. People that text and drive are killers. ...
Yes, and it's arguably fucking crazy that we let them do that. The whole reason is a deliberate campaign to normalize the carnage: "speed demons" were replaced by "jay walkers" and now more people (in the USA) have been killed by cars than by all the wars we've fought.
plus the "beta" testers treat it like some kind of fun game. they're like "whoops, almost swerved into traffic. whoops, almost ran into a pedestrian crossing the street."
> I am really worried by the fact that I am the unwilling tester in the Great Driverless Car Experiment.
Welcome to America, where you are an unwitting tester of many private ventures that have been signed off on by the American government on your behalf.
Remember that complaining about these tests and demanding more control means that you are communist. Unless of course you don't mind waiting around to be harmed by such tests, and are either able to sue, or told that you had no reasonable expectation of safety.
We will never have driverless cars if we hold them to a standard that is unobtainable while continuing to let regular drivers cause accidents and deaths on a daily basis.
This is not exactly irrelevant, but there is some indeterminate weighting factor that you would have to apply for the bad taste of algorithms killing people vs people killing people.
Not that I'm an impartial judge... At the end of the autonomous car rainbow waits more parking, more driving, and fences to keep people out of streets.
Tradition has it that when you load-test a new bridge, you put the architect underneath. I feel like this, except I didn't design those driverless cars, somebody else did. Being an experienced software engineer, my trust in the software in these cars is pretty low. And yet they are testing them on me, because I can be the one getting killed.
I think we should set a much higher bar for allowing those cars on the streets, rather than "it kinda works, so let's roll with it".