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this when a buddy's parked car was struck by a drunk driver who was not legally licensed to drive because their license was revoked from having many prior DUI's. Luckily they didn't kill anyone.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.
Most of those are lacking or at least inconsistent, for AI driving.