When autonomous cars are moving along a freeway how does one car know what the car next to it is going to do anymore than a human driver would? I have this vision of computer driven cars never being able to get out of the inside lanes.
V2 of this tech likely involves a way for autonomous cars to talk to each other, either directly or through a central hub. It would be possible today to have this tech, so every car on the road would have a real-time view of every other car and know where it is going and what it plans to do next.
If this were “Science” (ie, some kind of reputable university or research group) i might be less cynical. But this is Uber. The whole reason they have meatspace driver in autonomous vehicles is to be able to foist the liability of exactly this situation onto them.
In other words my default position would be to feel that Uber is in the wrong unless a large number of reputable opinions analyze this and conclude otherwise. I see no reason to be merciful when dealing with fatalities with a company that has shown time and again willingness to flaunt laws and regulations that bother it.
Well have elk, deer and open range signs up for that very reason, telling people to expect the sudden and unexpected… but that doesn’t prevent all accidents, it just supposed to make you more alert to try and minimize the risk.
The question here is a little more narrow than can computers accommodate these things when humans can’t because humans… can. It’s more like, is it at the same level or better. I would have liked to know that answer better before they tested it with the public… like the public should already know the answer due to controlled tests but hey I’ve already said I am not happy with the way they’re testing this.
The other thing is… humans can respond to the unexpected… we do it all the time, but when we can’t, we’re not often at fault. So… how high is the acceptable standard for these machines which will never be perfect even if they are better in most scenarios than average or good drivers. And which is it by the way, we comparing them to average drivers or the good ones because there are a lot of questionable drivers on the road right now.
Menzo’s position seems to be: “Look we have to kill a bunch of people till we work out the kinks.”
And he doesn’t understand why people would be opposed to it.
Letting robots kill people is a terrible idea and the entire thing is premised on not letting humans drive cars anymore ever, which will likely never happen anyway. So the end game is impossible, but we gotta kill some people going there.
Except that every manufacturer will have it’s own incompatible system in order to be able to market how awesome their autonomous system is.
Car makers are terrible at technology.
Yeah, wrong.
My position is that autonomous cars should kill fewer people than ones with humans at the wheel on day one, but we can’t require that number to be zero.
But I think you know this.
So are you wiring people’s brains directly into the car computers or does your proposal involve actual magic?
Because literally the only way that second statement works is if you don’t allow any humans to drive.
Yes, I think this is the inevitable future, but it’s far away (more than 20 years).
I think human drivers will be very rare and possibly illegal.
https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/car-to-x-communication/
So… what I said was completely correct. And then you gave me shit like it wasn’t.
I’ll just add you to the list of people I not longer interact with. Have a nice day.
Makes sense. But you have to weight that against the possibility that the human is texting or otherwise distracted.
Why was this car going 38 in a 35 speed limit area?
A human driver would never do such a thing. Someone stop the robot apocalypse already.
We know a human would speed. This is supposed to be better. Why was it speeding at all?
Maybe it had somewhere important to be.
It had to go 38 in order to reach its victim in time.
Yeah it would be weird if they programmed it to speed.
How are these things at 4-5 way stops. People generally suck at those as it is.
#uber
I’ve read conflicting reports about the speed limit - 45 or 35. It’s possible it was in a transition from one to the other?
But it would be illogical for an autonomous car to be speeding. Even 3 mpg over would be weird, so again, I think we need to see what the facts are.
I do agree, and have said before, that the inevitable logical conclusion of having autonomous cars on the road is having only autonomous cars on the road. Pretty much any solution worth its engineering chops requires it. A mix of human and computer-controlled vehicles is the worst possible situation in my estimation, as it magnifies the worst aspects of both types of vehicle control. It gives computers a lot more wild-ass variables to deal with, and it gives humans other vehicles that are operating in what we can only describe in an alien, unfamiliar manner, such that the human driver’s experience gained over the years interacting with other human-controlled cars, becomes not only irrelevant but probably misleading.
I also think it’s open to question whether the actual data sharing and processing infrastructure is actually feasible in anything like the near to medium term, at levels of safety, security, and reliability that would be acceptable. We already have the relatively primitive vehicle info and control systems being hacked, and once you start entrusting everything to the computers this is going to be an, um, issue. That’s not even getting to the more mundane issues caused by weather, road conditions, terrain, debris, user action (modifications, legal or illegal; mistreatment or misuse; simply negligence or accidental damage), and the rest.
I think, yeah, it is a likely long term scenario for some regions, where I’m sure some time in the future there will be zones where only autonomous vehicles are allowed, and perhaps you stash your human controlled vehicle at an outlying park-n-ride type places, or turn the switch that makes your car fully controlled by the machines until you leave the restricted area, or something. I find it harder to believe that hundreds of millions of regular cars are going to up and poof!, or that people in East Bumblefuck (like me) are going to get anything like this fancy tech.