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A very small survey of people of different ages suggests that there are age and gender differences in the acceptance of riding in automated cars. In summary, 2,600 people in the US replied and of them 38% of the men and just 16% of women would be happy to ride in an automated vehicle. About a quarter of respondents said they would feel safe in a driverless car while around two thirds said they would not travel unless there was a driver. No mention was made about their opinions of sharing the road with these massive projectiles when driving themselves in traditional cars.
Source : Driverless cars: Men and women have very different opinions on letting go of the wheel
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Men and Women Have Very Different Opinions on Automated Cars
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* m2 stares at the monitor... it looks like a hamburger...
m2 - that's a bad sign
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Thursday February 01 2018, @05:01PM (16 children)
I see very dangerous driving all the time. What I see these years is probably at least one minor incident per 15 minutes of road time and one major incident every few trips. I think we agree on the awfulness of a significant number of the human drivers. Where we probably disagree is how many decades off safe autopilots will be on the market for cars.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 01 2018, @05:31PM (7 children)
Where we probably disagree is how many decades off safe autopilots will be on the market for cars.
I don't know that we disagree here; I haven't stated any strong belief about any specific timeframe where I believe automated cars will be the norm. Given the inherent complexity of driving, I'm somewhat skeptical, but they do have cars driving themselves around now for research purposes, so I'm keeping an open mind. We've seen other places where some technology went from R&D to being rolled out en masse in a very short amount of time: the internet, smartphones, etc., and it was very surprising and disruptive. Personally, I wish we'd work more on SkyTran; the system should be even safer (cars are suspended from elevated rails, so the operational complexity is a couple orders of magnitude less), not to mention much more energy-efficient (tiny, lightweight, electric-driven 2-person cars on Maglev rails with no intersections as they operate in 3D space, instead of 3000-lb. gas-driven cars on rubber tires on the existing mostly-2D road network complete with stoplights every few hundred feet), and much faster too (again, no stoplights). We still need automated road-going vehicles, as many places aren't dense enough for a PRT system like SkyTran, and other vehicles like trucks should be automated too, but we could cover so many travelers with PRT that we'd greatly increase time efficiency (people wasting their time in traffic) and energy efficiency (wouldn't need foreign oil with so many fewer gas cars needed).
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday February 01 2018, @06:23PM (5 children)
On the whole, I agree with your sentiments about the pace of technology. However, the examples you gave are actually terrible ones:
The Internet: Let's be generous and say that the Internet as we know it today came to be with HTML/web browsers, which was in 1990. The first APRANet link went live in 1969. That's about 20 years.
Smartphones: Let's be *really* generous this time and call the Inter@ctive Pager 900, announced on September 18, 1996 the first smartphone. The Osborne 1 was the first *portable* computer, released in 1981. Hmm...fifteen years. Not so long. But the first cellular phone (which is, arguably, in this day and age of apps mostly just being proprietary interfaces to web sites, much more important) was introduced in 1973, some 23 years before the first "smartphone."
As such, this sort of thing generally takes *decades* to meld disparate technologies into such disruptive applications.
Given the rapid development of mobile communications, computing power and expert systems [wikipedia.org] in other areas, it's not surprising that such technologies would be used, and are *already being used*, for transportation systems [wikipedia.org]. As such, I think it's more useful to gauge the advent of actual, commercially available, autonomous vehicles in terms of billions of road miles without an accident or failure (a rough analog to MTBF, perhaps?)
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 01 2018, @07:57PM (4 children)
I don't think my examples are bad at all, when you look at things from the point-of-view of regular people rather than technologists.
The Internet: Let's be generous and say that the Internet as we know it today came to be with HTML/web browsers, which was in 1990. The first APRANet link went live in 1969. That's about 20 years.
To regular people, "the internet" didn't exist before about 1994, at least not in a form that they could access or care about. The MOSAIC browser was released in 1993, and that was the thing that really kicked things off, and within 7 years we had the Dot-Com boom and then bust. Regular people didn't care that academics were using ARPAnet in the 70s.
Smartphones: Let's be *really* generous this time and call the Inter@ctive Pager 900, announced on September 18, 1996 the first smartphone.
Again, no. I've never even heard of that thing, and I was certainly around at that time (and I do remember using MOSAIC when it was new). To regular people, the first real smartphone was the Apple iPhone, released in 2006. No one cared about WinMo and other crap that came before that; it was the iPhone's "slate" form factor and ease-of-use that really changed things and brought smartphones to the public consciousness. It wasn't long after that that Android became a real competitor, and suddenly everyone and their dog had a smartphone.
But the first cellular phone ... was introduced in 1973, some 23 years before the first "smartphone."
I never said anything about (non-smart) cellular phones. A phone that you can only talk on is simply not comparable in any sense to a modern smartphone. I barely do any talking on my phone; it's mostly for data and other uses: chat/texting apps, web browsing, GPS navigation, etc. This is like comparing a modern PC to a 4-function calculator. They're just not remotely the same kind of device.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday February 01 2018, @09:20PM (3 children)
Just to clarify, I wasn't attacking you. Nor was I trying to diminish your arguments. I merely wanted to point out that there's always history and (usually decades) long R&D cycles for just about everything. For example, without the work of Rutherford, Geiger, the Curies, Einstein and others around the turn of the 20th century, we wouldn't have had any real understanding of nuclear physics. Shooting alpha particles at gold foil bears little resemblance to the NIF and ITER hydrogen fusion reactors, but the Geiger-Marsden Experiment [wikipedia.org] was critical research without which atomic physics, quantum mechanics and all the attendant technologies stemming from those fields would have been set back until their discoveries had been *researched* by others instead.
You said, and I quote:
And in response to my post you said, and I quote again:
"Regular people" do R&D? I think not. And without that R&D, (in your examples, the Internet and smart phones) would not exist. Full stop. That's the way it has been for a long time, and will likely be so forever. The difference today is that with the Internet and ubiquitous connectivity (based on those decades of R&D), both the rate of change *and* (more importantly in the case of autonomous vehicles, IMHO) the volume of self-promotion have increased exponentially.
I was around, and actually working in IT when Mosaic (from NCSA [illinois.edu] -- which took Tim Berners-Lee's work and made it simpler to use, but again, NCSA folks certainly weren't, and still aren't, "regular people") was released and found it much better (well, at least when there were sites to actually visit) than Usenet, anonymous FTP lists, Archie, Veronica and Jughead. What is commercially available and what's in R&D are generally pretty far apart, except in incremental (like HTML/HTTP/etc.) improvements in the technology. The basic concepts and the technologies to support those concepts took decades to develop.
As for smartphones, without the cellular (or Wifi -- whose forerunner AlohaNet, actually predates Ethernet -- developed in the early 1970s) networks designed to carry data (often referred to as "packet radio") were developed along with AlohaNet back in the early 1970s.
ARPANet, AlohaNet, "portable" computing, continued miniaturization and density of transistors (first observed, but already in progress, in the mid 1960s) as well as a number of other technologies required *decades* of R&D before anyone could commercialize the Internet or create smartphones.
"Regular people" didn't know/see/care about that stuff until it was ready to be commercialized, and (as you pointed out in the case of smartphones, not even for a decade after it was first commercialized).
Even for the Internet, there were commercial entities doing business there long before Mosaic.
Back to your initial post, I agree with your reasoning and reticence to make predictions. There are too many unknowns at this point -- even with some cars on the road -- we're nowhere near ready for commercialization.
That said, R&D into autonomous vehicles has been going on for a long, long, time. Trains are a great example of that, as I linked i my initial post.
If you think that R&D begins when a corporation decides to design a product for mass distribution, you misunderstand what R&D is. I have neither the time or the inclination to to teach you the history of technology. There are many good books about it, and If you don't like to actually *read*, check out stuff like How We Got To Now [pbs.org] and other (inferior to books on the subject) audiovisual offerings.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 01 2018, @09:46PM (2 children)
Maybe I misspoke about the R&D thing, but as far as the internet is concerned, while the underpinnings of the internet (packet-switched networking, TCP/IP) were around long before the WWW, how long was it between the invention of HTML, HTTP, the WWW and its wide adoption by regular people? It wasn't very long. Obviously, they rely completely on those other technologies I mentioned, namely TCP/IP, but it's the same with self-driving cars: they rely on 1) cars (chassis, engines, suspensions, etc.; we have this stuff down pretty well at this point), 2) computer hardware (that's quite mature as well), 3) operating systems (also quite mature), 4) various sensors (radar cruise control and blind-spot monitoring is pretty commonly available these days on pedestrian cars), 5) GPS navigation (not quite as mature as the others, but millions of people use it daily), etc.
Same goes for smartphones; sure, they depend on the cellular technologies, just like self-driving cars depend on suspensions and brakes, but that stuff is old, mature technology, just like cellular tech was by the time the iPhone came out.
So my whole point is that once the enabling technologies are in place and converge, it frequently doesn't take that long for something built on top of them to take off commercially and become common. Most of the enabling technologies for self-driving cars have been around for ages (ICE engines, computers), and others are fairly mature as well. The "new stuff" is really the algorithms to make it all work. Also, don't forget, self-driving cars have been around as R&D projects for probably a couple decades now. I think there's a self-driving car from the 1990s at the Smithsonian. However, these older projects were used off-road, though in the 00s I think they started doing on-road projects.
So far, the research vehicles are showing great promise, and remarkably low failure rates. And when there is some kind of accident or incident, it's almost always the fault of some human driver who ran into the autonomous car, frequently because the robocar follows the traffic laws too well and isn't as aggressive as human drivers.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday February 01 2018, @10:54PM
You're missing out the fact that for safe mass adoption they also need:
6) Advanced neural AI with the ability to improvise when new problems present themselves and decades of knowledge of the many social cues and habits of human drivers.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday February 02 2018, @12:33AM
Yes. I agree wholeheartedly.
As I said from the beginning, I don't disagree with your arguments, I just thought the examples you used weren't that good.
So why don't we just agree to agree and snatch victory from the jaws of victory?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 02 2018, @06:01AM
I couldn't find it through a quick search since the search space is more polluted now and Google has gotten worse (no more scholar search link), but there were autonomous golf carts in the late 70s or early 80s. With a slight change in road design, we could have had automated transportation a decade ago. But that's a high up front cost and our culture doesn't value such things.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday February 01 2018, @09:13PM (7 children)
Seems to me your evaluation of "minor incident" of dangerous driving is defined as putting the key in the ignition.
If you were seeing that much danger every 15 minutes, you would also be seeing at least one in ten of those "dangerous driving" resulting in an accident.
Failing that, what you see and interpret as "dangerous" is, by definition, not dangerous.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Thursday February 01 2018, @10:43PM (2 children)
Depends how you define a minor incident. I see minor incidents more often than every 15 minutes, by which I include : running red lights, being in wrong lane, tailgating, obstructive parking, cutting in, failing to signal, driver being on a phone, cuting the centre line - and I won't even count speeding. These are all things that a SD car would not do.
OTOH I have little confidence in SD cars reliably coping with other than clearly and nicely laid-out roads - like th ones I see in videos demonstrating how good SD cars are supposed to be. Where I live in rural Wales there are many single track roads with no reliable side verges, and on meeting a vehicle coming the other way a kind of waving negotiation takes place as to which of you reverses perhaps 500 yards to the nearest entirely unofficial patch of rough banking or undergrowth that it is possible to get up or into in order to allow the other one to squeeze past. An SD car is never going to enter such an area. It is going to need official passing places. In other words roads are going to need modifying.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 02 2018, @03:25AM
While I agree with most of your post, I'm pretty sure that this part:
> and I won't even count speeding. These are all things that a SD car would not do.
...is incorrect.
SD programmers realized early on that their cars better move at the speed of surrounding traffic or they were going to get kicked off the roads pretty quickly. They might go at the slow lane speed on the freeway/motorway, but that can often be above the speed limit.
I've been on little lanes as you describe, happened to be outside Norwich, UK. Driving around a blind corner (due to tall hedges) and coming face-2-face with a large agricultural machine[*], there was no question of negotiation, I was in reverse as quickly as possible!
* It had pointy things sticking out all over.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Friday February 02 2018, @04:09AM
I'll have to agree. I see about 1-2 careless and/or dangerous actions every 10 to 15 minutes on the road. In a fairly low-population area. With low traffic. Lots of drifting over the centerline on undivided highways. Drifting across the fog line and into or nearly into the dirt. Cutting across a turn lane because they just realized they needed to make a quick stop at Wendys. When you think about it, seeing someone seriously injured or gore and death - where does everyone encounter this? On the roadways. It's so common. For many this will be the one setting they will ever encounter these kinds of gruesome events.
Automated cars will see in the dark, 360 degrees, with high resolution and will have reaction times 1000 times better than a human. They can make shitty decisions most of the time and they will still improve road safety.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday February 02 2018, @04:57AM (2 children)
If you were seeing that much danger every 15 minutes, you would also be seeing at least one in ten of those "dangerous driving" resulting in an accident.
Oh, I see plenty of smashed cars or cars in the ditch even though they are usually cleaned up within hours. I just don't usually see them get smashed up. Sometimes its even a bus or a tandem trailer. Two or so years ago it was both when a tandem trailer t-boned a partially full school bus just up the road.
In addition to nuke's list, some of which like failing to signal and failing to yield and leaving highbeams on, are merely status quo, I'd add a few more some serious some more serious: There are often kids dorking around with ATVs on undivided highways. I've seen ATV races at 60kph through residential neighborhoods. Back before the local highschool was shut down by the politicians, it was a regular occurence to see different motorcycles (not mopeds) travelling at highway speeds on pedestrian walkways. The most extreme case of that I saw slalom between sets of old people, a woman with a baby carriage and several dog walkers all while travelling about the same speed as me on the parallel highway. It's not uncommon to see people try to pass in their cars in the face of oncoming traffic on the undivided highway such that the oncoming traffic has to brake. Oncoming tandem trailers have drifted over into my lane coming with in centimeters of forcing me into the ditch. People are often engrossed in their phones, probably texting or watching a movie, not just talking though talking on the phone is common. Sometimes talkers have their good ear on the same side as their dominant hand so they are really contorted to keep one hand on the wheel. It's not uncommon to see street speeds in parking lots. In parking structures, it's not uncommon for cars and occasionally motor cycles to sprint. Getting passed on the wrong side happens occasionally. Once I got passed in a 50kph zone by a car going around 120kph, again on the right. Occasionally there are what I call rally turns, where the car hits the intersection almost at speed and turns sideways just before entering the crossing and relies on the grip of the drive wheels to pull it to the right direction and the friction of the tires going sideways to slow down its forward motion.
I'm sure there are more examples if I were to sit down and think about it. The slalom, 120kph, and drift were not so recent happening bewtween 1 and 3 years ago. The rest are all this winter.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Friday February 02 2018, @12:14PM (1 child)
I thought Michigan drivers were bad, but WTF do you guys live? Aggressive driving is par for the course here, but /unsafe/ driving? I see that very rarely, and usually it's drunk people late at night, or some guy on a fast bike running from the cops or street racing.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday February 02 2018, @01:00PM
some guy on a fast bike running from the cops or street racing
A few years ago a woman who was as high as a kite took out a road sign across the way on her way into the ditch. Supposedly she was running from the cops but they turned up long while later at a leisurely pace and then took her away. I'm curious as to how they knew where she was going. Not all accidents are due to bad driving. One old guy we knew had a fatal heart attack just up the road from us a few years ago and destroyed his car in the process. There are also minor annoyances such as the heavy equipment, such as all kinds of tractors and front loaders, commuting to and from work sites during rush hour. Farmers I don't mind because they do real work but many of these others are the result of privatizing the road maintenance and they don't have the right equipment and make do with all kinds of inappropriate earth-moving machinery to clear snow. Technically it is also illegal to burn fuel oil instead of diesel. That seems to have become a lot less frequent lately, but you still smell such a car or van every once in a while. Seeing people pass long lines on blind curves or in no-passing zones is also common.
Last week there were two conflicting reports of whether Chinese tourists would be able to use Chinese drivers licenses here while visiting. In another country, I used to know a lot of people from Mainland China and many of them considered making the car move forward as the only consideration in driving. One neighbor I only knew by sight took out a front porch that way even though it was set back far from the street. But that was decades ago.
Ok. Enough grumbling from me on that topic I think.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday February 02 2018, @12:05PM
sudo mod me up