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posted by Fnord666 on Monday March 19 2018, @10:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the bound-to-happen dept.
 
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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 19 2018, @10:49PM (22 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 19 2018, @10:49PM (#655170) Journal

    And the amounts could easily bankrupt them.

    Bah... some regulation. Nothing a good lobbying and electoral contributions can't solve.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday March 19 2018, @10:55PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Monday March 19 2018, @10:55PM (#655174)

    Meh. I need to express my pain. Money is speech. You can't tell me I'm limited to a specific amount of pain (multiplied by the class size).

    Silly? It only takes 5 judges agreeing with me.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Monday March 19 2018, @10:59PM (12 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Monday March 19 2018, @10:59PM (#655176) Journal

    Might also make pedestrians a bit more careful.

    I've been legally driving since 1971, and I couldn't possibly count the number of times someone has walked out into traffic in some unreasonable fashion and required me to stand on my brakes.

    Might even make us build safer roads - pedestrian bridges in towns and etc., anti-wildlife-fenced highways elsewhere. A lot of death and destruction is simply a result of cheaping out on how roads should actually be built. After all, the vehicle can't hit 'em if they aren't there.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by bob_super on Monday March 19 2018, @11:12PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Monday March 19 2018, @11:12PM (#655180)

      Outside of towns, sure. Inside cities, it might be wiser to remove the cars, or force them to really low and therefore safe speeds. There are way too many places in the US where a 4-lane road, where people go 50mph, is right against houses, shops and schools.

    • (Score: 2) by Nuke on Monday March 19 2018, @11:40PM (2 children)

      by Nuke (3162) on Monday March 19 2018, @11:40PM (#655191)

      The idea of self-driving cars is being pushed on the claim that they are safer than human driven ones and that no infrastrucure changes will be required to accomodate them. But there you go already.

      • (Score: 2) by pendorbound on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:35PM (1 child)

        by pendorbound (2688) on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:35PM (#655423) Homepage

        Self-driving cars don't have to be all that safe to be "safer" than human drivers. The accident stats for all self-driving cars to date back that up. Given the number of total miles driven by self-driving cars, human drivers would statistically have caused far more accidents and deaths.

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @05:05PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @05:05PM (#655492)

          > human drivers would statistically have caused far more accidents and deaths.

          Sorry, I don't give a rat's ass about the stats for the total driving population. I want the self driving car to be better/less accidents than my demographic niche. I don't drink and drive, I'm not a teenager and I've been to advanced driving schools--I do my racing off the public roads. My strong suspicion is that my demographic is a good order of magnitude safer than the general average. That's the target I want to see before I hand off driving to an AI.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday March 19 2018, @11:45PM (1 child)

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Monday March 19 2018, @11:45PM (#655195) Homepage Journal

      I saw a fenced highway in Banff National Park.

      It had underpasses here and there to enable animals to migrate.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
      • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Tuesday March 20 2018, @11:53AM

        by fyngyrz (6567) on Tuesday March 20 2018, @11:53AM (#655334) Journal

        In Indiana, the highway has (or had, it's been some years since I drove it) infrared animal detection and warning systems set up that would signal drivers if animals were near the pavement. I saw it work a couple of times.

        It has always struck me that the calculus for road engineering vs. saving lives – both human and animal – is pretty harsh, most places.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday March 20 2018, @02:45AM (3 children)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday March 20 2018, @02:45AM (#655241) Journal

      Might also make pedestrians a bit more careful.

      An autonomous car that isn't in beta (death) testing phase should be far safer than a human driver. LIDAR can be used to see around corners and the computer can react to circumstances in milliseconds rather than hundreds of milliseconds. So I don't see it having an effect on pedestrian behavior. In fact, if pedestrians know that autonomous cars will always halt when a pedestrian gets in the way, they may be motivated to jaywalk more.

      We always knew that people would die from autonomous cars. "Zero fatalities" isn't realistic.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:34AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:34AM (#655255)

        How does lidar see around corners? Bendy light?

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:43AM

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:43AM (#655261) Journal

          Stanford Researchers Develop Non-Line-of-Sight LIDAR Imaging Procedure [soylentnews.org]

          NLOS [(Non Line Of Sight)] imaging reconstructs the shape and albedo of hidden objects from multiply scattered light. Despite recent advances, NLOS imaging has remained impractical owing to the prohibitive memory and processing requirements of existing reconstruction algorithms, and the extremely weak signal of multiply scattered light. Here we show that a confocal scanning procedure can address these challenges by facilitating the derivation of the light-cone transform to solve the NLOS reconstruction problem. This method requires much smaller computational and memory resources than previous reconstruction methods do and images hidden objects at unprecedented resolution. Confocal scanning also provides a sizeable increase in signal and range when imaging retroreflective objects.

          --
          [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday March 20 2018, @05:57PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 20 2018, @05:57PM (#655523) Journal

        I don't think that "lidar seeing around corners" is realistic outside of a controlled environment. It's one thing for "over the horizon radar" to work, as the sky is a pretty uniform environment, it's another for lidar to see around corners. Yes, they've done it in a controlled environment, but that's not a typical use case.

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:36AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:36AM (#655258)

      Might even make us build safer roads - pedestrian bridges in towns and etc.

      Apparently pedestrian bridges do not, in fact, make the roads safer.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @06:25AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @06:25AM (#655280)

      Nice, put it on the pedestrians. Drivers are often inattentive, drive too fast*, and are aggressive-- all the while feeling invincible because they are surrounded by tons of steel. The pedestrian is a grease spot waiting to happen. If the pedestrian could kill *you* by their actions, then you would have a right to complain, as it is, it is a certainty that you have come closer to killing a pedestrian while driving that any pedestrian has come to causing your death, unless that pedestrian was packing, and shot at you, but that is another thing entirely.

      I walk a lot. I've been almost killed by idiot drivers more times than I can count (cars running red lights, driving up onto the sidewalk while looking at their phones, blowing through intersections while pedestrians are in the cross walk, etc.) I've taken to carrying rocks to throw at the glass of vehicles that try to kill me, and once happened to have a bag of dog poop in hand at the right moment. Fuck car drivers, they are the problem, and the idiots who design terrible intersections / too wide of streets / too high of speed limits to make it as unsafe as possible for the pedestrians.

      *car - pedestrian collisions:
      40mph = 85% probability of death to pedestrian
      30 mph = 40% probability of death to pedestrian
      20 mph = 5% probability of death to pedestrian

      There are several 45 mph streets in front of schools in my town. This is fucking insane.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 20 2018, @12:25AM (7 children)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Tuesday March 20 2018, @12:25AM (#655206) Journal

    Perhaps. Right now it's a bit of a race on whether they improve things fast enough to get widespread adoption before major accidents happen. All it might take is a few serious accidents and politicians might be loathe to touch this issue.. and might even regulate the industry enough to set it back a decade or two.

    Just imagine an incident like this involving a school bus collision where some kids die. Won't matter if a human driver would have also made an error. Won't matter if the autonomous car wasn't even primarily at fault.

    People keep saying self-driving cars only need to be better than the average human. Not so. Like any new tech, they may be judged harshly while they are still unfamiliar... And even a couple serious freak accidents could damage the industry.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by acid andy on Tuesday March 20 2018, @01:01AM (5 children)

      by acid andy (1683) on Tuesday March 20 2018, @01:01AM (#655218) Homepage Journal

      You're so right.

      People keep saying self-driving cars only need to be better than the average human.

      And those people consist mainly of astroturfing shills and those who've been brainwashed by them. We'll need more details of this accident but imagine how an owner of the autonomous vehicle would feel in such a situation, if it was an accident they felt sure they could have avoided had they been driving instead. They don't just need to be better than average, they at least need to be better than most drivers that want to buy one.

      Also, we need to be careful what we mean by "better than average". It's no good if your self-driving car is better than average for the first five years you use it and then turns out to be lethally dangerous in a rare situation you happen to encounter in the sixth year. For the long term owner's safety, it needs to be at least as good as them in all circumstances.

      --
      If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @01:14AM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @01:14AM (#655220)

        They could also allow worse and worse human drivers to get licenses in order to lower the standard.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @02:33AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @02:33AM (#655234)

          Hard to lower the standards for getting a driving license much further than they are currently in much of the USA. Other parts of the world have much more stringent tests.

          Same for registering cars--some parts of the world (like Japan & Germany) have very rigorous inspections for used cars more than a few years old. Much of the USA has no annual safety inspection at all, old cars may be driving behind you that have no brakes (for one extreme example).

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @02:37AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @02:37AM (#655237)

            Fine, then raise the standards to revoke them. Same thing, except that can get you more votes.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:38AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @03:38AM (#655260)
        It needs to be much better since you are giving up control and your genes have a much reduced influence over what happens. Having a wide spread potential lethal danger where the DNA doesn't have much influence on survival is not so good for the species. Maybe in toughness and recovery but that's it.

        This is why elevators have to be much safer than the stairs and why airplanes, trains and self-driving cars have to be much safer than you driving a car for yourself.

        p.s. that's also why it's great for the species to have young guys do crazy stupid potentially fatal stunts. Guys are far more expendable (you just need the males for a few minutes, you need the females for nine months), so evolution has made the males more keen to push the limits in all sorts of stuff. If some fail and die it's good for the species. If they succeed they might have something to contribute to the gene pool. That's why you see more guys in "fail" and "awesome" videos.
      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday March 20 2018, @04:12PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday March 20 2018, @04:12PM (#655447)

        > to be lethally dangerous in a rare situation you happen to encounter in the sixth year

        Haven't you been paying attention to the companies designing those? They won't get safety updates after three years, five at most.
        "Your autonomous car is no longer supported, have you looked at our latest model?"
        "But, it's still in good shape, I want to keep using it!"
        "You're on your own, maam. We have to disable the self-driving for liability reasons. You may buy our Steering Wheel package for $15000, and you get 50% off the pedals at $5000"

    • (Score: 2) by tonyPick on Tuesday March 20 2018, @06:34AM

      by tonyPick (1237) on Tuesday March 20 2018, @06:34AM (#655283) Homepage Journal

      People keep saying self-driving cars only need to be better than the average human.

      Yeah, only for an actual self driving car that's "better than average human" at driving you need a general purpose artificial intelligence with the whole "Reasoning, planning, learning and knowledge" thing baked in.

      Good Luck With That.