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from the don't-tell-them-about-motorcycles dept.
Like record companies at the dawn of online music file sharing, Allstate, Geico, State Farm, and others are grappling with innovations that could put a huge dent in their revenue. As carmakers automate more aspects of driving, accidents will likely plunge and car owners will need less coverage. Premiums consumers pay could drop as much as 60 percent in 15 years as self-driving cars hit the roads, says Donald Light, head of the North America property and casualty practice for Celent, a research firm. His message for insurers: "You have to be prepared to see that part of your business shrink, probably considerably."
Auto insurance has long been a lucrative business. The industry collected about $195 billion in premiums last year from U.S. drivers. New customers are the source of so much profit that Geico alone spends more than $1 billion a year on ads to pitch its policies with a talking lizard and other characters. Yet even Warren Buffett, whose company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns Geico, is talking about the long-term risks to the business model. "If you could come up with anything involved in driving that cut accidents by 30 percent, 40 percent, 50 percent, that would be wonderful," he said at a conference in March. "But we would not be holding a party at our insurance company."
The loss of revenue for the insurance industry gives me a sad.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday July 31 2015, @05:05PM
If AI can't react to each other properly, then there's no way they can judge human drivers properly and that's going to be a prerequisite for a while.
Sorry to be nitpicky, but this is not true. The software being designed to deal with human drivers. If automated cars drive differently than humans then it has to be tested against the new behaviour. Either these companies will need to work with each other to iron this out before the production phase, or the rules of how to handle certain events will have to be regulated by a governing body.
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(Score: 1) by timbojones on Friday July 31 2015, @05:48PM
To the extent that automated cars will drive differently than humans, they will be more predictable with fewer outliers. Automated cars will not present entirely new driving strategies -- their strategies will be a subset of human driving strategies.
Automated driving software is being designed to deal not just with human drivers, but with human cyclists, pedestrians, streetcars, school buses, construction detours, falling trees, balls rolling into the street, birds swooping across the windshield, a woman in an electric wheelchair chasing a duck in circles in the middle of the street. They are being designed to deal with any moving or stationary road hazard of any size.
Other automated cars will present zero challenge and zero surprise.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday July 31 2015, @06:08PM
To the extent that automated cars will drive differently than humans, they will be more predictable with fewer outliers.
I don't think that's a safe assumption, especially when you factor in that robotic reaction time is different from human reaction time. That alone will deviate the behaviour enough to require extra rounds of testing. It'll likely mean more software updates during the life of each car as well.
Other automated cars will present zero challenge and zero surprise.
I hope you end up being correct, but I've heard similar arguments against sanitizing inputs on web-facing code.
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(Score: 2, Insightful) by timbojones on Friday July 31 2015, @07:15PM
True, but irrelevant. The car is still a car with a car's momentum and maneuverability. An automated driver needs to respond to a car swerving regardless of whether the human driver is reacting to something that happened a second ago, or another automated driver is reacting to something that happened a tenth of a second ago, or the car itself blew a tire just now.
(Score: 2) by tempest on Friday July 31 2015, @07:09PM
While I sort of agree that AI might drive differently than an average person, I don't think we'll really know until AI has a track record. But I think AI cars will be far more predictable, even if different than humans, because it's nearly impossible to group humans together as driving one way. Teenage punks, girls texting, drunks, old folks, and "normal drivers" all drive completely differently and inconsistently. Not accounting for random other factors, like the time my girlfriend smashed into a curb because there was a bee in her car. Computers are generally kept fairly simple, as in keeping it on the street between the lines obeying traffic rules and not hitting things. Unfortunately humans are often not concerned with these things like they should be and can't be expected to even act in their own safety.
I think you're very right about new protocols will be needed first. I'd guess that will eventually fall to a regulated body of some sort. Especially when these cars will have to decide how to weight human life and damage in scenarios where there is no "safe" option. Thus far I can't recall anyone stepping up to the plate to handle this yet, so I'm guessing we'll have to wait for a disaster to make news headlines.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2015, @09:29PM
I think that a communication protocol would not be necessary for safety but it would be beneficial for improving efficiency given the same degree of safety. Without such communication a car would have to be much more conservative assuming and planning for the worst case scenarios and taking the (less efficient) path that would be safe under multiple different possible scenarios because it doesn't know the intent, status, location, and orientation of surrounding cars. With such communication then cars can collectively coordinate the most efficient scenario and no longer have to assume the worst case scenarios (or take into account multiple possible scenarios) since they can plan for and hence know the scenario ahead of time.