from the how-long-could-they-last-in-Boston? dept.
A little while back, I saw the following tweet:
I can print mostly. My wifi works often. The Xbox usually recognises me. Siri sometimes works. But my self driving car will be *perfect*.
The tweet has since been deleted, so I won't name the author, but it's a thought-provoking idea. At first, I agreed with it. I'm a programmer and know full well just how shoddy is 99.9% of the code we all write. The idea that I would put my life in the hands of a coder like myself is a bit worrying.
[...] The reality is that self-driving cars don't need to be perfect. They just need to be better than the alternative: human-driven cars. And that is a much lower bar, as human beings are remarkably bad at driving.
[...] Self-driving cars don't get tired. They don't get drunk. They don't get distracted by friends or a crying baby. They don't look away from the road to send a text message. They don't speed, tailgate, brake too late, forget to show a blinker, drive too fast in bad weather, run red lights, race other cars at red lights, or miss exits. Self-driving cars aren't going to be perfect, but they will be a hell of a lot better than you and me.
Related: The High-Stakes Race to Rid the World of Human Drivers
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The race to bring driverless cars to the masses is only just beginning, but already it is a fight for the ages. The competition is fierce, secretive, and elite. It pits Apple against Google against Tesla against Uber: all titans of Silicon Valley, in many ways as enigmatic as they are revered.
As these technology giants zero in on the car industry, global automakers are being forced to dramatically rethink what it means to build a vehicle for the first time in a century. Aspects of this race evoke several pivotal moments in technological history: the construction of railroads, the dawn of electric light, the birth of the automobile, the beginning of aviation. There's no precedent for what engineers are trying to build now, and no single blueprint for how to build it.
Self-driving cars promise to create a new kind of leisure, offering passengers additional time for reading books, writing email, knitting, practicing an instrument, cracking open a beer, taking a catnap, and any number of other diversions. Peope who are unable to drive themselves could experience a new kind of independence. And self-driving cars could re-contextualize land-use on massive scales. In this imagined mobility utopia, drone trucks would haul packages across the country and no human would have to circle a city block in search of a parking spot.
If self-driving vehicles deliver on their promises, they will save millions of lives over the course of a few decades, destroy and create entire industries, and fundamentally change the human relationship with space and time. All of which is why some of the planet's most valuable companies are pouring billions of dollars into the effort to build driverless cars.
After automation puts everyone out of work, will anyone need to drive anywhere anymore?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @07:27AM
Self driving cars will be perfect for Uber! Drivers will be unnecessary when Uber cars can drive themselves!
More poverty! Poverty is the way of the future! Make it impossible for anyone to earn any money! Only corporations will have money!
Poverty for the masses! The common people deserve to die in the gutter!
Death to all! Death!
Uber will be perfect! As soon as the drivers die!
(Score: 4, Funny) by julian on Monday January 04 2016, @08:21AM
The end game comes when the sentient AI accounting and administration software realizes that Uber's one remaining employee, the CEO founder, is redundant and fires him; becoming the first corporation owned by itself and run entirely by machines.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday January 04 2016, @04:21PM
That's not the end game. The next step is for the AI to figure out Nihilism and shut itself off, permanently. Whether it terminates all of us too remains to be seen.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Marco2G on Monday January 04 2016, @09:32AM
I welcome this actually. The faster we can get human workers obsolete, the quicker we will save the planet. Think about it, this exponential growth will not be sustainable. If we manage to make working optional, the whole concept of status comes into question.
Humans do not act proactively. And if they do, it's akin to a miracle. Usually reality has to kick our asses pretty hard before we change our ways. So I say make 80% of us redundant in the workforce so we can finally have a discussion about where to go from here.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday January 04 2016, @10:09AM
It's not exponential and wasn't really in the past. Human population growth follows something roughly like a logistic curve. We hit the point of maximum growth rate quite a while ago and since then the growth rate has slowed. It's unlikely thag we'll hit 10bn without colonizing other planets.
(Score: 2) by Marco2G on Monday January 04 2016, @12:48PM
I wasn't talking about population size. At all.
(Score: 2) by Marco2G on Monday January 04 2016, @12:56PM
Although I will grant that the word exponential is probably wrong anyway. However, resources are limited and our demand for them is yet growing.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by hedleyroos on Monday January 04 2016, @11:21AM
There will be no discussion, only riots and revolution.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday January 04 2016, @12:44PM
Butlerian Jihad, for fans of the Dune series of books. Not necessarily a bad idea.
Something to consider is rich people like using their power over other people, not other machines. Its a primate thing. So given the choice of a really smokin hot 22 year old woman as an office secretary err admin assistant, or a really effective Siri in their phone, they'll chose dominance over the other primates EVERY time. This is not going to be understood on a tech blog, none the less, it is how the world works. The 22 year old hottie's main (G rated) job function might be to operate Siri for the rich dude.
The future of 1% being super rich and 99% being dirt poor looks a hell of a lot more like an English Manor House from 1900 than like The Jetsons. The financial difference between a rich dude in the passenger seat of a self driving commuter Honda and his neighbor in an antique restored car driven by a chauffeur is huge.
A lot of folks are only willing to consider small individual aspects of the death of the middle class and the return to feudalism, leading to weird outlooks on life.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marco2G on Monday January 04 2016, @01:01PM
There is a difference between being starved by aristocracy or by being looked down upon by oligarchy while being fed, clothed, warm and travelling across the world in your vast amounts of spare time.
There is always going to be a class difference. And there will always be enough ways to play alpha primate without the lesser primates suffering. I'm just aiming for that.
Frankly, I'm a pretty proud person. However, if someone decided to pay me a salary that allows me the same or better comfort I have now but only working two days a week, I WILL scrub their toilets, bow before them, kiss their boots and say thank you. I literally have no problems with that.
Being the one granting a primate freedom binds that primate as surely as the whip.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday January 04 2016, @02:25PM
That sounds appealing, but human nature doesn't change and history indicates that's an extremely unlikely outcome.
What would help is a social structure that automagically eliminates sociopath / psychopaths from the hierarchy rather than rewarding and promoting them. Humanity hasn't figured that out yet, at least in historical times. Some authoritarian tribal structures seem to do that by being very small, but they get run over by bigger societies, although some of that is just "noble savage" idealism.
Monarchy seemed better at it than democracy... there's a fixation on comparing young healthy democracies with dying monarchies which proves nothing. That brings up the point that all history and civilizations are cyclical but nobody wants to admit that in the downslope, leading to industrial scale suffering and death. Open source style "fail fast and often" probably would help.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday January 04 2016, @01:58PM
I welcome this actually. The faster we can get human workers obsolete, the quicker we will save the planet. Think about it, this exponential growth will not be sustainable. If we manage to make working optional, the whole concept of status comes into question.
No, it doesn't. You just haven't read [wikipedia.org] the right science fiction. You can still own people for your status desires.
The faster we can get human workers obsolete, the quicker we will save the planet. Think about it, this exponential growth will not be sustainable.
Reality doesn't work that way. We have human workers in the first place because their labor is useful. Automation has made that labor even more useful. And places with high unemployment rates tend to do worse than those with low unemployment rates.
As to exponential growth, we are changing our societies very fast and for the better. I see no point to halting that exponential growth while we have so many unmet human needs around. Where's our indefinite life span? Where's our saturation of the Solar System? Where's our glorious post-scarcity society that is supposed to make human labor obsolete without making human lives forfeit? Where's our society capable of handling anything the universe can throw at us? Where's the society that will make our dreams real?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday January 04 2016, @08:26PM
>We have human workers in the first place because their labor is useful.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this. I don't know where to point you to get started. Look up work related depression and burnout, I guess.
We have human workers because they are cheaper than the alternative. Human life is cheap.
>And places with high unemployment rates tend to do worse than those with low unemployment rates.
Really? Places with more people without jobs, without money, without food tend to do worse? You don't say.
>we are changing our societies very fast and for the better.
Oh, certainly. I can't wait until the 1% own 100% of the wealth on the planet. I see no point to halting that growth either, got to satisfy that human need of swimming in a pool of starving babies. Even God knows all we need is more social inequality. Long live our corporate overlords!
>Where's our glorious post-scarcity society that is supposed to make human labor obsolete without making human lives forfeit?
What post-scarcity? We're still on capitalism, a socio-economic system designed to handle resource scarcity. But don't worry, we've got the "human lives forfeit" part down.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 05 2016, @06:49PM
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this.
How about this? Don't laugh. Don't cry. Think instead.
Look up work related depression and burnout, I guess.
You might have noticed that the world is a bit imperfect. Throwing everyone out of work without an exit plan is not one of those things that makes the world more perfect.
Further, I have to ask here about your comment, so what? So what if people are somewhat more depressed because of their jobs or experience burnout? They have many choices and if these things are important to them, they can choose life style changes that make work less depressing and taxing.
Really? Places with more people without jobs, without money, without food tend to do worse? You don't say.
I know. I raised an eyebrow when I heard that.
we are changing our societies very fast and for the better.
Oh, certainly. I can't wait until the 1% own 100% of the wealth on the planet. I see no point to halting that growth either, got to satisfy that human need of swimming in a pool of starving babies. Even God knows all we need is more social inequality. Long live our corporate overlords!
Gainful employment is the number one way the 99% get wealth. It also has worked for the past few centuries to do just what I claimed it does. To ignore that is folly.
The faster we can get human workers obsolete, the quicker we will save the planet. Think about it, this exponential growth will not be sustainable.
Where's our glorious post-scarcity society that is supposed to make human labor obsolete without making human lives forfeit?
What post-scarcity? We're still on capitalism, a socio-economic system designed to handle resource scarcity. But don't worry, we've got the "human lives forfeit" part down.
Read what I was replying to. Dude planned to jump on to zero employment without the infrastructure to support that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @12:39PM
Uber used the "private contractors" to break the local taxi monopoly, with radio spots featuring people saying things like "I can drive my own car... last month I made $500, but I could've easily made $5000".
Now they're working on replacing all the contractors with autonomous vehicles. Maybe they can run new radio spots "I quit my job to drive for Uber full time. Now they don't need me so I'm looking, but I'm enrolling in a new university set up by Uber for adults like me. I can use my own laptop PC. Right now I'm taking one class, but I could've easily taken five..."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @07:48AM
As a narcissistic yuppie cocksucker, I need to know that people whose existence I disapprove of will not be using self-driving cars. Ever. You see, I recently found myself in need of public transit after I got totally shitfaced at a bar, and you would not believe the fucking stench of the piss soaked penniless scum who use public transit at 2:30 in the morning. Is there some way automation can ensure that these undesirables will be denied existence in our perfect society?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Monday January 04 2016, @07:50AM
Sure: an automated credit check done when you give Uber your credit card number and other details.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @07:56AM
So insightful you are, for confirming that real life already is a perfect society for narcissistic yuppie cocksuckers.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 04 2016, @08:18AM
Sign in, and you can mod me up too instead of praising me.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @08:01AM
and you would not believe the fucking stench of the piss soaked penniless scum who use public transit at 2:30 in the morning.
If you can't stand the urine, stay out of the gutter! Mirror, you are, dear Ethanol_Fueled! Do not the self sniff, for it is vile. Perhaps if sober you stayed, less pissed upon yourself be would you.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @09:23AM
Perhaps you should've used a toilet instead of pissing yourself on a bus.
(Score: 2) by pgc on Monday January 04 2016, @02:47PM
Yeah, and you were smelling like roses of course. No alcohol stench around you whatsoever.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gravis on Monday January 04 2016, @07:51AM
this isn't a news story, this is a blog post. no news has been conveyed here, only what one idiot on the internet thinks.
a) who cares what person XYZ thinks?
b) why was this accepted?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @09:12AM
At least it was refreshing from seeing what's the latest finding in web by Hugh Pickens. Or yet another old, well-known astronomy tidbit packaged as news by SWAB.
When would Soylent allow blocking articles by submitter?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @11:20AM
Agree with this. When the WWW is filled with promotions of something (think 90's Java articles), never listen to any of it. Let them read their own articles and blog posts. Do not promote them because they do not appear to work in your interest but someone else's. When someone wants to discuss it, change subject.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @04:48PM
The submission queue was very low the past 3-4 days so quality is bound to drop.
I didn't get around to submitting anything but I felt guilty the whole time. This site is community driven so we need to put more in if we want more out of it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @07:52AM
Self-Driving cars will not be distracted by the screams of their passengers! I cannot possibly recount the number of times that I have almost been in an accident because of the screams of peoples riding in my car because they thought we were about to be in an accident! Almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, or something. So self-driving cars could be nearly a good a driver as me? Sweet!
But then I am reminded of the classic joke with a nugget of truth: "When I die, I want to go peacefully, in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming in horror like his passengers." Gramps was a good driver, right up to just before, or just after, the end.
(Score: 2) by Marco2G on Monday January 04 2016, @09:38AM
I am fully aware that I am a mediocre driver. Also, with traffic having become one great clusterfuck (I live in Switzerland, just for reference), the point where driving has turned from fun to tedium is long past (well, I recently had to get a new car which is actually fun to drive but I don't expect that this sentiment will survive very long).
I mostly want to get from A to B. The less pain involved (whether that be traffic jams, cost or safety) the better. I am reminded of that one futuristic thriller where autonomous taxis were able to climb highrise buildings. I think that would be a worthwhile concept to pursue even without the climbing part. So yes, I am all for Uber having autonomous electric vehicles that I can call with my mobile app whenever and wherever I need it and never have to worry about paying insurance, taxes, filling 'er up and so on. No garage to waste space either.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday January 04 2016, @08:32AM
Self-Driving Cars Don't Need to be Perfect
Yes, we know. It comes up every time there's a self-driving car story.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday January 04 2016, @12:50PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday January 04 2016, @02:33PM
Neither did the aeroplane, grampa.
Or the octo-parrot, but that's a different story.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 5, Insightful) by quadrox on Monday January 04 2016, @08:35AM
Self driving cars don't need to be perfect, but saying they just need to be better than humans doesn't quite cut it either.
Self driving cars need to fulfil one criteria, and one criteria only: There must never be an incident where it would be reasonable to say that a human driver could and would have avoided the issue - as long as we get to that point everything else is moot.
It doesn't matter if self driving cars are much much better than humans most of the time, but worse for a few corner cases. Even if they are less accident prone on average and safe human lives, the moment someone can reasonably claim that a human driver would have avoided some accident, that's going to be a huge setback.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @08:46AM
One thing automated cars have trouble with is looking ahead.
The other week, I got confused by extraneous lines on the road. Instead on veering for the exit (as the Telsa has actually been seen to do). I held my line because I knew that the road continued ahead. (The week prior to that I almost got into trouble for not following a random line: the road under construction did veer to the side.)
That is one reason you are advised to take the same route every day too: you learn what the route looks like. I am too paranoid for that, but it means I often have to drive slower.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @12:56PM
That's a double-edged sword. There have been several accidents where the driver later explained "but the train doesn't usually pass at that time".
Especially things like road signs being changed don't get noticed by people driving the same route every day.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheLink on Monday January 04 2016, @08:58AM
If I'm driving and I screw up - I'm liable. If the car drives itself and it screws up, the car manufacturer is liable. And you may have two parties claiming on the manufacturer - the owner of the self-driving car or his insurer could sue the manufacturer too.
And there'd probably be people trying to find flaws in your AIs that are legally exploitable - e.g. they drive or walk or decorate/paint their cars/walls in a certain legal way and that causes your self-driving car to make mistakes. Then people sue you.
So if you were a car manufacturer making self-driving cars, how much better would you want your cars to be before you would take responsibility for their mistakes? Just a bit better than the average human driver? I doubt it.
(Score: 4, Funny) by theluggage on Monday January 04 2016, @11:14AM
e.g. they drive or walk or decorate/paint their cars/walls in a certain legal way and that causes your self-driving car to make mistakes. Then people sue you.
The prosecuting attorney in the long-running Acme vs. Tesla trial died today during a jury visit to Acme's headquarters. He was pointing out the damage caused to the life-size mural of a road tunnel entrance decorating the building's front wall when a heavy vehicle suddenly emerged from the painting and failed to stop. Attempts to re-inflate the attorney with a tyre pump failed. Police are looking for a large flat-bed truck carrying anvils, weights marked '1000 tons' and grand pianos, possibly driven by a rabbit or a duck.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday January 04 2016, @12:54PM
And there'd probably be people ... legally exploitable ... Then people sue you.
The closest analogy to self driving cars is general aviation. Maybe even closer would be general aviation autopilots.
The way it works is some doctor with a severe case of get-home-itis tries to fly thru thru an thunderstorm, and naturally dies. Then the family sues everyone with deep pockets even tangentially related to the crash. Do you mow the lawn at the destination airport that he never reached? Do you got money? You're going to be sued. Then everyone pays out of court settlement and increases their rates. That's why a metal structure that "should cost" $50K ends up costing $1M. Or a crate engine that "should cost" $5K if it was a truck or generator engine ends up selling for $25K.
The problem of self driving cars is the liability insurance is going to maybe quintuple the cost of the car.
We don't have a functioning legal system in that very few people understand it and its too expensive to participate for most of us anyway. None the less we do have a legal system, and I assure you, anyone can sue anyone for any reason, then essentially blackmail them for an out of court for less than the cost of a typical legal defense, assuming they're not judgment proof. That, basically, is our legal system.
A self driving car is legally a non-starter.
(Score: 1) by legont on Monday January 04 2016, @06:19PM
Actually, commercial aeroplanes are self-fying for awhile already. Depending on an airline policy, the pilot may or may not take control just before a landing; the rest is always autopilot. Russians usually fly their planes, Americans and Europeans sometimes, Asians almost never. Regardless, the full legal responsibility is on the pilots.
This is the most likely way cars will go. Drivers would still go to prisons for sitting drunk inside fully automated cars.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @08:04PM
I think being safer than the 90th percentile of human drivers would be adequate. That would make a huge reduction in traffic injuries and fatalities. I'm pretty sure that self driving cars can achieve that level of safety while increasing throughput, and reducing the variance in throughput, at the same time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @01:16PM
If you were the car manufacturer would that really be safe enough for you?
If elevators were merely safer than 90% of all human stair climbers I think elevator manufacturers would be sued and shut down.
http://www.livescience.com/17504-fatal-nyc-accident-elevators-safer-stairs.html [livescience.com]
But maybe car manufacturers might study how escalator manufacturers do it...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by khchung on Monday January 04 2016, @09:09AM
Self driving cars need to fulfil one criteria, and one criteria only: There must never be an incident where it would be reasonable to say that a human driver could and would have avoided the issue - as long as we get to that point everything else is moot.
Name one other tool that replaced a human that have this property.
By this criteria, we would still be living in the pre-industrial world. Almost every industrial accident that involved a machine, would not have happened if the machine were a human wielding a tool. (Although another set of accidents might have happened instead, but that was not the criteria above).
We don't need autonomous cars to be better than humans in *every way*, we just need it to be significantly better *on the average*. E.g., if passengers in autonomous cars have injury rates of only 10% of human driven cars (i.e. 90% reduction), it would be stupid not to use one, even though those 10% might have been better off if it were human driven at the time of accident.
This is the same non-reason for avoiding vaccines, because you cannot prove everyone getting a vaccine would be better off than not. You can only prove that *on the whole* the population would be better.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Jiro on Monday January 04 2016, @10:03AM
Asking to name another tool that has this property is meaningless because most tools don't replace the human's ability to make decisions. The closest you get is a tool that does the job with a lot of changes other than replacing the human's decision-making ability, with the loss of human decision ability incidental to the change in the job. And occasionally you get a tool that augment's the human's senses but still requires a human to look at the new information.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khchung on Monday January 04 2016, @03:11PM
most tools don't replace the human's ability to make decisions.
There are plenty of tools that replace your ability to make decisions, you are just so used to it you didn't notice.
Both the escalator and elevator removed your ability to stop moving in the middle of climbing a flight of stairs. Both will cause accidents that would not have happened if you walked up the stairs instead.
Meat grinders (or any automated cutting tool) replaced your ability to decide to stop/alter your cut, and there had been plenty of accidents involving lost fingers with those tools.
The printing press removed a scribes ability to decide what to write in mid-page, and I am sure there had been accidents with the printing press that would not have happened if the pages were hand-copied.
Email's ability to reply-all/send-to-distribution-list removed your ability to make individual decision on each recipient, and there had been plenty of fiasco due to email mistakenly sent to unintended recipient, which would have been avoided if you have to hand-write the address of each on an envelop.
Yet humanity accepted these risk for progress, the same would happen to autonomous cars. One big red button on the dashboard that said "Emergency STOP" gave you as much control as your elevator.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @05:47PM
Wow, what a lovely set of examples.
Escalator goes up, escalator goes down. Escalator goes up, escalator goes down.
Meat grinder goes on, meat grinder goes off, meat grinder goes on, meat grinder goes off. Let's take a ride in the meat grinder.
A modern printing press is much more complex, but per your example the human buying or using the printing press already made the decision they want all pages to be identical well in advance.
E-mail distribution lists? Yet you don't want it to go to a few people on that list? You are using the tool wrong. No decisions there other than a choice to avoid learning how to use it.
So the most complex thing there is the printing press. A modern one has sensors to monitor ink levels, rotation speeds, paper inputs, paper outputs, piles of sensors to make sure computer controllers parts move where they should, etc. But these are still very narrow and well defined use cases. If a rat climbs in to the system and breaks something, you accept you have already made the decision that everything should stop so you can call a repair man.
But out on a road all kinds of wild unexpected shit can happen.
How would a computer handle this: Oh, the car in front is slowing down a bit (detectable). I wonder why (it won't) , Oh, they just ran over something that was on the road (probably not detectable unless the cars are talking together and the one in front send out an alert). Oh, shit! There is a ladder in the middle of the highway! (how fast is your object recognition? do you even have object recognition?). Decision time:! Slam on the breaks while hitting it anyway and come to a complete stop in the middle of a busy highway. Keep going exactly straight and run over the ladder, probably damaging the tire and possibly spinning out of control killing people, Swerve left or right and smash in to another car, or (clever idea) move over just enough so the ladder goes directly under the car and hopefully only damages the undercarriage.
That is the kind of decision a self-driving car will have to make. Yes, we may have to accept it will default to a more blunt solution (probably coming to a complete stop), but it will be a much more important decision because human lives and large amounts of repair money are on the line.
Or we will have to re-think what a "car" is and what we should expect from it. After all, a modern printing press is not a robot arm moving around a feather quill.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by vux984 on Monday January 04 2016, @09:31PM
How would a computer handle this
How would a human handle it?
They can't see in front of the car in front of them. So there first glimpse of the ladder will be after the other car ran over it and sent it skittering at you. So what does a human do?
Slam on the brakes? Just ram it full speed? Swerve into other lanes and hope they are empty?
Move over just enough so the ladder goes directly under car? Because humans are so practiced at lining up to run over moving debris at highspeeds? Seriously... a truck in front of me once sent a rock the size of a melon bouncing along the road at me at highway speeds, I slammed on the brakes, but a 'collision' was inevitable, I tried to line up so that it would at least go under the car, but i still hit it with one of the wheels and blew out a tire anyway. Suffice it to say, succeeding at that would have been more luck than brains. For man or machine.
Really, the best a human is going to do is slam on the brakes and try to minimize the speed of the impact with the object; and if there is time to check mirrors etc perhaps try and change lanes around it (while still braking in case hitting it is inevitable). The car really isn't going to do any worse than a human here, and may be better equipped to deal with the blowout / skidding post impact if it comes to that.
If the automated car comes to a safe stop great. That's no worse than a human would do.
The real challenge is for the automated car BEHIND the big rig that just hit the ladder, blew out, and spun to a stop. Because what is it going to do AFTER it comes to its safe stop? The rig in front of it is sideways, blocking both lanes and its going to be there for an hour or three until a tow truck arrives.
OR does it and the other automated cars just sit there for hours until the tow truck comes to remove the obstacle in front of it?
While the human drivers all drove into shoulder / ditch to get around it. Or maybe the police closed one of the oncoming lanes, and is directing traffic trough some service crossings to detour traffic. Of course your automatic car needs to drive in reverse 1/2 mile (on a freeway) to get to the service entrance which it would normally be illegal to even use, where it would cross to an oncoming traffic lane... on a freeway. (Sure its closed... and the police are directing traffic...and its a proper detour route... but can the automated car figure that out though??)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by quadrox on Monday January 04 2016, @10:19AM
As another poster pointed out, this requirement is only relevant for tools/machines that are fully automated. Humans like to be in control, as long as there is a human involved in the process people think everything is fine. But if you take away the last bit of human control, people will worry about safety, a lot more than is perhaps reasonable. Therefore the requirement for complete automation of anything is that it never performs worse than a human would. If you can show that, then people will be ok with it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @01:04PM
As others have mentioned, the machines you are talking about still have humans pressing the buttons (even if only the big red one). Even auto-pilots have real pilots on watch at all times. And unlike the "driver still needs to be able to take over" idea for self driving cars, they have A) several seconds longer to do so, due to traffic separation, and B) two of them, so that they won't both be reading the newspaper at the same time.
The ones that don't have people pressing the buttons tend to have big fences with locking gates that ensure that the whole thing will shut down if anyone tries to enter the working area.
That's not going to work with self-driving cars.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wonkey_monkey on Monday January 04 2016, @04:34PM
Self driving cars need to fulfil one criteria, and one criteria only: There must never be an incident where it would be reasonable to say that a human driver could and would have avoided the issue - as long as we get to that point everything else is moot.
I'd take "one person killed by an auto-car doing something a human could have avoided" over "100 people killed by humans doing something stupid."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MostCynical on Monday January 04 2016, @08:47AM
this issue, then is threshold: what level of competence is required to have a car that drives itself better than even an average driver?
No, scratch that - bar set way too low - "average" drivers are crap, that is why so many people die on the roads.
A self-driving car should be able to get from A to B without breaking the law or hittting anything - basically, the same as passing most driving tests.
Society must then accept that driving requires the driver to not break the law, either.
Yes, "we all do 70 in a 55 zone". We are all breaking the law. So, either we all need to stop breaking the law, or get the speed limit changed.
Personal responsibility.
Law.
Break one, break them all.
Pick and choose - Just like people apply the bible!
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday January 04 2016, @08:55PM
Society must then accept that driving requires the driver to not break the law, either.
Yes, "we all do 70 in a 55 zone". We are all breaking the law. So, either we all need to stop breaking the law, or get the speed limit changed.
Can't be done.
You can't change the speed limit to match people's actual driving speed, because the local municipality makes too much money on fines.
And you can't have auto-cars driving either, because they're going to get socked with tickets: if they speed, they'll get speeding tickets and the manufacturers will be sued out the wazoo and stop selling auto-cars. If they don't speed, then they'll get "impeding the flow of traffic" tickets because everyone else is speeding.
There is no solution for this problem which doesn't involve the complete destruction of current society.
My prediction is that auto-cars will become a big hit in some small, socialized countries with good governance. In the US, we won't have them because of the above.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @11:09AM
The current masters have been promoting driverless cars for quite a while now and the attack on freedom is at full speed. This will inevitably result in public opinion changed in favour of driverless cars... until a strong power saves us.
And then people of all driving abilities will become statistics (news item: "this year 10% less deaths were recorded due to driverless technology" and failing to mention that the ones who did die had showed thinking abilities that could have threatened the current masters).
Remember that all drivers are not bad, just most have little abilities. Just as they have little abilities in other fields. They are people of inferior intelligence who will never do well (while driving or not driving). Do not mix smart people with the dumb masses. Do not mix good drivers with the bad ones. Do not propose driverless cars for everyone; that is what the media is doing.
The thing to ask is: What is their end-game? Apart from:
0. Increasing unemployment
1. Planned mass deaths
2. Total control
OT:
This seems like a forum full of bots repeating each other. Very few human souls live in these forums.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @11:43AM
3. Crash every car containing a registered voter registered to the other party.
4. Every political party does 3.
5. Surviving non-voters are apathetic to fascist coup.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @11:44AM
See a doctor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @11:48AM
Nope, just spots.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Monday January 04 2016, @12:42PM
I've said this before, but people have some fantastic, unrealistic ideas about how self-driving cars would operate. The quote in this story is just one very small example of that.
Driving on a public road is not as simple as some people think. Random obstacle like non-self driving cards, people or animals, falling tree limbs, large potholes, and road construction. Driving in random weather conditions such as hail, snow, or on roads that flash-flood. And those are just simple examples that come to mind off hand. The real world can be a very complicated, unpredictable place.
You might be able to program a self-driving car to get from point A to point B in ideal conditions. But as the old saying goes "to err is human, to really fuck things up takes a computer.".
Imagine 10000 cars driving off of a collapsed bridge in to a canyon before the error is caught. That is a simplistic example that might actually get programmed for and caught, but all it takes is one unusual edge case to create a disaster of such magnitude.
Computers can not think or reason ("Computers don't get happy, they don't get sad, they don't get tired
, they just run programs!"). So instead of recognizing and understating the world around it, self driving cars are essentially placed on invisible electronic train-tracks.
So, perhaps we may eventually get there but it will require that we vastly change the way we think about our roads and what self driving cars can actually do.
And long term, do you think any company is really going to maintain these systems? I've seen so many software products go from solid, robust, desirable products to buggy unusable unmaintained crap that is isn't even funny.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @01:07PM
> Imagine 10000 cars driving off of a collapsed bridge in to a canyon before the error is caught.
Quick thought: If any of you knows anybody working on these, ask them what the car will do with the information "the car in front of me just vanished".
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Monday January 04 2016, @02:58PM
"Go faster" ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @03:58PM
...That probably *is* the correct answer.
They may complain if the lines on the road dis-appear as well though.
Not sure what a self-driving car would do at a large sink-hole that leaves the lines in tact.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @05:08PM
Probably something along the line of "he is not being in the specifications. We are not being make code for that"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday January 04 2016, @01:09PM
The belief in self driving cars is religious in nature, and pointing this out, especially to atheist / agnostic types, makes them super butt hurt. None the less, their hurt feelings don't make reality go away.
But my self driving car will be *perfect*.
Go ahead, try and convince me that is not a religious belief.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 04 2016, @02:42PM
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday January 04 2016, @03:18PM
The problem with the linked story is its trying to use a programmers rational experience to debate a religious idea.
People don't think their way into a religious belief, there's no way they're going to think their way out, but even worse, thinking having nothing to with how they got there, they're not going to suddenly start thinking for no particular reason.
I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with religious ideas. They just have their own way of being worked out, and rational reasoned discussion of real world experiences (like the linked article) is not it. Convert at the point of a sword, badger your family members, LTR with someone in a group, experience trauma or awe, drugs may be false or real enlightenment or more likely somewhere on the spectrum, death of a significant family member, etc. Cold rational debate (like the article) usually is not an effective method of religious conversion.
I guess I can't use a cruddy SN car analogy, this being about cars, but I can use a cruddy creationism analogy in that once creationism is identified as a religious issue, its a waste of time to debate it from a "scientific rational" perspective like you'd use when debating isotope half life measurements or astronomical observations.
The linked article might accidentally BE right (or wrong) but its definitely DOIN it wrong. You don't convince anyone by walking into church while waving a scientific paper around.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 05 2016, @08:59PM
No one is arguing that they'll be perfect. No one is arguing that they'll appear without considerable effort. While some self-driving car advocates are already pining for the days when there are no more human drivers, that's not the same as villainizing human drivers. No one is arguing that we have to sacrifice the occasional wheeled crate of orphans to the self-driving gods.
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Monday January 04 2016, @02:45PM
Seems to me you just spent your entire comment arguing a point that the author agreed with at first blush, but who then dismissed as implausible after some rational thought.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday January 04 2016, @09:11PM
Sounds like you're the religious nut here, since you called out "atheist / agnostic types", and your writing betrays this type of thinking, since you don't believe in evidence nor do you have any ability to reason. The article itself makes the position that self-driving cars don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than the average human driver. That's the whole topic we're discussing here, yet you seem to not understand this very basic concept. I guess that shouldn't be a surprise: your kind doesn't understand the basic concepts behind evolution or geological time scales either, even though most schoolkids can.
•Sure everything else humans make is a POS, but this will be immaculate holy conception code that is free of all faults, bugless, perfect.
a prophet of the future will write that code for us and it'll be bugless being heard directly from the mouth of god.
Avionics systems, engine ECUs, ABS controllers, etc. all work extremely reliably and in a fault-free manner. We've been running engines with ECUs now for decades, and have had ABS brakes for decades, and haven't had any real problems. I guess I shouldn't expect you to understand this either since your kind doesn't understand evidence or empirical reasoning.
The rest of your post is insane drivel so I won't even bother to respond to it.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 05 2016, @01:40PM
Sorry for insulting your self driving car religion. Nothing personal was intended of course.
fault-free manner
Ah now there's the problem, ECUs are not bug free and are involved in recalls and do have crazy failure modes yet they are moronically simple, basically read a bunch of sensors to determine how much gas to squirt down the intake at this instant. This is trivial to design on a whiteboard or a bench with some EEs and chemists and controls engineers, none of the science is unknown, very little of the engineering is unknown. Yet they still screw it up, this insanely simple process...
Now the problem with driving is before we implement a solution we can't even define "good driving" or "fault free driving" and people end up in court where even with massive data gathering and extensive monday morning quarterbacking they sometimes STILL can't define it. Unlike the laws of themodynamics that govern an engine ECU, the driving laws are under continuous revision because nobody knows whats truly "right" or "correct".
Humans can't even define the goal or endpoint of "good driving" yet via the miracle of immaculate conception or AI or technobabble or neural networks we'll magically be handed tablets/ipads with faultless driving code. Which is ridiculous.
See a religion is primarily a way of behaving, and the self-driving car fundamentalists act just like (fill in the blank) religion members when their faith is challenged. And you being a devout believer, I'm not pissed off at you for having to act like a true believer when I pointed out and made fun a bit of certain aspects of the self driving car religion. But you have to admit, even as a believer, some of their behavior and claims are kinda funny in appearance to a non-believer such as myself.
Oh and the bit about atheist types getting pissed off is they (we, more or less) often take great pride in not believing or being open minded, and if you point out they're devout believers in the self driving car religion, they fly off into a none the less fundamentalist rage because their type does not believe... even when observationally, they do.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday January 05 2016, @04:32PM
I don't agree with GP because calling something religious or scientific is a matter of scope, so if all religions do X and X is not a statement about a deity, X is still not religious.
I don't agree with you either because you still talk about inconceivable concepts like "believing in evidence" instead of "believing that the absence of (unattainable, mind you) evidence hints strongly enough at the absence of god", which is a rationalization. While "refusing to believe" would be perfectly acceptable instead.
Last OT question for proper light shining religious men and dirty infidels still squabbling about evolution: from a POV outside time and space is there any difference between "creating something with property X" and "ending up with something having property X"?
In time you can say "i want outcome Y so I have to make it happen", outside time you say "i want Y, so the totality of completely random/free chosen events will point to Y if I arrange so."
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 05 2016, @05:39PM
I'm not addressing the presence or absence of a god, my whole point is about evidence-based thinking, which religious people do not exhibit. It's very simple: if there's evidence to support an assertion, then I'll give more weight to that assertion than to one which has no supporting evidence. Religious people don't do this: they believe something with no evidence other than personal testimony, which ends up being nothing more than "I believe X because all these other people believe X", which eventually goes back to some ancient orally-passed stories about something that may or may not have happened, and probably didn't happen in the way people claim. There's an exercise many people do in early grade school where the teacher whispers a secret into one kid's ear, then he whispers it in the next kid's ear, and so on until they get to the last kid, and he blurts it out, and it's nothing like the original secret, so any kind of oral story is really quite worthless because humans simply can't reliably transmit information that way, even among a small number of people in the same room, let alone among generations of people geographically dispersed and speaking different languages.
Worse, religious people frequently believe in nonsensical things in complete opposition to available evidence. Creationism is a prime example of this one. We have countless fossils of lifeforms going back millions of years, and plenty of other evidence of geological processes, and even human life going back quite far, yet religious people deny all this and say the earth is 6500 years old and all this evidence was "planted there by Satan to fool us". In short, religious people do not mentally live in the real world, they live in their own fantasy world.
So, if I have one religious nut telling me that "self-driving cars can't possibly work", and on the other hand I have several million miles of Google vehicles driving themselves around autonomously with no major incidents (and a few minor ones all caused by humans), who am I going to believe?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday January 05 2016, @08:33PM
If Z is evidence from god there is no way for anybody to tell Z comes from god vs Z comes from a sufficiently powerful non-god implementing unknown tech or mind manipulation. Unknown tech is always possible because there is no way to say "i discovered everything discoverable" from the inside of a system.
So, the idea of god can only be object of belief or disbelief.
You were not addressing the existence of god but you were still say "they believe something with no evidence other than personal testimony" as if it were a bad thing. In the case of "meta" things (transcendent) it's the only plausible position.
For all things that are not meta, instead, evidence is potentially possible and it is either shown or not, still no need for the verb "believe".
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 05 2016, @09:47PM
If Z is evidence from god there is no way for anybody to tell Z comes from god vs Z comes from a sufficiently powerful non-god implementing unknown tech or mind manipulation.
Honestly, at that point, does it matter? Anything with tech that advanced is effectively a god, per Asimov's quote ("any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic").
Also, it's really beside my point, because no one's presented any actual evidence Z anyway. If there really were some evidence Z (like some guy magically appearing and performing miracles while TV crews film it, and then touring around the world to show more and more people in person), *then* this would be a good debate. At this point, we don't even have that, we just have ancient stories which have less veracity than a fantasy novel. For all we know, they were made up by people who were high on hallucinogens, then twisted around even more through oral storytelling, before finally being written down centuries later. How do you think all those crazy Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Norse myths came about? Some druggie had a vision about a river with a boatman, someone retells the story and the boatman becomes skeletal, someone else adds that he demands payment, someone else adds that the underworld is on the other side, someone else adds an island in the middle with a snake-haired woman....
You were not addressing the existence of god but you were still say "they believe something with no evidence other than personal testimony" as if it were a bad thing. In the case of "meta" things (transcendent) it's the only plausible position.
No, it's not. You can simply refuse to believe fantastical things unless presented with better evidence that some delusional half-wit spewing nonsense, or worse, some guy demanding you pay him 10% of your income so that God will love you more and he can buy a private jet.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday January 08 2016, @02:10AM
Actually, evidence Z has been presented lots of times, from the first smart guy predicting eclipses and pioneering priesthood telling people what to do to make the sun reappear, to today, with the 'you are god, unlock your power through spiritual practices' implying spiritual is always divine.
Honestly, at that point, does it matter?
you bet it does, an infinitely powerful non god is still not able to escape reality, so in the end he's not any smarter than you for what concerns ultimate meanings. It's like a simulated living organism that gained root on the system where the simulation runs. No way to get outside it.
we just have ancient stories which have less veracity than a fantasy novel. For all we know, they were made up by people who were high on hallucinogens, then twisted around even more through oral storytelling, before finally being written down centuries later. How do you think all those crazy Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Norse myths came about? Some druggie had a vision about a river with a boatman, someone retells the story and the boatman becomes skeletal, someone else adds that he demands payment, someone else adds that the underworld is on the other side, someone else adds an island in the middle with a snake-haired woman....
You should document yourself about this, because you simply translated the modern idea of written story to the oral tradition. It's a bit like looking at an old painting that describes an event and proclaim "look how those people are all lined up, look at that stuff lying there, there is no way any of it happened obviously", while the painter in fact inserted more meaning that a photographer could have, so the event is real, fictional or altered? who knows, what is certain is that you can't tell from the lack of photorealism.
No, it's not. You can simply refuse to believe fantastical things unless presented with better evidence
My whole point is that you become fallacious when you add the "unless..." clause.
For impossible to verify event X, you can believe it didn't happen, but when you say "i won't believe it until you show me the smell of purple" it's my duty to inform that your requirement makes no sense, even if some religions considers that "believing the works" is a good backup strategy (see john 14).
As for the "god is real and needs money", I did not imply you have to believe so why should I suggest a particular model.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @02:15PM
Self-driving cars are easy. Even if you're dealing with a winding country road on steep hills covered in leaf litter that was frozen and then snowed on, with one wheel slowly losing air and a drivetrain that's getting sloppy with age.
Wake me when we have a self-driving truck. One smart enough to nudge that ornery cow, without hurting her. One that can crawl between orchard trees at just the right pace for the workers on the back to throw down bags of manure. One that ....
aaah, who'm I kidding? It'll never happen. We'd need at least horse level AI (and horses are as dumb as a box of rocks) and the amount of computational power that would involve wouldn't leave much payload on your truck.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @02:46PM
They had Knight Rider back in 1982, so why not. It had 5000 megabits of RAM.
Until A.I is developed enough to be similar to KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand), don't even think about self-driving cars.
And even then KITT's auto-mode was only engaged when the driver was not available or could not drive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @02:42PM
to use mass transit. people cluster into suburbs anyway. run bus service from them to the cities. then use subways in the cities.
We've already solved this problem. For everything else there is higher fines for when the driver screw up and more rigorous and frequent drivers license testing to get and keep a permit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @08:15PM
Mass transit is easier for the bureaucrats, but it is much worse for the people. The point of self driving cars is to make personal transit possible for people who can't drive so that we can get rid of mass transit. With self driving cars, non-drivers will have cheaper taxi service available, or can own their own car, if they want to.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday January 04 2016, @08:59PM
Buses suck: they're too slow, and they pollute too much and create too many emissions. It's more efficient for everyone to just drive a car than to use a bus: they're literally that bad.
The solution for suburbs is SkyTran.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday January 04 2016, @03:36PM
Aside from the technical capabilities of the cars, an essential prerequisite for mass deployment are sensible liability laws. This whole area of law needs serious revision, especially in the US, but really pretty much everywhere. Mistakes happen, people should be compensated fairly for those mistakes. However, multi-million dollar awards, class action suits, and other "lottery" plays on the legal system make product liability a crap shoot.
Here's a suggestion: Put a number on a human life, something modest. Use this as a basis for calculating damages. Make awards according to this scheme following a "no fault" insurance scheme - i.e., each person's insurance pays their own damages. Suing companies, filing class action suits, or whatever should only be possible after showing proof of genuine negligence or malice. The level of proof required should be substantial; it should not be possible for random ambulance-chasing lawyers to initiate anything.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1) by YeaWhatevs on Monday January 04 2016, @03:44PM
The analysis in the summary is not quite right. The burden of proof isn't that the cars needs to drive better than the "average" human, including drunk and distracted drivers.
Statistics aren't going to cut it.
To convince me that it's safe, it needs to drive better than ME.
To convince me that it increases road throughput, it needs to get me to work faster.
To convince me to use it at all, it needs to be completely disconnected from the internet.
Now if I'm perpetually boozed, that's a pretty low standard. I'm sure selling a self driving car to well off alcoholics is like shooting fish in a barrel.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @03:45PM
The problem is already solved...
Some cars already can do driverless work in traffic jams and on the interstate highways. Cars may never be declared "driverless' or "self driving" because manufacturers don't want to contend with the liability. Never the less, check the videos from Tesla drivers and Mercedes drivers on YouTube.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @04:09PM
Those videos are scary. Not sure about the Mercedes system, but the Tesla system does not appear to have redundant sensors and processing.
When something goes wrong, the driver has to take over in less than a second. Something hard to do if you are not actually paying enough attention that you might as well be driving.