Self Driving Cars: How well do they work in areas with haphazard driving rules?

[Cerebus]

How many of us can truly say that in an emergency braking situation we run through all of the options and select the best?

It depends if your body has decided that you're in real immanent danger of death. If it has the world goes into slow motion and you have a surprising amount of apparent time to think about what you're going to do - in real time no more than 200-300ms. I've had it happen to me (twice) and it's a truly weird feeling. Both times I had enough volitional thought and control to make a difference to the outcome. Whether this was enough to select the 'best' outcome is doubtful, but it was enough to select a 'better' outcome.

[james_s]

Well I know this, if I'm ever involved in an accident with a self driving car that is not my fault, I'm going to sue the manufacture of the self driving car. Given what I've observed about the legal system, there is a very good chance that I will win a very substantial settlement. I'm certain that I'm not unique here, a few dozen similar such incidents could bankrupt the manufacture.

[KE5FX]

You just retain the capability for the driver to control the car, and switch to the driver when in a situation outside of the autopilots capabilities.

Sorry, but that's not going to work.

How many of us can truly say that in an emergency braking situation we run through all of the options and select the best?

That depends on what you were doing before the emergency braking situation came up. 

Were you scanning traffic ahead, reading road conditions, and keeping a mental note of cars in the vicinity of your own?  If so, then there's a good chance you'll do OK, and everyone will go home with their sheet metal intact.

Or, were you doing what drivers will actually be doing, and texting your friends or watching a movie on your phone when the "Emergency Intervention Required" alarm went off? 

If so, then there's not a chance in hell you'll be able to take over in time. 

Seriously: how can it not be completely obvious that self-driving cars are an all-or-nothing kind of thing?

[sokoloff]

I suppose you consider the trolley problem a difficult question too?

No, but it has nothing to do with this discussion.

At least we've discovered the core point of disagreement between us. I'm not going to build this box if I'm going to be held responsible even for a decrease in deaths; the idea that you're more interested in assigning blame regarding the 10,000 deaths rather than the enormous suffering and heartbreak associated with the 20,000 extra deaths is just unconscionable, at least with respect to my personal axioms/approach to ethics. The fact that you have absolutely no interest in the 20,000 lives saved is just bewildering, absolutely bewildering to me. Those aren't statistics, those are real people in real families, only some of whom are even responsibile for their deaths?

You clearly don't care about the 10,000 people your device killed, and you're fine with "Oh well, at least I statistically saved 20,000 lives!" This is like a murderer saying she's not a murderer because she "saved 8 lives" by killing 2 people instead of 10.

You do realize that the second underlined section is the trolley problem in a nutshell, right?

It seems to me that it has quite a bit to do with this discussion.

[JoeN]

Seriously: how can it not be completely obvious that self-driving cars are an all-or-nothing kind of thing?

Well, for one thing manufacturers are not saying this.  Only you are.  Secondly, then they are a nothing thing.  There is no way we are going to turn over the entire fleet of automobiles in North America just to implement this optional feature.  The people would never stand for it.  It would be the least popular law proposal ever.

[BrianHG]

Statistically? Should we give no credit to the measles vaccine because the 17.1 million lives it have saved are merely "statistical" "estimates"?

If that vaccine were known to have killed 1 million of the people who received it, would you give it to your children?

On balance, you certainly should. After all, it's 17 times as likely to save their lives, as it is to kill them.

People don't work that way though, which is probably why I prefer working with machines instead.

This analogy only works if you have given out 18.1 million doses of the vaccine.  Otherwise the 17 times as likely doesn't add up.

[BrianHG]

I also don't like the 30000 lives today VS saving 20000 lives by lowering the death count to 10000 lives.  How can you say the now 10000 lives lost by machine driving are a sub-set of the original 30000?  Machines will make different mistakes than human drivers, no matter how well they are taught.  The court argument will always be in a number of these 10000 cases will always be that a human driver would have not made that type of mistake under the same circumstances.  Video logs from the car's computer will confirm this often enough to create public outcry.

[CatalinaWOW]

You just retain the capability for the driver to control the car, and switch to the driver when in a situation outside of the autopilots capabilities.

Sorry, but that's not going to work.

How many of us can truly say that in an emergency braking situation we run through all of the options and select the best?

That depends on what you were doing before the emergency braking situation came up. 

Were you scanning traffic ahead, reading road conditions, and keeping a mental note of cars in the vicinity of your own?  If so, then there's a good chance you'll do OK, and everyone will go home with their sheet metal intact.

Or, were you doing what drivers will actually be doing, and texting your friends or watching a movie on your phone when the "Emergency Intervention Required" alarm went off? 

If so, then there's not a chance in hell you'll be able to take over in time. 

Seriously: how can it not be completely obvious that self-driving cars are an all-or-nothing kind of thing?

A:  The kind of transition I am talking about isn't an "Oops, I'm out of my league - here it's your hot potato." thing.  The GPS says gee, at current rate of progress I am coming to a (construction zone, dense pedestrian zone, loonie driving zone, rain squall....) in five minutes.  Time to alert the driver that he/she needs to take over.  Which is handled with a handshake protocol.  If this hasn't happened with one minute to go the urgent alarms go off and the car starts looking for a place to pull over and park.  This is what the sci-fi folks wrote about.

B:  I am a fairly alert driver, scanning nearby and approaching traffic and all of that.  But I don't think I am alone in saying that I don't try to evaluate the human cargo of nearby vehicles to use in choosing which bad outcome to select in case of a possible emergency.   My time and attention is better spent looking for road hazards and keeping track of closure rates and consistency of driving of the dozen or more vehicles in my threat space at any given time.

C:  I have been a number of emergency reaction situations in my life, and have come through all but one of them without collision.  I agree that time does seem to slow in cases of emergency, but there is still never enough time to do all the things you would like.  In the case of a collision I arguably made the wrong choice as there wasn't quite enough room to stop behind the vehicle (by less than a half meter) in front and an emergency lane change might have been the better choice.  But even in retrospect I'm not sure since there was marginal passing space on either side of the stopped vehicle and if that margin actually negative I would have traded the very low speed collision I had for a much higher speed sideswipe, or perhaps a rollover into a ditch.  An autopilot could have judged all of these factors much more quickly and accurately than I.  Human beings make mistakes in these situations, it is ludicrous to expect an autopilot to be perfect.

[james_s]

Seriously: how can it not be completely obvious that self-driving cars are an all-or-nothing kind of thing?

Well, for one thing manufacturers are not saying this.  Only you are.  Secondly, then they are a nothing thing.  There is no way we are going to turn over the entire fleet of automobiles in North America just to implement this optional feature.  The people would never stand for it.  It would be the least popular law proposal ever.

To borrow a quote from the gun guys, they can pry my manually driven (and manually shifted) car from my cold, dead hands.

[sokoloff]

To borrow a quote from the gun guys, they can pry my manually driven (and manually shifted) car from my cold, dead hands.

My uncle has a country place
That no one knows about
He says it used to be a farm
Before the Motor Law
And on Sundays I elude the eyes
And hop the Turbine Freight
To far outside the Wire
Where my white-haired uncle waits

Jump to the ground
As the Turbo slows to cross the borderline
Run like the wind
As excitement shivers up and down my spine
Down in his barn
My uncle preserved for me an old machine
For fifty odd years
To keep it as new has been his dearest dream

I strip away the old debris
That hides a shining car
A brilliant red Barchetta
From a better vanished time
I fire up the willing engine
Responding with a roar
Tires spitting gravel
I commit my weekly crime

Wind
In my hair
Shifting and drifting
Mechanical music
Adrenaline surge...

Well-weathered leather
Hot metal and oil
The scented country air
Sunlight on chrome
The blur of the landscape
Every nerve aware
...

(Red Barchetta, Moving Pictures, Rush)

[sokoloff]

Our daily drivers are 3, 13, and 19 years old and my 2 classics are 51 and 52 years old.

I doubt that we'll see any kind of hard cutover from human-driven to AI-driven cars. If the AI cars can't co-exist with the human cars, who will buy an AI car?

I can't imagine the government banning all other cars. Can you imagine the outcry? It would literally be a giant F-U to poor people (and to those of us who choose to drive economical [older] cars. Depending on which year and which study you read, the average age of the car on the road in the US is 11.4-12 years old. It will take that long to cycle out roughly half of the cars on the road.

[james_s]

If they wanted to do a hard cutover it would be far cheaper and more practical to build light rail everywhere, and a lot more efficient and effective too. I simply fail to see the attraction of a personal car that you can't drive, it's the worse of both worlds. All the fun of mass transit coupled with the cost of owning a premium car. Personal cars are a highly inefficient way to move people and goods, and making one drive itself is orders of magnitude more complex with a far greater opportunity for error than rail which is inherently self driving.

[KE5FX]

If they wanted to do a hard cutover it would be far cheaper and more practical to build light rail everywhere, and a lot more efficient and effective too. I simply fail to see the attraction of a personal car that you can't drive, it's the worse of both worlds. All the fun of mass transit coupled with the cost of owning a premium car. Personal cars are a highly inefficient way to move people and goods, and making one drive itself is orders of magnitude more complex with a far greater opportunity for error than rail which is inherently self driving.

You'll see car ownership take a steep dive if/when this ever happens.  There won't be much point to owning one.  Call one up when/where you need it, and pay as you go.

And yes, it will be one hell of a lot better than trains and buses that are guaranteed not to be where you are and to go where you want.

[cdev]

You've got it backwards, the inefficiency is a feature, not a bug. Jobs are going away, money may too, soon, so they all are trying to make as much as possible, and salt it all away offshore. Remember the money you may now may have to last your descendants forever.

Proof? just look at US's health care insurance system.  "the one bright spot in a dismal economy" as it was put to me a few years back. 

Quote from: james_s on Today at 20:27:22

If they wanted to do a hard cutover it would be far cheaper and more practical to build light rail everywhere, and a lot more efficient and effective too. I simply fail to see the attraction of a personal car that you can't drive, it's the worse of both worlds. All the fun of mass transit coupled with the cost of owning a premium car. Personal cars are a highly inefficient way to move people and goods, and making one drive itself is orders of magnitude more complex with a far greater opportunity for error than rail which is inherently self driving.

[poorchava]

Lol, I bet nobody would buy an autonomous car here in Poland, and not due to financial reasons.

That car would obey the official rules, not real ones. Try coming here to Poland and driving 50km/h on a 50 limit. You'll be overtaken and honked on by literally everyone. I usually drive somewhere around 70-80km/h and still get overtaken on regular basis in very center of a 700k people city. I somehow can't see autonomous cars fitting into that image.

[X]

You clearly don't care about the 10,000 people your device killed, and you're fine with "Oh well, at least I statistically saved 20,000 lives!" This is like a murderer saying she's not a murderer because she "saved 8 lives" by killing 2 people instead of 10.

You do realize that the second underlined section is the trolley problem in a nutshell, right?

It seems to me that it has quite a bit to do with this discussion.

No, the trolley problem is talking about choosing who is dead, with all people tied onto the line, who already have their lives in danger, not about playing with statistics. The number of people on each line are known to the exact number of people. This is very different to "A programming error on my part may have killed 10,000 with my magic box, but it might be possible that maybe 30,000 would have died if my magic box wasn't around."

If relevant to anything, it may be slightly relevant to that specific (and somewhat flawed) example, but not the discussion.

The best thing I ever heard in favour of self driving cars is that when you have quick errands to run and parking is inconvenient, expensive or just not available you can just leave it circling the block until you complete your business.

(arrives at work 4 hours late) "Sorry boss, there was a bug in the new firmware I flashed in my car, it just drove me all around in circles!" 

[tszaboo]

I doubt that we'll see any kind of hard cutover from human-driven to AI-driven cars. If the AI cars can't co-exist with the human cars, who will buy an AI car?

I would. I throw away 2x30 min in my day doing things that a machine can do. I'm not one of those "my car is my life" kinda people. I have a Prius, and while I like driving, I dont like driving when there are other people on the road, because they are inbred morons, that are able to put my life at risk on, daily basis. If I want to drive, I rent a Catherham and I go to the Nürnburgring.
BTW, I recently read an article about "self driving" Peugeot. Guess what it was doing? Driving in zig-zag, and randomly breaking for no good reason. Just like the drivers that buy any new Peugeot.

[james_s]

But why not just take lightrail? When I visited Los Angeles I didn't bother to rent a car, I just got a hotel room near the light rail line and rode it everywhere. It worked great, the trains were fast, quiet and clean, ran every 15 minutes on predetermined routes, maps prominently displayed in each car and stops called out automatically as they approached. It worked really well, felt great to blast down the middle of a jammed up freeway at 70mph.

A hard cutover simply won't work, at least not in the US. People like to drive cars, people are attached to their cars, a large portion of the population can't afford a brand new car, I could afford one but I would never buy one, I refuse to spend so much on a depreciating asset. It just won't happen unless they can integrate seamlessly with manually driven cars and I don't think they will in practice, at least not for a long time. Once they are out there I look forward to the first unexpected snowstorm, I'll park somewhere well away from the streets and find a safe perch to sip a beer and watch the show.

[cdev]

This is so strange to read because for most of my life LA has been the city that just couldn't bring itself to have a decent public transport system. Unlike all the other big cities I know well.  The RTD buses were uniformly horrible.

Way back in the 30s and 40s (way before my time) they had a great trolley system that went everywhere, but like the others, a company controlled by the evil National City Lines bought it up and junked it.

Quote from: james_s on Today at 15:57:28

But why not just take lightrail? When I visited Los Angeles I didn't bother to rent a car, I just got a hotel room near the light rail line and rode it everywhere. It worked great, the trains were fast, quiet and clean, ran every 15 minutes on predetermined routes, maps prominently displayed in each car and stops called out automatically as they approached. It worked really well, felt great to blast down the middle of a jammed up freeway at 70mph.

A hard cutover simply won't work, at least not in the US. People like to drive cars, people are attached to their cars, a large portion of the population can't afford a brand new car, I could afford one but I would never buy on, I refuse to spend so much on a depreciating asset. It just won't happen unless they can integrate seamlessly with manually driven cars and I don't think they will in practice, at least not for a long time. Once they are out there I look forward to the first unexpected snowstorm, I'll park somewhere well away from the streets and find a safe perch to sip a beer and watch the show.

[sokoloff]

I doubt that we'll see any kind of hard cutover from human-driven to AI-driven cars. If the AI cars can't co-exist with the human cars, who will buy an AI car?

I would. I throw away 2x30 min in my day doing things that a machine can do. I'm not one of those "my car is my life" kinda people. I have a Prius, and while I like driving, I dont like driving when there are other people on the road, because they are inbred morons, that are able to put my life at risk on, daily basis. If I want to drive, I rent a Catherham and I go to the Nürnburgring.

But if they can't co-exist with human driven cars, you still have to drive it manually or at least monitor it, right? You don't get back that 60 minutes/day unless it's fully autonomous AI, IMO.

I don't see a parallel road network as likely to spring up. How does the AI car help you?

[tszaboo]

But if they can't co-exist with human driven cars, you still have to drive it manually or at least monitor it, right? You don't get back that 60 minutes/day unless it's fully autonomous AI, IMO.
I don't see a parallel road network as likely to spring up. How does the AI car help you?

There are 6 levels of autonomous cars. I have level 1 now, level 5 is "steering wheel optional". Tesla is level 2, people die when they think it is a level 3.

[sokoloff]

Exactly. That's my point in this sub-thread. If level 5 is only useful if you get all the human-driven cars off the road, who will buy the level 5 car in the first 10, or even 5, years? Sure, some gadget freaks might, but it won't deliver the significant practical advantage of "take me to work while I nap".

[AndyC_772]

... or indeed, "take me home after I've been out for a few drinks". Or perhaps, "take me somewhere after I've had a stroke, and I can't ever drive again for myself".

[tszaboo]

You dont need to get rid of the human drivers. Although, you should, it would speed up the road network. You cannot get rid of the cyclists or pedestrians from the road. I know, these things are unknown in the USA. But a level 5 car for sure needs to be prepared to it. Even some level 2 handles them. Why would you need a separate network?
Volvo claims that nobody would die or get injured in their self driving car. They claim that as soon as 2020 they can do this.

[rstofer]

]But if they can't co-exist with human driven cars, you still have to drive it manually or at least monitor it, right? You don't get back that 60 minutes/day unless it's fully autonomous AI, IMO.

I don't see a parallel road network as likely to spring up. How does the AI car help you?

It will take a while to get rid of the non-automated cars but we'll do it through legislation just like we got rid of the gross polluters and we'll use the same logic.  The older cars prevent efficient use of the roadway and lead to increased pollution so we'll just make the pollution laws increasingly difficult to pass until only electric cars with a barn full of electronics can pass.

Or we will restrict non-automated vehicles to off-peak hours.

Seems simple to me!

We already have an example of this:  In California, early adopters of the Prius were allowed to drive in the HOV lane with no passengers.  Now that privilege is restricted to just a certain number of hybrids and will soon disappear entirely.  And it should!  One of the latest Prius cars has a 1.3 kWh battery that lasts just a couple of miles.  The gasoline engine is running all the time.  Even calling it a hybrid is a joke.  The battery is just there to absorb the regenerative braking.

The 2017 Chevy Bolt has a 60 kWh battery - nearly 50 times the size of the Prius battery.  And it doesn't even have a gasoline engine!  And no semiannual smog inspection either!  And darn little scheduled maintenance.