The politics and social liabilities of Driver-less vehicles ?

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   ahorsebackposted 5 years ago

   So your brand new driver-less vehicle is driving innocently down the highway with your usual car-poolers  ,  you get to the intersection at  5th and Grand   And all of a sudden two things happen at once ,  a loose doberman  runs out into the street on the left and a  congressional lobbyist  in a three piece suit with ear buds in walks off the sidewalk on the right .
   
   There is no time to stop , Which way does the car swerve ?
   Towards the dog or towards the congressional lobbyist ?
   
   Careful , You will be graded .

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      jackclee lmposted 5 years agoin reply to this

      The scenario you described would not happen in my lifetime. The self driving car is a phanthom dream. I see a case of intelligent assisted driving coming and already here in some high end cars. I also see it as an improvement to the many trucks on the highway... however, for day to day driving, I cannot see self driving cars being implemented. There are just too many problems on the road and too many drivers who are not machine “ready”. It is this mixed environment that I wrote about which will defeat the full implementation of self driving vehicles. Here is my test. If they can have self driving cars on the streets in Beijing today, then I will be convinced.

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         ahorsebackposted 5 years agoin reply to this

         Good points all , No there are to many inherent road / traffic hazards , human frailties and technical  nightmares ..........Talk about a climbing highway death toll !

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            wildernessposted 5 years agoin reply to this

            And yet...the record of autonomous cars is far better than any human driven rate.  We can think up a thousand odd situations that will give a robotic brain fits, and know that it will make the wrong decision some of the time, but the bottom line is that it will save, not cost, lives.  The savings from drunk drivers alone would tip the scales.

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               jackclee lmposted 5 years agoin reply to this

               That is the fallacy of people who believe in autonomous cars...
               The safety is the selling point.
               How do you solve the real problem of a mixed driving environment? Humans along side machines?

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                  wildernessposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                  Can you refute that autonomous cars have been in fewer accidents per million miles driven than humans?  No?  Which one is safer, then?
                  
                  I have heard of just one autonomous accident that just should not have happened, when the car drove under a truck it could not "see".  Even then the manufacturer, Tesla, makes a big think of the fact that autonomy is NOT ready for the highways yet, and won't be for some time to come.

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                     jackclee lmposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                     You are missing the point. In any controlled environment, the parameters are easy to set and the results can be impressive. However, scale that up by 1000000 or higher and you will see why it will not work. Especially, in the real world, the reality is these cars will have to share the road with us humans for quite a while. As I said, the prove of the pudding is on the streets of Beijing. If autonomous car can survive in that environment, I will become a convert.

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                        ahorsebackposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                        Seriously out of 1.4 billion with a B auto's and 10 million  driver-less cars by 2020 , Isn't  it enough that those ratio's , especially today, cannot be compared effectively ?  There will be a whole new category of highway deaths and  technical causation of automobile accidents   .
                        
                        I often wonder about cell phone blind spots that pocket the mountainous regions of America , where I live as much as 20 -30 % of the area lacks  cell coverage , how will that effect the driver-less car?

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                           wildernessposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                           What am I missing here?  What does cell coverage have to do with anything - those cars "see" things from road signs to the road to obstructions and carry a map to boot.  What do they need, or use, cell coverage for?
                           
                           (If you only have 30% of the rural roads without cell coverage you have a lot more than I do!)

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                              jackclee lmposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                              I guess some of the systems rely on GPS and sonar sensing and short distance communications between vehicles for guidance. As we all experienced, when you loose satellite contact, your GPS stops working...

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                                 wildernessposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                                 GPS, yes, but that's not cell phone towers.  Sonar I hadn't heard about - that seems unlikely when radar and lidar are more accurate and noisy roads don't bother them.  Short distance communications will undoubtedly be a part of it one day, but only when vastly more cars have it - in the short term it is almost useless.

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                              ahorsebackposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                              I have no real  technical idea how they do work but what I do know is how horribly screwed up our highway infrastructure system is today because of federal highway fund spending  by states , it may work well in central L.A. , in northern Vermont on a muddy dirt road ?   
                              
                              But please explain your expertise .

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                                 wildernessposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                                 Somehow I think muddy, dirt roads are a long ways off.  So are roads completely covered in fresh snow - I've been on more than one road where even I couldn't tell where the road ended and the ditch began!
                                 
                                 My expertise?  Only what little I read, which is why I asked what cell service has to do with it.  How do the cars use it, what it does for them, and why it is useful.  I take it you don't know either.

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                                    ahorsebackposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                                    No I don't  , I just know that cell phones are satellite , line of sight towers and don't  work well where I've been at all , even police communications where I live aren't  so swell , seems communication has a ways to go but the car can leap frog that ?
                                    I don't have a clue , but I get a kick out of the possibilities ,  like who gets the speeding ticket .

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                        wildernessposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                        Well, somebody is missing the point as that is already being done with near perfect results.  We've got quite a ways to go, but for a start that near perfection is pretty darn good.

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                           jackclee lmposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                           Where is that? Is it in Beijing? Paris, NYC, Boston...?

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                              wildernessposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                              California has a fleet or two (LA, I think), and so does NYC.  It is also being used in Europe, and I read where a campus somewhere is putting a small fleet out there with no safety driver at all, just for around campus.
                              
                              Tesla produces a "semi-autonomous" car, with caution that a driver must remain alert, with hands on the wheel.  Which wasn't done, resulting in the one Tesla crash when a white truck "disappeared" into a gray sky as far as the computer could tell.  It couldn't distinguish it from the sky.

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                                 jackclee lmposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                                 I followed some of these tests but they are long way off of “self driving.” 
                                 There are numerous issues just from day to day driving which are easily handled by a human and yet the computer, even with advanced AI software, would have a hard time to decipher let alone making a good on the fly response.
                                 
                                 As I said, the difficulty is when a mix of self driving cars is in the same space as human drivers. They don’t follow rules all the time and they make mistakes and they are distracted...
                                 In such an environment, I can see huge grid lock caused by self driving cars in a large dense city environment.

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                                    wildernessposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                                    Of course they're a long way off.  That's why drivers are used at this point, just to sit and watch.  But in 10 years?  I foresee lots of them in a decade or so, and a huge market for them - the money and resources being poured into the problem is enormous.  How many seniors have given up driving because they know they aren't capable any more and are thus nearly confined to their homes?

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                                       jackclee lmposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                                       That is why we have uber.
                                       This argument that with time and improved processing and faster computers and better sensors... will get us to the holy grail of self driving cars is a fallacy.
                                       
                                       I have heard similar arguments 30 years ago in the attempt at AI research at IBM.
                                       They failed to achieve true AI though they made progress with Deep Blue and Watson.
                                       
                                       The problem is knowing the type of problems these systems are dealing with. Some problems are complex and some are easy. With improved speed and power, the simple problems can easily be solved. The complex ones, which self driving cars is one along with AI, depends on more than just computer power and speed. It requires human cognition. The answer is not black and white. The solution cannot be solved with a set of binary tree decisions.
                                       
                                       Time will tell if I am correct. Have a great day.

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                                       ahorsebackposted 5 years agoin reply to this

                                       Or how many road raged younger drivers hog the roads ,the lanes , texting , talking on phones ,  overload the cars ,  altered minds with drugs , drinking and  general mayhem ............You're right though , whatever comes down the road will  be a better way to go.
                                       
                                       Than today , heck ya.

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