9 ms·

Remembering When Driverless Elevators Drew Skepticism

110 points by piyushmakhija 11y ago

mschuster91 11y ago
Automatic elevators at least have their own distinct movement areas. Automatic cars have to share their space with (human-driven) cars, crazy nuthead bikers and drunk-as-fuck pedestrians, not to mention cops ignoring all the traffic rules to get a fucking burger from McD and other emergency services. Quite a difference I'd say, even with today's technology.
- SCAQTony 11y ago
  And 30,000 people a year did not die in them with said elevator operator punching his finger on the buttons.
- conception 11y ago
  Normal drivers, Nuthead bikers, drunk pedestrians and cops can all be reacted to much swifter by a computer using radar than any driver behind the wheel. It's just pride to think you could.
  - mokus 11y ago
    I don't think anyone doubts it can react more quickly. The real question is whether it can react more correctly. I think the answer is "soon", for what that's worth, but I also think that until the answer is an unmitigated "yes" it's a valid criticism. (edited for tone)
    - kbenson 11y ago
      Well, whether it acts more correctly becomes a moot point when it acts correct most of the time, then it's about what acts more safely. There are advantages to having a system that's not allowed to be lax when it comes to safety rules.
    - kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
      The key is that a human can anticipate a dangerous situation and take mitigating action before a quick reaction is necessary. AI still has far to go before that sort of nuanced behavior can be replicated. Until then self driving cars will be like teenagers learning to drive. Sure they can get themselves from point A to B but I don't want to be near them while they do it.
      - nkozyra 11y ago
        Disagree entirely. Anticipation is just a function of memory - of having enough training data that you can glean potential outcomes and their probabilities through the attributes that surround them. That's used in AI all the time already.
        refurb 11y ago
        You're drivng down a crowded highway and you see an obstacle. You're likely to get rear ended if you hit your brakes and you can't change lanes. However you recognize it's just an empty card oard box. You drive through it with no issues. Can you train a computer to do that?
        yongjik 11y ago
        ...and it turns out the "empty" cardboard box is half filled with metal pipes, which your human eye had no way of knowing in the split-second before your car collides into it in 65 mph. Your car screeches, loses control, and swerves into the neighboring lane. But luckily a following self-driving car already detected the presence of an obstacle using radar. It detects your car maintaining speed. Within several milliseconds it evaluates chance of collision as VERY HIGH, starts evasive maneuver, scratching your car at a speed which is still uncomfortably high but not likely to cause a fatal accident. Several weeks later a team of automobile experts review everything recorded in the accident, improve the algorithm to reduce the chance of accident even further in Edge Case 783645: the preceding human-driving car plowing into a small road obstacle at 65 mph. Firmwares are automatically upgraded during the following months.
        11y ago
  - feedjoelpie 11y ago
    Instincts are strange. I have been (happily) surprised by myself on multiple occasions by how I've reacted to near-impact situations. Do I think that means cars can't do it? Absolutely not. I do think that it will take a lot of learning to get the same out of them. On the other hand, do I also think that replacing every car on the road with a self-driving one right now would result in fewer accidents and fatalities? Yes. If it were illegal to drive and all vehicles were required to be autonomous, I 100% believe that would drop the danger of motor vehicles significantly. Where it gets weird is the concept of fault. Right now, because most motor vehicle accidents are driver error, humans screwing up almost serves as an insurance policy for manufacturers. If fewer people die, but more of them die as a result of manufacturers' software... Yeah I don't know. The future is going to be weird.
  - scintill76 11y ago
    Well, I'd say it's just pride to be so confident in the ability of human engineers to make machines outperform humans consistently (at least in the next few years that vendors want to start selling auto-drivers.) I don't think anyone's doubting whether radar+computer can move faster than a human, but we may doubt whether it will make the "right" reaction and if it might make unwanted decisions in some other cases we don't think of until they happen. And that's just the "AI" level, not stupid things like your electronic throttle's stack overflowing and locking in the open position[1]. [1] http://embeddedgurus.com/state-space/2014/02/are-we-shooting-ourselves-in-the-foot-with-stack-overflow/ http://embeddedgurus.com/state-space/2014/02/are-we-shooting...
    - dexterdog 11y ago
      You speak as if humans are really good at making driving decisions today. We're really not.
      - scintill76 11y ago
        I didn't exactly say that. But I think you and others are underestimating our collective skills. We make stupid decisions, get tired, etc., but we manage to recover, workaround others' mistakes, etc. I think people are underestimating how hard it will be to get "the last 10%" of driving skill, that gap between slapping together cruise control+camera+radar+GPS to be able to handle the best-case scenarios, and being able to drive at least as well as the average human in the average-case scenarios. Another thought: what if it takes a generation or longer for self-driving cars to do well with cases like slippery rain or ice? People will stop practicing how to drive at all, until suddenly one day they have to drive in the most dangerous conditions possible. Will the net cost/casualties of accidents still be lower than it is today?
      - ghaff 11y ago
        I suppose it depends on what your standard is and what you're comparing it with. The Insurance Institute for highway safety says there is about 1 fatality per 100 million vehicle miles travelled in the US. http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalityfacts/state-by-state-overview http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit... That still translates into a lot of annual deaths of course (and doesn't capture the many serious injuries not included in that statistic). But humans actually drive a lot of miles with relatively few serious accidents.
  - biot 11y ago
    Swifter, yes. Better? I think that depends on the particular circumstance. For example: you look in your rear view mirror and notice an out of control cement truck half a block away heading directly towards you, plowing through vehicles in its path. Would a computer recognize the impending catastrophe and take the initiative, sideswiping a few vehicles in your way in an effort to get out of the situation? I think it's safe to say that every day driving circumstances are already on par with what a human driver could achieve. It's the extenuating circumstances where a human can make the call of "my life is more important than property damage or even risking others lives" where I have my doubts. Those situations are obviously rare, but still quite important.
    - aianus 11y ago
      If they're extremely rare, then they're not important. If you save X lives in every day driving circumstances at the cost of Y (Y << X) lives in bizarre rare circumstances, it's an easy, obvious win.
      - gambiting 11y ago
        Mhmmm no. If you have a machine that is manually operated and kills 1/1000 people due to operator errors, and a machine that is fully automatic but kills 1/10000 people due to software errors or "weird edge cases", it's still the second machine that will never be allowed on the market, because even one instance of it killing anyone will cause it to be fully recalled - doesn't matter that statistically it kills less people than a manually operated one. For automatic machines that number is 0, and automatic cars are unlikely to achieve that.
      - scintill76 11y ago
        That may be the rational response under certain morals, but not everybody is rational always or has the same morals. Who is legally responsible for those Y deaths? Or, even if there was no death but the car broke a traffic law, how is that addressed? If the Y deaths are disproportionately a distinct class of people from X (say, pedestrians, construction workers), are they going to be eligible for some class action lawsuit? Or will it deepen class divides as poor pedestrians become bitter about being hit by self-driving cars carrying rich people? Are the "drivers" going to suffer guilt, wondering if there's something they could have done to prevent an accident? Are issues like this going to cause the law to require a human "standby driver" ready to take over, canceling many of the hoped-for advantages of self-driving cars? If drivers have legal or monetary liability, are they going to want to hand that over to a machine built as cheaply as possible and designed by overworked startup engineers? (perhaps the first generations at least.) Will the cars keep audit records to prove "who" was driving, etc.? Maybe some of this is getting off-topic; I'm just musing on how complex the practical and societal factors could get.
  - theklub 11y ago
    What about in bad weather?
scintill76 11y ago
Cool bit of history and I kind of see the analogy, but there's a difference between pulling up and down by cables in a single shaft indoors, and powered rolling on roads outdoors anywhere. Even if the first self-driving cars are on fixed paths too, there are a lot more variables.
- CydeWeys 11y ago
  But technology in general is a lot more capable now too. Self-driving cars are safer than manual elevators were, and they're a lot more useful to boot, as they get you to anywhere you want to go rather than just to a different floor.
Jedd 11y ago
The story a few days ago about a bicyclist doing a track stand confusing a google car, which in turn reverted to performing a sequence of seemingly excessively safe manoeuvres, generated some fascinating responses. Most particularly an observation that we seem to be stuck in a 'perfect or nothing' mentality - whereas new technologies, even in their own niche, really don't need to solve all problems for all people. I guess because it feels like that attitude directly contradicts the sarcastic adage 'there's never time to do it right, but lots of time to do it over' (and myriad permutations) that generally encourage us to get it right on the first go so we do not have to waste time revisiting. Complaining about the 100% applicability of an otherwise fine analogy seems to, again, be missing the point here. Plus, HN readers are not the target audience for this kind of story. Aside: on a very recent trip to India, spending some time working in a very large, very new office (not retail) building, replete with fully functional lifts, it was fascinating to see each lift had a uniformed attendant that pressed buttons on request.
- mschuster91 11y ago
  > Aside: on a very recent trip to India, spending some time working in a very large, very new office (not retail) building, replete with fully functional lifts, it was fascinating to see each lift had a uniformed attendant that pressed buttons on request. I think this may be more of a "show off, we're rich and can afford service" attitude. Spoken from the POV of an European only hearing about India when there is another outsourcing, terrorism, gang-rape or caste-based case (like the two poor "untouchables" girls sentenced to being raped by a village court, because their brother had married and run off with a higher-caste girl), I think it's just symptomatic of the culture. Prove me wrong.
  - SilasX 11y ago
    Well, since you asked ... It's my understanding that menial labor in India is expected to be cheap and so people wouldn't naturally interpret one extra worker as an extravagant show of wealth. I also read on Quora that Indian parking attendants will do nothing but press a button to generate your parking pass and give it to you, another example of pointless labor that doesn't seem very related to flouting wealth.
yellowapple 11y ago
I'm pretty sure driverless elevators never operated on open roads. I'm also pretty sure driverless elevators don't travel at highway speeds. I dunno, maybe I'm wrong, and this elevator here in my office building goes burning up asphalt and rubber when I'm not around to notice.
- prawn 11y ago
  You've completely missed the point. See IkmoIkmo's post in this thread.
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    Even after seeing IkmoIkmo's post, I'm standing by my own. It does nothing to prove that the drivered->driverless car transition would be anything close to the drivered-driverless elevator transition. Even historical elevators rarely (if ever) had multiple elevators per shaft or a shaft that travelled in more than one dimension; that's a non-starter for the analogy this article tries (and in my opinion fails) to present as if it proves anything.
anti-shill 11y ago
doctors were also under a great deal of suspicion 200 hundred years ago or so...the idea of the story of Frankenstein was taken from the fabric of the society of that day...most people did not trust doctors...anything new is under suspicion.
- ghaff 11y ago
  While I don't really disagree with the general point, 200 years ago there was minimal understanding of medical sterilization methods and no anesthetics so it's certainly understandable that surgery at least was viewed with, shall we say, suspicion. Given that you would probably die or be seriously incapacitated in some way.
brudgers 11y ago
There's a false analogy here. Driverless elevators raised a concern in regard to the safety of the elevator cab's occupants in what was primarily a matter of private policy on private property. Essentially any public policy decision was about regulating the use of private property within private spaces and any citizen could opt out by taking the stairs. On the other hand there are primary concerns with driverless cars in regard to the safety of non-occupants in the public commons and therefore it is primarily a matter of public policy regulating the use of private property in public spaces. The notion that opting out of public spaces is healthy for citizenship in general seems antithetical to a meaningful concept of citizenship in a liberal polity. There are luddite concerns over self-driving cars. But there's an auto-industry counter tale of "Remembering when Tetra-Ethyl Lead in Gasoline was Considered a Good Thing."
- Falkon1313 11y ago
  Or the counter tale of "Remember when having all of the vehicles be driven 80+mph by drunk and/or sleep-deprived, distracted people filled with road-rage while trying to eat, put on makeup, text on their cellphone, and interact with passengers at the same time was considered a good thing?" People were outraged over the Vietnam War, in which, 20 years of war, the U.S. lost 58,209 dead. Since 1930, we've lost about 30,000-54,000 each and every year to vehicular deaths. Even now that cars are a bit safer and deaths are down a bit, they're still quite high compared to an event where you expect death, and unlike a war, it doesn't end. If we lost 100+ people per day to plane crashes or a few thousand people a month to terrorism, (or to elevators for that matter), it would be a huge deal. I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a push to get humans out from behind the wheel.
  - IkmoIkmo 11y ago
    This so hard, I mentioned this in a post just last week. There's a 9/11 every month on US roads, yet we leave the number 1 safety improvement (computerized traffic) we could make to probably eradicate 90% to private business: pushing driverless cars. Now of course at the end of the day this change has to be driven by businesses, but government can and should help: R&D and prototyping (like a ton of big inventions, e.g. the internet) could and should be funded to a very large extent by the government. Commercialization should be entirely left to businesses, but even here governments can use regulation to introduce new safety standards to inform drivers of the safest options for driving at the very least. And you could even go so far as to employ a model akin to that of many governments which increase taxes on fuel inefficient cars (e.g. SUVs) and decrease them on fuel efficient cars as an environmental measure, but then apply the same on the basis of safety (driverless cars, if they score well on safety which they should over time, being cheaper). You can argue that such a move is big government, you can also argue that's simply the government forcing the market to price in externalities (purely from a financial perspective, road death and injury increasing costs of healthcare on society, decreasing productivity, but also things like congestion and fuel efficiency can be priced in, which driverless cars should do better in) that currently are ignored. It'd still be entirely market driven, but the market reflects reality better. Once it picks up individual states could choose to make certain sections of roads (e.g. one lane) or sections of their city, entirely driverless car only at certain hours of the day, to accelerate the process. And once you go driverless you'll essentially open up what 'public transportation' really means. In a sharing economy of vehicles which need no driver, anyone's car essentially becomes a tiny bus-service. I'd expect the cost of transportation to drop quite significantly.
hyperpallium 11y ago
Planes need 3D steering and trains 1D... yet we have driverless planes and not driverless trains.
- gress 11y ago
  We do have driverless trains.
  - codingdave 11y ago
    And we do not have driverless planes - we have driver-supervised autopilots. EDIT: I guess we have drones, with programmed routes. But again, regulations require supervision in those cases.
    - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
      We sure don't have any drones carrying passengers, so I think your argument stands.
- toast0 11y ago
  We do have driverless trains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirTrain_(San_Francisco_International_Airport) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirTrain_(San_Francisco_Intern...
nyolfen 11y ago
this reminds me of a truly excellent HOPE X presentation about elevator hacking[0]. one of the most entertaining con panels i've seen, and interesting information on an esoteric topic. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOzrJjdZDRQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOzrJjdZDRQ
codingdave 11y ago
I personally am just missing one thing to give me confidence in self-driving cars - transparency into their algorithms. I don't need to get deep into them, but some general information on how they "think" for accident avoidance would help me. Just as an example, lets assume some debris on the highway. I am sure the self-driving car can avoid it, or stop until there is a clear space to go around it. But what if a human is tailgating? Does the car ignore that? Or does it (facetiously anthropomorphically) think to itself, "Hey, that is a human behind me, tailgating, at 75 mph. Swerving left to avoid this debris would put the human-driven vehicle on a path to collide with it, because the poor sap doesn't have my reaction time. I'd better hit the brakes instead, to communicate the danger." I know that is an edge case, but edge cases are where accidents happen anyway, so I'd like to know what to expect from self-driven cars.
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  Edge cases are where accidents happen because humans suck at them, whereas you can specifically train on them with a computer. The bigger problem, that you allude to, is that the algorithms that actually work are mostly machine learned and therefore very opaque to human inspection.
  - IkmoIkmo 11y ago
    One of the big issues with this is how consumers/government will require algorithms to prioritize. i.e. one can imagine that there are accidents with a certain context wherein a driverless car could prevent x amount of people from dying, by killing its own passenger. For example an axle breaks, you can't turn right anymore, only left, and you're coming up on a right turn. You're supposed to turn right and stick to your lane, you can't, you either go straight onto the other lane, or go left. You happen to be driving an SUV and there's two small cars in the lane. If you go straight you hit both of them, and the camera registers 2 young children in each and an adult driving. Given the difference in car sizes, you're likely to survive but also likely to kill at least two kids, perhaps up to 6 people, you'll definitely destroy 2 cars and injure all 6. Or you take a sharp left and drive infront of them straight off the road, you drop down in a cliff and die. In both cases the computer calculates to a large degree of certainty that if either choice is made that it'd go down pretty much like this. Now this is a silly edge case but it's the best I could come up with right away, more plausible ones exists. Anyway the question now becomes, is it okay for cars to be sold that are programmed to prioritize the passenger's life, i.e. killing the maximum amount of innocent people who are not you, estimated between 2 and 6, injuring at least all 6, creating the biggest economic damage and loss of life or livelihood to innocent people (particularly 'innocent' as their car's axle was just fine, yours wasn't). Or would a government require the algorithm to take a different priority, one in which the car's software is programmed to sacrifice the car's owner/passenger, for the sake of a utilitarian calculation? I think the answer is pretty clear what's fair, and that if a computer wasn't part of the equation that an ordinary human would likely not have had the mental fortitude to identify the axle steering issue and all options and choose the best one and that the outcome would be worse than a driverless car. But I also think it's pretty clear that the 'fair' decision would still be highly controversial and scary to imagine and something that'll see quite a lot of debate and pockets of resistance the next few decades.
kazinator 11y ago
Elevators are enclosed and move on rails. The "driver" of an elevator does not even consider obstacles, and couldn't see them if he or she wanted to because the floor and ceiling aren't transparent. Driverless trains operate in many cities around the world. They hardly raise an eyebrow. They are on rails, of course, and those rails are on dedicated, closed tracks out of the way of traffic. The trains just have to coordinate to stay out of each other's way, stop if there is an alarm condition (object or person in track area), and correctly stop at the proper spots at the stations. Not comparable to driving a car.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  Of course it's not comparable in the sense that driving a car is different from operating an elevator, that's not a point the article aims to address. The point is that at one point we thought we needed to manually operate something out of safety or convenience concerns, that we could actually automate more safely and conveniently. Similarly, the point is, that most people had similar notions a few years ago about cars, and we're now seeing they're similarly untrue.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    You can avoid elevators you can't avoid cars.
  - kazinator 11y ago
    Convenience is the main point of automation; the only thing convenient about manual operation is that it provides a convenient job for someone, who finds it inconvenient to be replaced. I don't think there was ever any genuine concern about automation bringing inconvenience (other than maybe some ineffective forms of automation: "strawman automation"). "I mostly like the idea of a machine that lets you just throw in your dirty clothes and punch some buttons, but won't that do away with the sheer convenience of washing clothes by hand?" Doesn't compute.
- CyberFonic 11y ago
  The you consider the car hacks, like the recent Jeep one and the bugs like the Toyota ECU issues with unintended acceleration. I don't think that the state of software engineering is sufficiently robust to allow it to drive cars.
hoodoof 11y ago
Is this here to sort of suggest that "we got used to driverless elevators so we'll get used to driverless cars". It's perhaps true but a really bad analogy. There's minimal risk of my child being hit and killed by an elevator as a result of a bug in the elevator software.
- onion2k 11y ago
  If your concern is your child being run over the important question is whether there's a higher risk of your child being hit by an autonomous car or a human-driven car.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  It's not a technological argument, it's one of human perception. The article talks about how ordinary people like you and me simply didn't view an elevator as something that's safe or convenient without a manual operator, quite like cars today. And that this perception didn't change automatically, it took time and new ideas which didn't have much to do with technology really. As for safety perceptions back then, it's hard to say exactly what they were like. The article alludes they were pretty bad, when elevator operators went on strike the city was badly affected apparently. I can tell you in the US like 20-30 people die each year in elevators, it's pretty minor given the billions of trips but I think we can easily imagine elevators were not quite as reliable 100 years ago when the automatic elevator existed, and that the accident rate was quite a lot higher.
kw71 11y ago
Oh man, this reminds me of the time I met an elevator with an operator. It was in one of the Smithsonian museums - perhaps appropriately the museum of american history? It was only 22 years ago, and I rode the elevator several times just to watch the operator work the strange controls. I wish I'd photographed it.
- joeclark77 11y ago
  I saw one in the Air and Space Museum just this summer. Your tax dollars at work, America.
joeclark77 11y ago
The change in elevators was from having a professional operator to allowing passengers to push the buttons themselves. Elevators are still "driven" by humans, not robots. The self-driving cars are a whole different ball of wax.
- ultimape 11y ago
  Interestingly, this exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat_elevator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat_elevator
dogma1138 11y ago
My biggest issue with driverless cars is how they'll handle extremes. You as a driver might choose to hit some one rather than risk hitting a barrier with your wife and baby on in the car. In other cases you might rather drive your car into a barrier or even off a cliff rather than hit a child. Now this isn't about morality or legality you might be morally and legally "wrong" for swaying out of a more dangerous obstacle for your self and the passengers of your car while increasing the likelihood of harming some one else, you might go to jail for that, be found liable in a civil law suit or just feel like shit for the rest of your life but it's still your decision to make. With dirverless cars that's gone the car really has a choice to make and that's in an extreme case in which it cannot avoid an accident some where there will be a algorithm dictating should it prefer to risk the passengers of the car or the 3rd party it might collide with. Even if the car can do a risk calculation and choose the lowest results that still isn't good enough since well it shouldn't be upto the car to make that decision because it cannot count for other factors such as who is in the car and who you might hit. Heck if you as a driver have a choice of swaying left or right to avoid a kid on the road and there's a 200,000 to your right and a 20,000 car to your left you are going to go left every time.
- Joeri 11y ago
  It takes too long for the deliberative mind to make a decision, because thinking through the situation would take ten seconds or more. The way you describe it is not what happens. In actuality the animal brain will make an intuitive decision, and the rational brain will then invent an explanation for that decision and pretend it was going to make that decision all along. By contrast a driverless car will always make deliberative decisions, so if anything the only morally right decision is to let the algorithm decide, because whatever its process it will still reach the right conclusion more often than a monkey brain evolved to avoid lions trying to decide whether to turn the wheel of a car or not.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    I would disagree if there's enough time to react there's enough time for a choice now it doesn't mean you can have a lengthy internal deliberation but your mind will take the current biases into a fact. There's allot of stuff you are doing without realizing it people for example drive 10-20% slower with a child in their car without doing that intentionally, while men tend to speed up while having an attractive woman as a passenger you will behave differently and make different choices based on the situation you are in. I've been involved in several accidents / near accidents in my life and in all of them i have enough time to react and make a decision, if you can't react and it's not some one really jumping infront of you which means you hit them before you even notice them it means you are driving too fast or otherwise distracted in the 1st place. I don't care about morality i care about the best outcome for me as it see it i don't want my car to sway into incoming traffic because it calculated that it's a lower risk of serious injury than hitting an idiot on a motorbike that decided to do an illegal uturn, That situation is from experience i couldn't way left because i might hit incoming traffic if i would say right i would hit the cars to my right if I would emergency break i would still hit him and most likely cause a chain accident with the car/s behind me so i went on knowing that i would most likely hit him, I've manage to get enough speed and stick close enough to the right to not him but even if i would've in my opinion that would've been the best situation even if it was the 1st or 2nd highest chance for some one to be seriously injured use case. Now I don't remember slowing and thinking hmm can't do left, can't do right, can't break, I remember my eyes running from left to right for a couple of milliseconds and then speeding up instinctively but it was still a decision i made. Now if it was a kid on a side walk I would've swayed right without a doubt even tho i could've gotten hit by a passing car or driving some one else of the road, and if i had my kid in the car? well if mowing down and entire puppy orphanage was the least risky scenario for me i would've done that in a heartbeat.
cconcepts 11y ago
Strange comparison, I've never heard of an elevator, driven or otherwise, run over kids.... Unfortunately I can't come up with a better analogy myself but comparing this to an elevator seems weird.
- __alexs 11y ago
  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/11802401/Girl5-dies-after-trapping-head-in-lift.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/1180240... Fatal lift accidents are not unheard of.
amazing_jose 11y ago
People still do not accept driverless trains or tubes yet. I remember talking with an AI expert a few years ago. The London's underground had a fully automated driverless prototype in the 70's. And here we are, in 2015 and only a toy driverless system in London (DLR).
- elros 11y ago
  I'm not sure how much that's the case. For many years now, Paris' lines 1 and 14 have been fully automated. I've been to Toulouse last year and their whole subway system – albeit small – is automated. I'm also pretty sure that the train one takes from Copenhagen's airport to the main train station is fully automated, but I'm not sure about the other lines. All in all, I think the public acceptance issue can be mitigated.
CrLf 11y ago
In tipical geek fashion, this discussion is stuck around matters of safety in driverless cars and how can people be made to trust them. How much better they are, how fascinating the tech is. How driverless cars can replace cars entirely. But do people actually _want_ driverless cars? Will they _ever_ do? A driverless car is not a driverless elevator or train. People never drove their own elevators or trains, they were driven by other people. A car is another matter entirely. People enjoy driving their own cars, some because of the control it gives them, others because of the act of driving itself. If this weren't so, people wouldn't choose to drive their own cars in situations where taxis or other forms of public transportation are clearly superior. I want a self-driving car as much as I want self-drinking beer. I'm not saying self-driving cars are useless. I can certainly see a future with self-driving buses and taxis. However, for that to happen there are a few human obstacles that must be overcome even if the technology becomes perfect. The same obstacles that currently prevent self-driving trains from becoming more widespread: if you need a human to stand watch against vandalism and to react in emergency situations, he might as well be driving the thing, it's cheaper.
- gvurrdon 11y ago
  Indeed, there's still a case for car ownership even if one doesn't enjoy driving. One reason for preferring a car over a bus or taxi is the ability to transport luggage. I frequently find that I have to undertake round trips of 200-300 miles with a car full of bulky and valuable equipment; the destination is often somewhere that is not easily accessible by public transport, or requires changes between bus, train and taxi, even if I could take the luggage via that means. It might be rather convenient to have the car conduct at least the motorway portion of the driving itself, but access to my own car is pretty much essential in order to do this sort of thing. I suspect that for anyone in business where they must transport goods or tools it will be even more vital.
  - prawn 11y ago
    You would just get a van or truck on demand. That's a huge benefit of on demand, self-driving cars - instead of having one car you try to fit into your every need, you get what you need and when you need it. So, something tiny if it's just you and your partner going to dinner. Or a van if you're taking kids and friends to an event. Or a truck if you have to move a sofa. I have a sedan. 90% of the time it's just me in the car. Insane.

110 points by piyushmakhija 11y ago

Automatic elevators at least have their own distinct movement areas. Automatic cars have to share their space with (human-driven) cars, crazy nuthead bikers and drunk-as-fuck pedestrians, not to mention cops ignoring all the traffic rules to get a fucking burger from McD and other emergency services. Quite a difference I'd say, even with today's technology.

SCAQTony 11y ago
And 30,000 people a year did not die in them with said elevator operator punching his finger on the buttons.
conception 11y ago
Normal drivers, Nuthead bikers, drunk pedestrians and cops can all be reacted to much swifter by a computer using radar than any driver behind the wheel. It's just pride to think you could.
- mokus 11y ago
  I don't think anyone doubts it can react more quickly. The real question is whether it can react more correctly. I think the answer is "soon", for what that's worth, but I also think that until the answer is an unmitigated "yes" it's a valid criticism. (edited for tone)
  - kbenson 11y ago
    Well, whether it acts more correctly becomes a moot point when it acts correct most of the time, then it's about what acts more safely. There are advantages to having a system that's not allowed to be lax when it comes to safety rules.
  - kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
    The key is that a human can anticipate a dangerous situation and take mitigating action before a quick reaction is necessary. AI still has far to go before that sort of nuanced behavior can be replicated. Until then self driving cars will be like teenagers learning to drive. Sure they can get themselves from point A to B but I don't want to be near them while they do it.
    - nkozyra 11y ago
      Disagree entirely. Anticipation is just a function of memory - of having enough training data that you can glean potential outcomes and their probabilities through the attributes that surround them. That's used in AI all the time already.
      - refurb 11y ago
        You're drivng down a crowded highway and you see an obstacle. You're likely to get rear ended if you hit your brakes and you can't change lanes. However you recognize it's just an empty card oard box. You drive through it with no issues. Can you train a computer to do that?
        yongjik 11y ago
        ...and it turns out the "empty" cardboard box is half filled with metal pipes, which your human eye had no way of knowing in the split-second before your car collides into it in 65 mph. Your car screeches, loses control, and swerves into the neighboring lane. But luckily a following self-driving car already detected the presence of an obstacle using radar. It detects your car maintaining speed. Within several milliseconds it evaluates chance of collision as VERY HIGH, starts evasive maneuver, scratching your car at a speed which is still uncomfortably high but not likely to cause a fatal accident. Several weeks later a team of automobile experts review everything recorded in the accident, improve the algorithm to reduce the chance of accident even further in Edge Case 783645: the preceding human-driving car plowing into a small road obstacle at 65 mph. Firmwares are automatically upgraded during the following months.
        11y ago
- feedjoelpie 11y ago
  Instincts are strange. I have been (happily) surprised by myself on multiple occasions by how I've reacted to near-impact situations. Do I think that means cars can't do it? Absolutely not. I do think that it will take a lot of learning to get the same out of them. On the other hand, do I also think that replacing every car on the road with a self-driving one right now would result in fewer accidents and fatalities? Yes. If it were illegal to drive and all vehicles were required to be autonomous, I 100% believe that would drop the danger of motor vehicles significantly. Where it gets weird is the concept of fault. Right now, because most motor vehicle accidents are driver error, humans screwing up almost serves as an insurance policy for manufacturers. If fewer people die, but more of them die as a result of manufacturers' software... Yeah I don't know. The future is going to be weird.
- scintill76 11y ago
  Well, I'd say it's just pride to be so confident in the ability of human engineers to make machines outperform humans consistently (at least in the next few years that vendors want to start selling auto-drivers.) I don't think anyone's doubting whether radar+computer can move faster than a human, but we may doubt whether it will make the "right" reaction and if it might make unwanted decisions in some other cases we don't think of until they happen. And that's just the "AI" level, not stupid things like your electronic throttle's stack overflowing and locking in the open position[1]. [1] http://embeddedgurus.com/state-space/2014/02/are-we-shooting-ourselves-in-the-foot-with-stack-overflow/ http://embeddedgurus.com/state-space/2014/02/are-we-shooting...
  - dexterdog 11y ago
    You speak as if humans are really good at making driving decisions today. We're really not.
    - scintill76 11y ago
      I didn't exactly say that. But I think you and others are underestimating our collective skills. We make stupid decisions, get tired, etc., but we manage to recover, workaround others' mistakes, etc. I think people are underestimating how hard it will be to get "the last 10%" of driving skill, that gap between slapping together cruise control+camera+radar+GPS to be able to handle the best-case scenarios, and being able to drive at least as well as the average human in the average-case scenarios. Another thought: what if it takes a generation or longer for self-driving cars to do well with cases like slippery rain or ice? People will stop practicing how to drive at all, until suddenly one day they have to drive in the most dangerous conditions possible. Will the net cost/casualties of accidents still be lower than it is today?
    - ghaff 11y ago
      I suppose it depends on what your standard is and what you're comparing it with. The Insurance Institute for highway safety says there is about 1 fatality per 100 million vehicle miles travelled in the US. http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalityfacts/state-by-state-overview http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit... That still translates into a lot of annual deaths of course (and doesn't capture the many serious injuries not included in that statistic). But humans actually drive a lot of miles with relatively few serious accidents.
- biot 11y ago
  Swifter, yes. Better? I think that depends on the particular circumstance. For example: you look in your rear view mirror and notice an out of control cement truck half a block away heading directly towards you, plowing through vehicles in its path. Would a computer recognize the impending catastrophe and take the initiative, sideswiping a few vehicles in your way in an effort to get out of the situation? I think it's safe to say that every day driving circumstances are already on par with what a human driver could achieve. It's the extenuating circumstances where a human can make the call of "my life is more important than property damage or even risking others lives" where I have my doubts. Those situations are obviously rare, but still quite important.
  - aianus 11y ago
    If they're extremely rare, then they're not important. If you save X lives in every day driving circumstances at the cost of Y (Y << X) lives in bizarre rare circumstances, it's an easy, obvious win.
    - gambiting 11y ago
      Mhmmm no. If you have a machine that is manually operated and kills 1/1000 people due to operator errors, and a machine that is fully automatic but kills 1/10000 people due to software errors or "weird edge cases", it's still the second machine that will never be allowed on the market, because even one instance of it killing anyone will cause it to be fully recalled - doesn't matter that statistically it kills less people than a manually operated one. For automatic machines that number is 0, and automatic cars are unlikely to achieve that.
    - scintill76 11y ago
      That may be the rational response under certain morals, but not everybody is rational always or has the same morals. Who is legally responsible for those Y deaths? Or, even if there was no death but the car broke a traffic law, how is that addressed? If the Y deaths are disproportionately a distinct class of people from X (say, pedestrians, construction workers), are they going to be eligible for some class action lawsuit? Or will it deepen class divides as poor pedestrians become bitter about being hit by self-driving cars carrying rich people? Are the "drivers" going to suffer guilt, wondering if there's something they could have done to prevent an accident? Are issues like this going to cause the law to require a human "standby driver" ready to take over, canceling many of the hoped-for advantages of self-driving cars? If drivers have legal or monetary liability, are they going to want to hand that over to a machine built as cheaply as possible and designed by overworked startup engineers? (perhaps the first generations at least.) Will the cars keep audit records to prove "who" was driving, etc.? Maybe some of this is getting off-topic; I'm just musing on how complex the practical and societal factors could get.
- theklub 11y ago
  What about in bad weather?

scintill76 11y ago

Cool bit of history and I kind of see the analogy, but there's a difference between pulling up and down by cables in a single shaft indoors, and powered rolling on roads outdoors anywhere. Even if the first self-driving cars are on fixed paths too, there are a lot more variables.

CydeWeys 11y ago
But technology in general is a lot more capable now too. Self-driving cars are safer than manual elevators were, and they're a lot more useful to boot, as they get you to anywhere you want to go rather than just to a different floor.

Jedd 11y ago

The story a few days ago about a bicyclist doing a track stand confusing a google car, which in turn reverted to performing a sequence of seemingly excessively safe manoeuvres, generated some fascinating responses. Most particularly an observation that we seem to be stuck in a 'perfect or nothing' mentality - whereas new technologies, even in their own niche, really don't need to solve all problems for all people. I guess because it feels like that attitude directly contradicts the sarcastic adage 'there's never time to do it right, but lots of time to do it over' (and myriad permutations) that generally encourage us to get it right on the first go so we do not have to waste time revisiting. Complaining about the 100% applicability of an otherwise fine analogy seems to, again, be missing the point here. Plus, HN readers are not the target audience for this kind of story. Aside: on a very recent trip to India, spending some time working in a very large, very new office (not retail) building, replete with fully functional lifts, it was fascinating to see each lift had a uniformed attendant that pressed buttons on request.

mschuster91 11y ago
> Aside: on a very recent trip to India, spending some time working in a very large, very new office (not retail) building, replete with fully functional lifts, it was fascinating to see each lift had a uniformed attendant that pressed buttons on request. I think this may be more of a "show off, we're rich and can afford service" attitude. Spoken from the POV of an European only hearing about India when there is another outsourcing, terrorism, gang-rape or caste-based case (like the two poor "untouchables" girls sentenced to being raped by a village court, because their brother had married and run off with a higher-caste girl), I think it's just symptomatic of the culture. Prove me wrong.
- SilasX 11y ago
  Well, since you asked ... It's my understanding that menial labor in India is expected to be cheap and so people wouldn't naturally interpret one extra worker as an extravagant show of wealth. I also read on Quora that Indian parking attendants will do nothing but press a button to generate your parking pass and give it to you, another example of pointless labor that doesn't seem very related to flouting wealth.

yellowapple 11y ago

I'm pretty sure driverless elevators never operated on open roads. I'm also pretty sure driverless elevators don't travel at highway speeds. I dunno, maybe I'm wrong, and this elevator here in my office building goes burning up asphalt and rubber when I'm not around to notice.

prawn 11y ago
You've completely missed the point. See IkmoIkmo's post in this thread.
- yellowapple 11y ago
  Even after seeing IkmoIkmo's post, I'm standing by my own. It does nothing to prove that the drivered->driverless car transition would be anything close to the drivered-driverless elevator transition. Even historical elevators rarely (if ever) had multiple elevators per shaft or a shaft that travelled in more than one dimension; that's a non-starter for the analogy this article tries (and in my opinion fails) to present as if it proves anything.

anti-shill 11y ago

doctors were also under a great deal of suspicion 200 hundred years ago or so...the idea of the story of Frankenstein was taken from the fabric of the society of that day...most people did not trust doctors...anything new is under suspicion.

ghaff 11y ago
While I don't really disagree with the general point, 200 years ago there was minimal understanding of medical sterilization methods and no anesthetics so it's certainly understandable that surgery at least was viewed with, shall we say, suspicion. Given that you would probably die or be seriously incapacitated in some way.

brudgers 11y ago

There's a false analogy here. Driverless elevators raised a concern in regard to the safety of the elevator cab's occupants in what was primarily a matter of private policy on private property. Essentially any public policy decision was about regulating the use of private property within private spaces and any citizen could opt out by taking the stairs. On the other hand there are primary concerns with driverless cars in regard to the safety of non-occupants in the public commons and therefore it is primarily a matter of public policy regulating the use of private property in public spaces. The notion that opting out of public spaces is healthy for citizenship in general seems antithetical to a meaningful concept of citizenship in a liberal polity. There are luddite concerns over self-driving cars. But there's an auto-industry counter tale of "Remembering when Tetra-Ethyl Lead in Gasoline was Considered a Good Thing."

Falkon1313 11y ago
Or the counter tale of "Remember when having all of the vehicles be driven 80+mph by drunk and/or sleep-deprived, distracted people filled with road-rage while trying to eat, put on makeup, text on their cellphone, and interact with passengers at the same time was considered a good thing?" People were outraged over the Vietnam War, in which, 20 years of war, the U.S. lost 58,209 dead. Since 1930, we've lost about 30,000-54,000 each and every year to vehicular deaths. Even now that cars are a bit safer and deaths are down a bit, they're still quite high compared to an event where you expect death, and unlike a war, it doesn't end. If we lost 100+ people per day to plane crashes or a few thousand people a month to terrorism, (or to elevators for that matter), it would be a huge deal. I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a push to get humans out from behind the wheel.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  This so hard, I mentioned this in a post just last week. There's a 9/11 every month on US roads, yet we leave the number 1 safety improvement (computerized traffic) we could make to probably eradicate 90% to private business: pushing driverless cars. Now of course at the end of the day this change has to be driven by businesses, but government can and should help: R&D and prototyping (like a ton of big inventions, e.g. the internet) could and should be funded to a very large extent by the government. Commercialization should be entirely left to businesses, but even here governments can use regulation to introduce new safety standards to inform drivers of the safest options for driving at the very least. And you could even go so far as to employ a model akin to that of many governments which increase taxes on fuel inefficient cars (e.g. SUVs) and decrease them on fuel efficient cars as an environmental measure, but then apply the same on the basis of safety (driverless cars, if they score well on safety which they should over time, being cheaper). You can argue that such a move is big government, you can also argue that's simply the government forcing the market to price in externalities (purely from a financial perspective, road death and injury increasing costs of healthcare on society, decreasing productivity, but also things like congestion and fuel efficiency can be priced in, which driverless cars should do better in) that currently are ignored. It'd still be entirely market driven, but the market reflects reality better. Once it picks up individual states could choose to make certain sections of roads (e.g. one lane) or sections of their city, entirely driverless car only at certain hours of the day, to accelerate the process. And once you go driverless you'll essentially open up what 'public transportation' really means. In a sharing economy of vehicles which need no driver, anyone's car essentially becomes a tiny bus-service. I'd expect the cost of transportation to drop quite significantly.

hyperpallium 11y ago

Planes need 3D steering and trains 1D... yet we have driverless planes and not driverless trains.

gress 11y ago
We do have driverless trains.
- codingdave 11y ago
  And we do not have driverless planes - we have driver-supervised autopilots. EDIT: I guess we have drones, with programmed routes. But again, regulations require supervision in those cases.
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    We sure don't have any drones carrying passengers, so I think your argument stands.
toast0 11y ago
We do have driverless trains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirTrain_(San_Francisco_International_Airport) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirTrain_(San_Francisco_Intern...

nyolfen 11y ago

this reminds me of a truly excellent HOPE X presentation about elevator hacking[0]. one of the most entertaining con panels i've seen, and interesting information on an esoteric topic. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOzrJjdZDRQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOzrJjdZDRQ

codingdave 11y ago

I personally am just missing one thing to give me confidence in self-driving cars - transparency into their algorithms. I don't need to get deep into them, but some general information on how they "think" for accident avoidance would help me. Just as an example, lets assume some debris on the highway. I am sure the self-driving car can avoid it, or stop until there is a clear space to go around it. But what if a human is tailgating? Does the car ignore that? Or does it (facetiously anthropomorphically) think to itself, "Hey, that is a human behind me, tailgating, at 75 mph. Swerving left to avoid this debris would put the human-driven vehicle on a path to collide with it, because the poor sap doesn't have my reaction time. I'd better hit the brakes instead, to communicate the danger." I know that is an edge case, but edge cases are where accidents happen anyway, so I'd like to know what to expect from self-driven cars.

seanmcdirmid 11y ago
Edge cases are where accidents happen because humans suck at them, whereas you can specifically train on them with a computer. The bigger problem, that you allude to, is that the algorithms that actually work are mostly machine learned and therefore very opaque to human inspection.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  One of the big issues with this is how consumers/government will require algorithms to prioritize. i.e. one can imagine that there are accidents with a certain context wherein a driverless car could prevent x amount of people from dying, by killing its own passenger. For example an axle breaks, you can't turn right anymore, only left, and you're coming up on a right turn. You're supposed to turn right and stick to your lane, you can't, you either go straight onto the other lane, or go left. You happen to be driving an SUV and there's two small cars in the lane. If you go straight you hit both of them, and the camera registers 2 young children in each and an adult driving. Given the difference in car sizes, you're likely to survive but also likely to kill at least two kids, perhaps up to 6 people, you'll definitely destroy 2 cars and injure all 6. Or you take a sharp left and drive infront of them straight off the road, you drop down in a cliff and die. In both cases the computer calculates to a large degree of certainty that if either choice is made that it'd go down pretty much like this. Now this is a silly edge case but it's the best I could come up with right away, more plausible ones exists. Anyway the question now becomes, is it okay for cars to be sold that are programmed to prioritize the passenger's life, i.e. killing the maximum amount of innocent people who are not you, estimated between 2 and 6, injuring at least all 6, creating the biggest economic damage and loss of life or livelihood to innocent people (particularly 'innocent' as their car's axle was just fine, yours wasn't). Or would a government require the algorithm to take a different priority, one in which the car's software is programmed to sacrifice the car's owner/passenger, for the sake of a utilitarian calculation? I think the answer is pretty clear what's fair, and that if a computer wasn't part of the equation that an ordinary human would likely not have had the mental fortitude to identify the axle steering issue and all options and choose the best one and that the outcome would be worse than a driverless car. But I also think it's pretty clear that the 'fair' decision would still be highly controversial and scary to imagine and something that'll see quite a lot of debate and pockets of resistance the next few decades.

kazinator 11y ago

Elevators are enclosed and move on rails. The "driver" of an elevator does not even consider obstacles, and couldn't see them if he or she wanted to because the floor and ceiling aren't transparent. Driverless trains operate in many cities around the world. They hardly raise an eyebrow. They are on rails, of course, and those rails are on dedicated, closed tracks out of the way of traffic. The trains just have to coordinate to stay out of each other's way, stop if there is an alarm condition (object or person in track area), and correctly stop at the proper spots at the stations. Not comparable to driving a car.

IkmoIkmo 11y ago
Of course it's not comparable in the sense that driving a car is different from operating an elevator, that's not a point the article aims to address. The point is that at one point we thought we needed to manually operate something out of safety or convenience concerns, that we could actually automate more safely and conveniently. Similarly, the point is, that most people had similar notions a few years ago about cars, and we're now seeing they're similarly untrue.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  You can avoid elevators you can't avoid cars.
- kazinator 11y ago
  Convenience is the main point of automation; the only thing convenient about manual operation is that it provides a convenient job for someone, who finds it inconvenient to be replaced. I don't think there was ever any genuine concern about automation bringing inconvenience (other than maybe some ineffective forms of automation: "strawman automation"). "I mostly like the idea of a machine that lets you just throw in your dirty clothes and punch some buttons, but won't that do away with the sheer convenience of washing clothes by hand?" Doesn't compute.
CyberFonic 11y ago
The you consider the car hacks, like the recent Jeep one and the bugs like the Toyota ECU issues with unintended acceleration. I don't think that the state of software engineering is sufficiently robust to allow it to drive cars.

hoodoof 11y ago

Is this here to sort of suggest that "we got used to driverless elevators so we'll get used to driverless cars". It's perhaps true but a really bad analogy. There's minimal risk of my child being hit and killed by an elevator as a result of a bug in the elevator software.

onion2k 11y ago
If your concern is your child being run over the important question is whether there's a higher risk of your child being hit by an autonomous car or a human-driven car.
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
It's not a technological argument, it's one of human perception. The article talks about how ordinary people like you and me simply didn't view an elevator as something that's safe or convenient without a manual operator, quite like cars today. And that this perception didn't change automatically, it took time and new ideas which didn't have much to do with technology really. As for safety perceptions back then, it's hard to say exactly what they were like. The article alludes they were pretty bad, when elevator operators went on strike the city was badly affected apparently. I can tell you in the US like 20-30 people die each year in elevators, it's pretty minor given the billions of trips but I think we can easily imagine elevators were not quite as reliable 100 years ago when the automatic elevator existed, and that the accident rate was quite a lot higher.

kw71 11y ago

Oh man, this reminds me of the time I met an elevator with an operator. It was in one of the Smithsonian museums - perhaps appropriately the museum of american history? It was only 22 years ago, and I rode the elevator several times just to watch the operator work the strange controls. I wish I'd photographed it.

joeclark77 11y ago
I saw one in the Air and Space Museum just this summer. Your tax dollars at work, America.

joeclark77 11y ago

The change in elevators was from having a professional operator to allowing passengers to push the buttons themselves. Elevators are still "driven" by humans, not robots. The self-driving cars are a whole different ball of wax.

ultimape 11y ago
Interestingly, this exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat_elevator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat_elevator

dogma1138 11y ago

My biggest issue with driverless cars is how they'll handle extremes. You as a driver might choose to hit some one rather than risk hitting a barrier with your wife and baby on in the car. In other cases you might rather drive your car into a barrier or even off a cliff rather than hit a child. Now this isn't about morality or legality you might be morally and legally "wrong" for swaying out of a more dangerous obstacle for your self and the passengers of your car while increasing the likelihood of harming some one else, you might go to jail for that, be found liable in a civil law suit or just feel like shit for the rest of your life but it's still your decision to make. With dirverless cars that's gone the car really has a choice to make and that's in an extreme case in which it cannot avoid an accident some where there will be a algorithm dictating should it prefer to risk the passengers of the car or the 3rd party it might collide with. Even if the car can do a risk calculation and choose the lowest results that still isn't good enough since well it shouldn't be upto the car to make that decision because it cannot count for other factors such as who is in the car and who you might hit. Heck if you as a driver have a choice of swaying left or right to avoid a kid on the road and there's a 200,000 to your right and a 20,000 car to your left you are going to go left every time.

Joeri 11y ago
It takes too long for the deliberative mind to make a decision, because thinking through the situation would take ten seconds or more. The way you describe it is not what happens. In actuality the animal brain will make an intuitive decision, and the rational brain will then invent an explanation for that decision and pretend it was going to make that decision all along. By contrast a driverless car will always make deliberative decisions, so if anything the only morally right decision is to let the algorithm decide, because whatever its process it will still reach the right conclusion more often than a monkey brain evolved to avoid lions trying to decide whether to turn the wheel of a car or not.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  I would disagree if there's enough time to react there's enough time for a choice now it doesn't mean you can have a lengthy internal deliberation but your mind will take the current biases into a fact. There's allot of stuff you are doing without realizing it people for example drive 10-20% slower with a child in their car without doing that intentionally, while men tend to speed up while having an attractive woman as a passenger you will behave differently and make different choices based on the situation you are in. I've been involved in several accidents / near accidents in my life and in all of them i have enough time to react and make a decision, if you can't react and it's not some one really jumping infront of you which means you hit them before you even notice them it means you are driving too fast or otherwise distracted in the 1st place. I don't care about morality i care about the best outcome for me as it see it i don't want my car to sway into incoming traffic because it calculated that it's a lower risk of serious injury than hitting an idiot on a motorbike that decided to do an illegal uturn, That situation is from experience i couldn't way left because i might hit incoming traffic if i would say right i would hit the cars to my right if I would emergency break i would still hit him and most likely cause a chain accident with the car/s behind me so i went on knowing that i would most likely hit him, I've manage to get enough speed and stick close enough to the right to not him but even if i would've in my opinion that would've been the best situation even if it was the 1st or 2nd highest chance for some one to be seriously injured use case. Now I don't remember slowing and thinking hmm can't do left, can't do right, can't break, I remember my eyes running from left to right for a couple of milliseconds and then speeding up instinctively but it was still a decision i made. Now if it was a kid on a side walk I would've swayed right without a doubt even tho i could've gotten hit by a passing car or driving some one else of the road, and if i had my kid in the car? well if mowing down and entire puppy orphanage was the least risky scenario for me i would've done that in a heartbeat.

cconcepts 11y ago

Strange comparison, I've never heard of an elevator, driven or otherwise, run over kids.... Unfortunately I can't come up with a better analogy myself but comparing this to an elevator seems weird.

__alexs 11y ago
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/11802401/Girl5-dies-after-trapping-head-in-lift.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/1180240... Fatal lift accidents are not unheard of.

amazing_jose 11y ago

People still do not accept driverless trains or tubes yet. I remember talking with an AI expert a few years ago. The London's underground had a fully automated driverless prototype in the 70's. And here we are, in 2015 and only a toy driverless system in London (DLR).

elros 11y ago
I'm not sure how much that's the case. For many years now, Paris' lines 1 and 14 have been fully automated. I've been to Toulouse last year and their whole subway system – albeit small – is automated. I'm also pretty sure that the train one takes from Copenhagen's airport to the main train station is fully automated, but I'm not sure about the other lines. All in all, I think the public acceptance issue can be mitigated.

CrLf 11y ago

In tipical geek fashion, this discussion is stuck around matters of safety in driverless cars and how can people be made to trust them. How much better they are, how fascinating the tech is. How driverless cars can replace cars entirely. But do people actually _want_ driverless cars? Will they _ever_ do? A driverless car is not a driverless elevator or train. People never drove their own elevators or trains, they were driven by other people. A car is another matter entirely. People enjoy driving their own cars, some because of the control it gives them, others because of the act of driving itself. If this weren't so, people wouldn't choose to drive their own cars in situations where taxis or other forms of public transportation are clearly superior. I want a self-driving car as much as I want self-drinking beer. I'm not saying self-driving cars are useless. I can certainly see a future with self-driving buses and taxis. However, for that to happen there are a few human obstacles that must be overcome even if the technology becomes perfect. The same obstacles that currently prevent self-driving trains from becoming more widespread: if you need a human to stand watch against vandalism and to react in emergency situations, he might as well be driving the thing, it's cheaper.

gvurrdon 11y ago
Indeed, there's still a case for car ownership even if one doesn't enjoy driving. One reason for preferring a car over a bus or taxi is the ability to transport luggage. I frequently find that I have to undertake round trips of 200-300 miles with a car full of bulky and valuable equipment; the destination is often somewhere that is not easily accessible by public transport, or requires changes between bus, train and taxi, even if I could take the luggage via that means. It might be rather convenient to have the car conduct at least the motorway portion of the driving itself, but access to my own car is pretty much essential in order to do this sort of thing. I suspect that for anyone in business where they must transport goods or tools it will be even more vital.
- prawn 11y ago
  You would just get a van or truck on demand. That's a huge benefit of on demand, self-driving cars - instead of having one car you try to fit into your every need, you get what you need and when you need it. So, something tiny if it's just you and your partner going to dinner. Or a van if you're taking kids and friends to an event. Or a truck if you have to move a sofa. I have a sedan. 90% of the time it's just me in the car. Insane.