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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

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.
- panic 11y ago
  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. Wasn't the DARPA challenge a big driver for autonomous car technology?
  - IkmoIkmo 11y ago
    Absolutely. I think they can do more. The Challenge was relatively (mostly because there wasn't much else) significant 10 years ago and had relatively small ($1m for the winner, per year) attached to them. Not quite the effort we'd expect in relation to the size of the automotive industry, or the damage of externalities of driving that could largely be solved or improved (loss of life, injury, congestion, fuel efficiency, cost of transportation etc). I'm also not aware they continued after 2007. Of course I wouldn't be surprised in the least if all those university teams (e.g. Carnegie Mellon who came in first, or MIT who came in 4th) are either employed at e.g. Google or Apple working on these things right now, or provided or are providing the research to those who are. edit: yeah Google's driverless car project is headed by the Stanford director whose team won the 2005 DARPA challenge.
Natsu 11y ago
My biggest worry would be bad repair work on the sensors or people who know the car is buggy but won't take it in for repairs. You can legislate against that, but people only listen if they get caught. But there are a lot of up sides, too, for driverless cars (no distractions / intoxication / etc.) so I hope we can work things out. But we can debug computer failures in a way we cannot for driver failures, so I do think we'll see some predictable level of social backlash and fear of the unknown, even if it's statistically irrational. I mean, driving is already one of the biggest intentional risks that we underrate every day and I doubt computers are ever going to be perfect.
- greggman 11y ago
  I'm totally for self driving cars but if press myself I can think of harder to solve problems than bad repair. How about hackers who tinker for fun and adjust all the parameters to the edges of tolerance. Drive like a race car mode or drive like a James Bond city chase mode. Or of course cheap and easy slow moving cruise missile bombs. Kind of like anonymity on 4chan what will anonymity on cheap cars do? Send a car full of shit to your ex. Send a car to crash into their house. Use face recognition and phone tracking to run over a specific person. I'm sure some of those aren't likely but computer run cars and drones certainly open new ways for mischief
  - DonHopkins 11y ago
    >Send a car full of shit to your ex. That's an example of a task that a horse drawn carriage could perform better than a driverless car.
  - Natsu 11y ago
    Hackers might be able to do worse, but someone being cheap on repair (either the person or the mechanic) is likely to be a far more common risk (the kind we underestimate).
  - mc808 11y ago
    Also, what will police do when they can't count on almost everyone carrying a state-issued ID card on them at all times? Dollars to doughnuts (no pun intended), carrying ID will become mandatory as driver's licenses become less common.
raverbashing 11y ago
> "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?" Sure, as opposed to what? Not to mention most people don't drive over 80mph usually. Horse carriages did run over people and cause accidents as well. Buses and street cars also cause accidents. I'm all for making traffic safer, but people are stupid, children do run in front of cars, etc People keep up to it because it means freedom. And not everybody can live near public transport or depend on it to work
brudgers 11y ago
I guess I wasn't clear. My concern is over the journalism. I'm ambivalent about the technology. As a matter of public policy I see a lot of handwaving instead of data about the externalized risks of self driving vehicles and disparagement of people with safety concerns instead of reasoned engagement...e.g. there's a factual past about tetra-ethyl lead but not about realized benefits of self driving vehicles. One is history, the other still fantasy.
- msandford 11y ago
  I also love how all the self-driving car enthusiasts talk about the computers as though they're infallible. How does a self driving car deal with a sensor failure? Will people be OK with it? What if I want to take over the car to avoid a wreck, but the car won't let me for some reason? Yes these are corner cases and yes corner cases are by definition rare. But the majority of people who buy term life insurance when they're in their 20s or 30s are at VERY low risk of dying. So why are they being so obviously stupid? Because it's actually not stupid! So just because the odds of dying are small people still buy insurance. I can't see how self driving cars are terribly different. I could die accidentally by my own hand with a small probability, or I could die at the whim of a computer with also a small probability (granted quite possibly smaller). Over the course of my driving career I've had no accidents and narrowly avoided plenty of them. I also know people who have had several. I am already substantially more safe than the worst drivers, and as a result also substantially safer than the average driver because as far as I can tell, it's a bimodal distribution. Either you're an awful driver, or you're above average. Getting the wreck-every-2-years person off the road is a great goal for self-driving cars. But because it's a bimodal distribution (or so I suspect) getting a self-driving car to be better than the average driver doesn't make it better than most, it's just better than the horrible drivers. I'd be much more inclined to think positively about self-driving cars once they're much better than the good driver population rather than being better than the bad driver population.
  - dcherman 11y ago
    The corner cases are extremely important and are only "rare" relative to the overall number of people driving. When you have 100MM cars (not a researched number) on the road, that one in a million chance happens 100 times every day! I've had this same argument at work a few times and although I fully admit the idea of a self driving car may be safer in the future, you will not be seeing me in the first few generations of these cars. I generally don't consider myself a luddite, but this is one area where I will prefer manual control for quite a while.

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.

panic 11y ago
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. Wasn't the DARPA challenge a big driver for autonomous car technology?
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  Absolutely. I think they can do more. The Challenge was relatively (mostly because there wasn't much else) significant 10 years ago and had relatively small ($1m for the winner, per year) attached to them. Not quite the effort we'd expect in relation to the size of the automotive industry, or the damage of externalities of driving that could largely be solved or improved (loss of life, injury, congestion, fuel efficiency, cost of transportation etc). I'm also not aware they continued after 2007. Of course I wouldn't be surprised in the least if all those university teams (e.g. Carnegie Mellon who came in first, or MIT who came in 4th) are either employed at e.g. Google or Apple working on these things right now, or provided or are providing the research to those who are. edit: yeah Google's driverless car project is headed by the Stanford director whose team won the 2005 DARPA challenge.

Natsu 11y ago

My biggest worry would be bad repair work on the sensors or people who know the car is buggy but won't take it in for repairs. You can legislate against that, but people only listen if they get caught. But there are a lot of up sides, too, for driverless cars (no distractions / intoxication / etc.) so I hope we can work things out. But we can debug computer failures in a way we cannot for driver failures, so I do think we'll see some predictable level of social backlash and fear of the unknown, even if it's statistically irrational. I mean, driving is already one of the biggest intentional risks that we underrate every day and I doubt computers are ever going to be perfect.

greggman 11y ago
I'm totally for self driving cars but if press myself I can think of harder to solve problems than bad repair. How about hackers who tinker for fun and adjust all the parameters to the edges of tolerance. Drive like a race car mode or drive like a James Bond city chase mode. Or of course cheap and easy slow moving cruise missile bombs. Kind of like anonymity on 4chan what will anonymity on cheap cars do? Send a car full of shit to your ex. Send a car to crash into their house. Use face recognition and phone tracking to run over a specific person. I'm sure some of those aren't likely but computer run cars and drones certainly open new ways for mischief
- DonHopkins 11y ago
  >Send a car full of shit to your ex. That's an example of a task that a horse drawn carriage could perform better than a driverless car.
- Natsu 11y ago
  Hackers might be able to do worse, but someone being cheap on repair (either the person or the mechanic) is likely to be a far more common risk (the kind we underestimate).
- mc808 11y ago
  Also, what will police do when they can't count on almost everyone carrying a state-issued ID card on them at all times? Dollars to doughnuts (no pun intended), carrying ID will become mandatory as driver's licenses become less common.

raverbashing 11y ago

> "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?" Sure, as opposed to what? Not to mention most people don't drive over 80mph usually. Horse carriages did run over people and cause accidents as well. Buses and street cars also cause accidents. I'm all for making traffic safer, but people are stupid, children do run in front of cars, etc People keep up to it because it means freedom. And not everybody can live near public transport or depend on it to work

brudgers 11y ago

I guess I wasn't clear. My concern is over the journalism. I'm ambivalent about the technology. As a matter of public policy I see a lot of handwaving instead of data about the externalized risks of self driving vehicles and disparagement of people with safety concerns instead of reasoned engagement...e.g. there's a factual past about tetra-ethyl lead but not about realized benefits of self driving vehicles. One is history, the other still fantasy.

msandford 11y ago
I also love how all the self-driving car enthusiasts talk about the computers as though they're infallible. How does a self driving car deal with a sensor failure? Will people be OK with it? What if I want to take over the car to avoid a wreck, but the car won't let me for some reason? Yes these are corner cases and yes corner cases are by definition rare. But the majority of people who buy term life insurance when they're in their 20s or 30s are at VERY low risk of dying. So why are they being so obviously stupid? Because it's actually not stupid! So just because the odds of dying are small people still buy insurance. I can't see how self driving cars are terribly different. I could die accidentally by my own hand with a small probability, or I could die at the whim of a computer with also a small probability (granted quite possibly smaller). Over the course of my driving career I've had no accidents and narrowly avoided plenty of them. I also know people who have had several. I am already substantially more safe than the worst drivers, and as a result also substantially safer than the average driver because as far as I can tell, it's a bimodal distribution. Either you're an awful driver, or you're above average. Getting the wreck-every-2-years person off the road is a great goal for self-driving cars. But because it's a bimodal distribution (or so I suspect) getting a self-driving car to be better than the average driver doesn't make it better than most, it's just better than the horrible drivers. I'd be much more inclined to think positively about self-driving cars once they're much better than the good driver population rather than being better than the bad driver population.
- dcherman 11y ago
  The corner cases are extremely important and are only "rare" relative to the overall number of people driving. When you have 100MM cars (not a researched number) on the road, that one in a million chance happens 100 times every day! I've had this same argument at work a few times and although I fully admit the idea of a self driving car may be safer in the future, you will not be seeing me in the first few generations of these cars. I generally don't consider myself a luddite, but this is one area where I will prefer manual control for quite a while.