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Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

62 points by gwintrob 11y ago

seibelj 11y ago
I'm a big self-driving cars skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art, and it's full of edge cases. So many edge cases. I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...
- zaphar 11y ago
  A huge number of those edge cases are caused by other Human drivers though. The superior solution is to get rid of the human driver. Safety goes way higher and things like highway congestion go way lower. It's clearly superior. It's only in the near term that it gets a little dicy.
- logicallee 11y ago
  except driverless cars have been driving around in California for a couple of years thanks to Google (and the fact that it's legal). Soon the term "driverless" will be like "horseless". Why would you keep your eyes on the road when a machine will do it for you, and with more awareness of its surroundings at 360 degrees, and the ability to judge the position and trajectory/velocity of any object to within a couple of m/s instantly, or react to anything in milliseconds? Don't kid yourself: humans aren't some kind of perfect driver. A bit of sleepiness, a text message, a tiny distraction in the car, and their responsiveness plummets.
  - joeclark77 11y ago
    Cars give you the freedom to go anywhere, any time, without having to file a plan or ask permission from the government or from Google. You want to give up that freedom in exchange for a little safety? Go ahead, but a lot of people will never be converted.
    - logicallee 11y ago
      joe you did not give this serious thought. Cars are highly regulated, you need to get a state-issues driver's liccense just to drive one, they need to be registered, etc. I was going to just reply with "Horses give you the freedom to go anywhere, any time, without having to build roads or get a drivers ..." and then I'm like, wait a minute.... there's all sorts of stuff you need for a car...
      - joeclark77 11y ago
        Not a reasonable comparison. You might as well have said "you have to BUY a car, so it's not FREE". Yes, you have to buy, register the car, and learn how to use it, and obey the laws of the road. But they allow a kind of mobility that is impossible for Europeans and other jelly-kneed metrosexual weenies to enjoy. Owners of cars don't have to organize our lives around where train stations are located or anyone else's schedule. Driverless cars, on the other hand, aim to "tame" the automobile and make it a kind of mini-train, with someone else deciding where you may go and how you may get there. Google is already creepy enough without handing over your freedom (and privacy) of movement to their computer.
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Or until there is a critical mass that people adapt their expectations of how many drivers violate minor road rules, like running a red light or running through a crosswalk. Also, even if self-driving cars aren't perfect, from the data we have so far, they're still several orders of magnitudes better than regular cars. If every self-driven car today were replaced with a regular car, we would see more crashes, not fewer, overall.
- ghaff 11y ago
  Pretty much. All the summon-a-robocar with an app in 5-10 years predictions seem to merrily ignore all the edge cases having to do with weather, direct driver interactions (e.g waving someone out into traffic), construction, parking in unmarked spaces, etc., etc. I have little doubt that autonomous highway driving for example is both achievable and desirable but a lot of folks extrapolate that to the more general case which is much, much harder.
  - waterlesscloud 11y ago
    The people developing Google's autonomous car say it will be available for consumers in four years.
- melling 11y ago
  I think you're making an invalid claim. If half the cars were self-driving and we had just as many accidents, we're still better off because half the people would be freed from driving. Personally, I would guess that there would still be a reduction in accidents, thus fewer deaths and injuries.
- koenigdavidmj 11y ago
  You are still not applying equal measures to the Google car and a hypothetical human driver. Your standard for humans is the current rate of accidents. Your standard for the Google car is absolute perfection. Not being in an accident. Ever. Even one caused by inattentive drivers. Otherwise, they're not ready.
- teraflop 11y ago
  > Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. You should be skeptical of drawing conclusions based on a news article's two-word excerpt of a presumably much longer comment. I seriously doubt Google actually thinks their cars will only be usable if human drivers massively change their behavior. It sounds more like an off-hand joke than a serious description of their product strategy. > I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming... Ten years ago, the best autonomous vehicles in the world could barely make it through an empty desert test track. Five years ago, they could do a reasonable job of navigating urban areas that were closed off from normal traffic. Today they drive about 50 miles per day, per car on public roads with a safety driver. It's likely not much longer before the safety drivers are considered unnecessary. If you want to get a skewed, unreliable view of how this technology is developing, feel free to keep listening to "armchair futurists". But if you actually look at what the engineers who are working on it say, and what they've actually achieved, it's clear that steady progress is being made.
- x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
  I'm a big human-driven car skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that accident rates won't go down until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art and it's full of edge cases. Can we expect all humans to be driving artists?
- themodelplumber 11y ago
  How about something like this? You can opt to pay (e.g. hit a payment button inside your car) to enable manual, hands-on driving on a per-roadway basis. Otherwise you let the car drive in what it sees as the most efficient way, and pay nothing. When traffic problems are at their worst, you pay the most. Conversely, on an open road, no charges apply. In addition, some multiplier involving driving conditions (rain, wind, proximity to other vehicles) and driver stats (driving record) comes into play.
- fizzbatter 11y ago
  > I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming... I'm quite surprised that you can be a skeptic on the concept as a whole. Being skeptical about the given timeframes is perfectly reasonable (and probably correct), but humans do so, so many things terribly. We have automated away so many tasks in our world, both for efficiency and safety, that i can't even see an argument to counter that. To extend that further then, why shouldn't we want human drivers off the roads asap? It's a dangerous act that, frankly, many people aren't qualified for. Self-driving cars have so much potential behind them, that being a "skeptic" seems quite confusing to me. Just because it's a difficult problem, does not warrant giving up. The safety benefits alone, are well, well worth it.
  - joeclark77 11y ago
    Cars give us freedom. The reason that technocrats love "self-driving" cars is the same reason they love trains of all kinds: it means that "the system" controls who may go where, and when. A lot of us are skeptical of self-driving cars because a lot of their advocates want the next step to be banning private citizens from driving, which you've just confirmed, thanks.
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    - linkregister 11y ago
      Given the current electorate in the United States, I think it would be nigh-impossible that human-driving cars would be banned. Notwithstanding the fact that the cost to equip every vehicle on the road with self-driving technology would be wildly expensive in the short term, Americans respond vigorously to threats to freedoms that are ingrained in their culture (visceral freedoms, not freedoms that are less tangible, such as electronic privacy). Examples: firearms, tobacco, alcohol. I could foresee this happening in one or two Western European countries, though I would expect Germany and Central Europe to hold out (the German electorate resists regulation that impedes the speed and power of their automobiles). An aside: how would a car being self-driving affect the owner's ability to direct it wherever he or she pleases?
- baddox 11y ago
  I can appreciate the claim that driving is an art, full of edge cases. But that claim on its own conceals the reality that humans are extremely bad at it. A ludicrous number of people die in automobile accidents. While it may be a long while before self-driving cars can match the prowess of an excellent driver, much less a professional one, I doubt we're far off from being able to exceed the ability of the average driver.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Define ludicrously bad. Yes there are a lot of accidents and fatalities every year. However the rate of fatalities in the U.S. Is 1 per 100 million miles driven which isn't intuitively a ridiculously high rate.
    - baddox 11y ago
      I don't think that fatalities per miles driven is that useful of a statistic, except for the other conversation of how to enable people to drive fewer miles (which I certainly approve of). It's still just abysmal that 30,000 people each year die doing something extremely routine that is virtually required to live in most areas. That's something like a quarter of US deaths from accidents/injuries. And, of course, there are presumably far more injuries than there are deaths, plus property damage.
- revelation 11y ago
  You should keep reading articles, because you clearly didn't read this one. The Google car is perfectly safe in the presence of morons.
jerf 11y ago
'“It’s always going to follow the rules, I mean, almost to a point where human drivers who get in the car and are like ‘Why is the car doing that?’” said Tom Supple, a Google safety driver during a recent test drive on the streets near Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.' This is a drum that, like privacy and encryption, we techies need to start banging hard before it's too late. The fact that laws are fundamentally limited by our abilities to enforce them, and that laws are fundamentally written to be enforced by humans with some discretion, is such a deep assumption for us that we don't see it. We irrationally tend to conceive of a law that says "It is a felony to wear your hair in a ponytail on a Tuesday" as an absolute, even though what it really means is "If a police officer spots you with your hair in a ponytail on a Tuesday, and by their discretion arrests you, and at the discretion of a prosecutor charges you, who at the discretion of a judge and jury convicts you, you will be guilty of a felony." All laws actually say that, but that's not how we humans speak or conceptualize them. Also note the importance of a human even spotting the violation in the first place. So, naturally, when we get technology that can rigidly enforce law, we don't program them with the "real" law, we program them with the text of the law. But the truth is, the text was never passed as a law. When the law was deliberated, everybody was really deliberating the version that involves all the human discretion, and prior to the introduction of computers, the law that was really enforced was the one with all the human discretion. A rigidly-enforced-by-computer law is a fundamentally different law, in the most concrete way possible; actions that you would never have been penalized by the human law result in immediate penalty in the computer world. There's no more concrete way to prove the point that it is a fundamentally different law. We CAN NOT simply translate the text of the law into computer programs. If we are going to do computer enforcement of laws (and I'm going to drop the question of whether that's a good idea, feel free to debate in replies), we must write new law. By that, I do not merely mean that society has an obligation to write new laws, but that the very act of programming a law is writing a new law into existence, one never deliberated by the processes of democracy. We literally can not simply translate laws into programs. It is impossible. The result is not the same law.
- qntty 11y ago
  I think you're onto something that a lot of people don't understand or don't buy into
gregwtmtno 11y ago
I think the accident statistics are a little misleading because as far as I'm aware (and please correct me if I'm wrong) Google only operates its driverless cars in good weather conditions. Not that Google doesn't have good reasons for doing so, but the safety of these vehicles might look different if they were operated in the rain and snow.
- ghaff 11y ago
  And mostly on highways.
- Flimm 11y ago
  They also only work in areas where Google already has "very detailed maps of the roads and terrain", kind of like invisible train tracks. ( http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/how-google-self-driving-car-works http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel... )
  - teraflop 11y ago
    Bear in mind that the phrase you quoted is from a third party, not someone who actually works on the project. And it's from four years ago.
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- beambot 11y ago
  Or Google could just chose not operate their cars in rain and snow -- ever, or at least not until they're sufficiently safe. The safety strawman you suggest (that safety in rain and snow is somehow necessary) doesn't need to exist, nor do the cars need to be a panacea to provide incredible value.
civilian 11y ago
Heh, google is training cars to drive like grandmas. > But the technology, like Google’s car, drives by the book. It leaves what is considered the safe distance between itself and the car ahead. This also happens to be enough space for a car in an adjoining lane to squeeze into, and, Mr. Windsor said, they often tried. Yeah. We just don't have the infrastructure in major cities for all of us to drive safely. We've been slowly crowding our roads over the last century and we're at the point where most people are used to driving with a 1 or 2 second rule. Which isn't good, but it's how we do things. Now I wonder if google-driven cars would actually be less efficient for LA. Sure there wouldn't be any traffic-slowing accidents, but there'd be 50% less volume traveling 20mph slower.
- rlpb 11y ago
  I'm not convinced that leaving shorter gaps between cars increases volume. Instead it creates waves of drivers slamming on the brakes because they are unable to react gradually, creating congestion instead. If we all left bigger gaps, we'd all be able to drive faster, increasing throughput (on highways, at least). > Now I wonder if google-driven cars would actually be less efficient for LA. Sure there wouldn't be any traffic-slowing accidents, but there'd be 50% less volume traveling 20mph slower. Self-driving cars in a line could detect and link up with each other, sharing sensor data on obstacles up ahead. In the end, this has the potential to safely reduce the gaps between cars at higher speeds and thus actually increase throughput, since the congestion issues with human drivers reacting separately would not apply.
  - duaneb 11y ago
    > Self-driving cars in a line could detect and link up with each other, sharing sensor data on obstacles up ahead. In the end, this has the potential to safely reduce the gaps between cars at higher speeds and thus actually increase throughput, since the congestion issues with human drivers reacting separately would not apply. Isn't this already true to a certain extent with map software? It automatically directs you to the fastest route—congestion relief is, in a way, built-in to open infrastructure. It seems to be the topology of the highway system would have a much larger impact on congestion than the drivers themselves. Among other things, it's going to be a long time (hopefully never. IMHO) before human drivers are off the road.
makeitsuckless 11y ago
Being a cyclist in Amsterdam, the lack of driver eye contact and understanding of body language is what worries me about the application of self driving cars. Amsterdam traffic is a chaos in which pedestrians and cyclists mix with cars, and the former two frequently (some would say always) ignore the rules. Not out of some anarchistic impulse, but for mutual convenience. Especially with cyclists, for whom coming to a full stop and accelerating again is both "expensive" and risky (accelerating cyclists tend to swerve), relying on eye contact and mutual understanding of intent rather than following the rules of the road by the book results in safer and more fluent traffic. I imagine a current generation Google self-driving car in Amsterdam coming to a grinding halt and not being able to move backwards or forwards. But most of all, as a cyclist I wouldn't feel safe sharing the road with "drivers" with whom communicating via eye contact and body language are impossible. To me, self-driving cars and liveable, human-scale cities are mutually exclusive, and I very much prefer the latter.
- Shorel 11y ago
  Until you actually live surrounded by self-driving cars, your speculation is nothing more than that. As someone who also commutes by bicycle, I would vastly prefer predictable, 100% consistent car behavior.
  - ortusdux 11y ago
    I wonder if a few e-ink displays on the outside of the cars could be used to smooth out these interactions by conveying actions and intents in plain English. I would be comforting to see 'Stopped, waiting for bicyclist to pass' flash up on the front display when I bike up to a 4-way stop.
  - linkregister 11y ago
    Absolutely. All of my near-misses are due to unpredictable behavior on my part (I sometimes make mistakes; and I'm improving) or unpredictable driving. I include driver rage in the unpredictable driving category.
- lumberjack 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
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joeclark77 11y ago
And here come the technocrats ready to say "let's ban driving and make driverless cars mandatory"...
sschueller 11y ago
Two driverless cars are about to crash into each other on a tight mountain pass (maybe a bug that couldn't for see the accident). There are 3 possible outcomes: 1. Car 1 and Car 2 crash into each other killing all passengers. 2. Car 1 with 3 passengers drives of the cliff, car 2 with 1 passenger survives. 3. Car 2 with 1 passenger drives of the the cliff, car 1 with 3 passengers survives. The cars can communicate with each other. The logical resolution would be to drive the car with the least passengers off the cliff to save as many lives as mathematically possible. I don't know how I would feel about my car killing me although logically I wouldn't have a chance of survival anyways.
- dman 11y ago
  What do you think happens in this situation currently with human drivers? Are we holding machines to different standards than we hold each other?
  - scrabble 11y ago
    Yes. Not too long ago I had the opportunity to have a surgery performed by a robot controlled by a human surgeon. My wife was adamantly against it since there had been accidents previously with the robot other places in the world. Overall, the rate of incident was lower than the rate of incident for human surgeons, but to her that was not the important point. There are people who will definitely hold machines to higher standards, and if they don't meet them, to them they are clearly inferior.
    - bholzer 11y ago
      Surgical robots do not perform as well as traditional instruments. I've talked to a few hospital executives and all have said that in most cases, these robots only cost them money and decrease the quality of the surgical procedures. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2526934/Surgery-performed-robots-no-successful-using-humans-cost-LOT-more.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2526934/Surge...
      - 11y ago
jasonjei 11y ago
I think it would be great if at some point some lanes of the freeways are dedicated for autonomous vehicles connected to a city or state-controlled system with some fallback. I suspect there is a fallacy somewhere in my idea, but I think the first step is to make some lanes only for autonomous vehicles on the freeway, and eventually all lanes as autonomous vehicles become more commonplace. I'm not a civil engineer, but I suspect this could eliminate a lot of traffic if all the cars are placed in the most optimal lane, assuming all vehicles on highways are autonomous.
pdq 11y ago
What happens with these driverless cars at four way stop signs? With humans, generally someone waves to the other driver signaling either to take right of way or that they will go first. I presume the car doesn't understand hand gestures, so does it just start nudging into the intersection and stop if another car goes ahead?
- kevinnk 11y ago
  Actually, it can already understand some hand gestures [1]. Compared to all the other things an autonomous car has to deal with, gesture recognition doesn't seem like such a stretch. [1] http://road.cc/content/news/150448-google-patent-reveals-how-driverless-cars-recognise-hand-signals http://road.cc/content/news/150448-google-patent-reveals-how...
sea2summit 11y ago
Step 1. Release autonomous cars to market with lower incidence rate than humans. Step 2. Sit back and watch humans cause accidents; insurance for human drivers goes thru the roof. Step 3. ??? Step 4. Skynet.
- lumberjack 11y ago
  Serious question. Is computer vision so advanced that it is already so obvious that self-driving cars will definitely be safer? Yes it's a computer which is more reliable at always outputting the same answer than a human but it's not a simple application this one. As far as I know most robots get confused at times just as humans do. I think eventually they will be, because they can learn and share their knowledge and keep learning about all the real world exceptions without limitation unlike humans. But right now or when they are deployed en mass. I'm not sure they will DEFINITELY without exception be safer. And I know there exists statistics about accident rates per kilometre driven but aren't those only a few cars driving previously selected and well documented routes?
brownbat 11y ago
Driving can easily end up as a competitive game where safety is traded against efficiency. The big versions of this are terrible, assholes weaving in and out of lanes at +20 mph. But it happens in little ways too, the rolling stops at 4-ways from the article are probably a tiny example. Someone should host a programming competition where every entrant writes the AI for a fleet of simulated driverless cars, each with random starting and ending destinations. Collisions mean you instantly lose. Your score is based on how quickly you can get through traffic generated by all the other AIs. I think the results would tell us a lot about where things are heading, or maybe where they should or shouldn't be allowed to go. (Of course, if you could control the whole fleet, all the cars could just ignore all the rules and dodge each other while tearing through intersections.)
charles2013 11y ago
> “The real problem is that the car is too safe...” no. this statement is fallacious, and i believe it is dangerously misleading. it sounds like something out of the mouth of a corporate attorney, and not someone who cares about being actually safe. out here in the real world driving laws are more like guidelines. my take on the situation is the car knows and follows all of the written rules of the road, but not the unwritten ones. kind of like a 16-year-old kid who's just aced his driving exam, but doesn't yet have a feel for driving. every so often he encounters a situation not covered by the law or the driver's handbook, and he's forced to choose the safest course of action on his own. i live near google in mountain view, and (usually) encounter the self-driving SUVs many times a day, either biking around town or as they drive past my residence. in hundreds of encounters i've only witnessed one potentially dangerous incident (many months ago) involving a self-driving SUV. it wasn't clear to me who/what was at fault. whilst making a protected left turn onto west el camino real from el monte ave [0], a self-driving SUV came to a complete stop in the middle of the intersection, causing the vehicles behind it to halt and lay on their horns. since the incident occurred a few yards behind me (over my left shoulder) i don't know exactly what precipitated the incident, but reflecting on the experience has caused me to recognize some potential flaws in this generation of self-driving vehicles. that intersection's turning lanes are delineated by dotted lines. this isn't unique, but it's interesting to me because dotted lines can sometimes be more difficult to see than solid lines (especially in certain lighting or weather conditions, or when there are debris on the road). for example, i remember lanes on stretches of 101-N marked with faded dotted lines and no reflector dots. these lanes were impossible to see under wet conditions and the sun's reflection. drivers were forced to either guess where the lanes might be, or to follow other vehicles, but we could still proceed safely. how would a driverless vehicle respond? further, some human drivers completely ignore lane markers even when they are perfectly visible. in india and some central american countries, for example, driving conditions are like the polar opposite of suburban SV: lawless. yet in my experience, driving there is not without rules; it's just that the rules are unwritten. and though this is an extreme analogy, it led me to an interesting question: if self-driving vehicles can't safely navigate the crowded streets of mumbai, how comfortable are we giving them free reign in the US? or perhaps should we exclude them from certain roads until they can? the main point i'm trying to make is this: the current generation of self-driving vehicles has not developed (whether by feature or flaw) the level of intuition of an experienced and safe driver. they are quite literally like student drivers whose instructors have a foot above the brake and a hand on the steering wheel. and while it's conceptually possible to create safer roads by eliminating human error, i'm not confident replacing humans with a bunch of robotic student drivers is the best solution. i'd feel much safer as a passenger in a vehicle driven by someone or something that's A) primarily concerned with my safety (and not corporate liability), and B) knows what to do in unexpected or unpredictable circumstances. [0] satellite image of the intersection; pin at approximate incident site: https://www.google.com/maps/place/1786+El+Camino+Real,+Mountain+View,+CA+94040/@37.3920222,-122.095255,191m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x808fb0c7fbe6c66b:0x260bc9681a0e197 https://www.google.com/maps/place/1786+El+Camino+Real,+Mount...

62 points by gwintrob 11y ago

I'm a big self-driving cars skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art, and it's full of edge cases. So many edge cases. I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...

zaphar 11y ago
A huge number of those edge cases are caused by other Human drivers though. The superior solution is to get rid of the human driver. Safety goes way higher and things like highway congestion go way lower. It's clearly superior. It's only in the near term that it gets a little dicy.
logicallee 11y ago
except driverless cars have been driving around in California for a couple of years thanks to Google (and the fact that it's legal). Soon the term "driverless" will be like "horseless". Why would you keep your eyes on the road when a machine will do it for you, and with more awareness of its surroundings at 360 degrees, and the ability to judge the position and trajectory/velocity of any object to within a couple of m/s instantly, or react to anything in milliseconds? Don't kid yourself: humans aren't some kind of perfect driver. A bit of sleepiness, a text message, a tiny distraction in the car, and their responsiveness plummets.
- joeclark77 11y ago
  Cars give you the freedom to go anywhere, any time, without having to file a plan or ask permission from the government or from Google. You want to give up that freedom in exchange for a little safety? Go ahead, but a lot of people will never be converted.
  - logicallee 11y ago
    joe you did not give this serious thought. Cars are highly regulated, you need to get a state-issues driver's liccense just to drive one, they need to be registered, etc. I was going to just reply with "Horses give you the freedom to go anywhere, any time, without having to build roads or get a drivers ..." and then I'm like, wait a minute.... there's all sorts of stuff you need for a car...
    - joeclark77 11y ago
      Not a reasonable comparison. You might as well have said "you have to BUY a car, so it's not FREE". Yes, you have to buy, register the car, and learn how to use it, and obey the laws of the road. But they allow a kind of mobility that is impossible for Europeans and other jelly-kneed metrosexual weenies to enjoy. Owners of cars don't have to organize our lives around where train stations are located or anyone else's schedule. Driverless cars, on the other hand, aim to "tame" the automobile and make it a kind of mini-train, with someone else deciding where you may go and how you may get there. Google is already creepy enough without handing over your freedom (and privacy) of movement to their computer.
chimeracoder 11y ago
> Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Or until there is a critical mass that people adapt their expectations of how many drivers violate minor road rules, like running a red light or running through a crosswalk. Also, even if self-driving cars aren't perfect, from the data we have so far, they're still several orders of magnitudes better than regular cars. If every self-driven car today were replaced with a regular car, we would see more crashes, not fewer, overall.
ghaff 11y ago
Pretty much. All the summon-a-robocar with an app in 5-10 years predictions seem to merrily ignore all the edge cases having to do with weather, direct driver interactions (e.g waving someone out into traffic), construction, parking in unmarked spaces, etc., etc. I have little doubt that autonomous highway driving for example is both achievable and desirable but a lot of folks extrapolate that to the more general case which is much, much harder.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  The people developing Google's autonomous car say it will be available for consumers in four years.
melling 11y ago
I think you're making an invalid claim. If half the cars were self-driving and we had just as many accidents, we're still better off because half the people would be freed from driving. Personally, I would guess that there would still be a reduction in accidents, thus fewer deaths and injuries.
koenigdavidmj 11y ago
You are still not applying equal measures to the Google car and a hypothetical human driver. Your standard for humans is the current rate of accidents. Your standard for the Google car is absolute perfection. Not being in an accident. Ever. Even one caused by inattentive drivers. Otherwise, they're not ready.
teraflop 11y ago
> Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. You should be skeptical of drawing conclusions based on a news article's two-word excerpt of a presumably much longer comment. I seriously doubt Google actually thinks their cars will only be usable if human drivers massively change their behavior. It sounds more like an off-hand joke than a serious description of their product strategy. > I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming... Ten years ago, the best autonomous vehicles in the world could barely make it through an empty desert test track. Five years ago, they could do a reasonable job of navigating urban areas that were closed off from normal traffic. Today they drive about 50 miles per day, per car on public roads with a safety driver. It's likely not much longer before the safety drivers are considered unnecessary. If you want to get a skewed, unreliable view of how this technology is developing, feel free to keep listening to "armchair futurists". But if you actually look at what the engineers who are working on it say, and what they've actually achieved, it's clear that steady progress is being made.
x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
I'm a big human-driven car skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that accident rates won't go down until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art and it's full of edge cases. Can we expect all humans to be driving artists?
themodelplumber 11y ago
How about something like this? You can opt to pay (e.g. hit a payment button inside your car) to enable manual, hands-on driving on a per-roadway basis. Otherwise you let the car drive in what it sees as the most efficient way, and pay nothing. When traffic problems are at their worst, you pay the most. Conversely, on an open road, no charges apply. In addition, some multiplier involving driving conditions (rain, wind, proximity to other vehicles) and driver stats (driving record) comes into play.
fizzbatter 11y ago
> I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming... I'm quite surprised that you can be a skeptic on the concept as a whole. Being skeptical about the given timeframes is perfectly reasonable (and probably correct), but humans do so, so many things terribly. We have automated away so many tasks in our world, both for efficiency and safety, that i can't even see an argument to counter that. To extend that further then, why shouldn't we want human drivers off the roads asap? It's a dangerous act that, frankly, many people aren't qualified for. Self-driving cars have so much potential behind them, that being a "skeptic" seems quite confusing to me. Just because it's a difficult problem, does not warrant giving up. The safety benefits alone, are well, well worth it.
- joeclark77 11y ago
  Cars give us freedom. The reason that technocrats love "self-driving" cars is the same reason they love trains of all kinds: it means that "the system" controls who may go where, and when. A lot of us are skeptical of self-driving cars because a lot of their advocates want the next step to be banning private citizens from driving, which you've just confirmed, thanks.
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  - linkregister 11y ago
    Given the current electorate in the United States, I think it would be nigh-impossible that human-driving cars would be banned. Notwithstanding the fact that the cost to equip every vehicle on the road with self-driving technology would be wildly expensive in the short term, Americans respond vigorously to threats to freedoms that are ingrained in their culture (visceral freedoms, not freedoms that are less tangible, such as electronic privacy). Examples: firearms, tobacco, alcohol. I could foresee this happening in one or two Western European countries, though I would expect Germany and Central Europe to hold out (the German electorate resists regulation that impedes the speed and power of their automobiles). An aside: how would a car being self-driving affect the owner's ability to direct it wherever he or she pleases?
baddox 11y ago
I can appreciate the claim that driving is an art, full of edge cases. But that claim on its own conceals the reality that humans are extremely bad at it. A ludicrous number of people die in automobile accidents. While it may be a long while before self-driving cars can match the prowess of an excellent driver, much less a professional one, I doubt we're far off from being able to exceed the ability of the average driver.
- ghaff 11y ago
  Define ludicrously bad. Yes there are a lot of accidents and fatalities every year. However the rate of fatalities in the U.S. Is 1 per 100 million miles driven which isn't intuitively a ridiculously high rate.
  - baddox 11y ago
    I don't think that fatalities per miles driven is that useful of a statistic, except for the other conversation of how to enable people to drive fewer miles (which I certainly approve of). It's still just abysmal that 30,000 people each year die doing something extremely routine that is virtually required to live in most areas. That's something like a quarter of US deaths from accidents/injuries. And, of course, there are presumably far more injuries than there are deaths, plus property damage.
revelation 11y ago
You should keep reading articles, because you clearly didn't read this one. The Google car is perfectly safe in the presence of morons.

jerf 11y ago

'“It’s always going to follow the rules, I mean, almost to a point where human drivers who get in the car and are like ‘Why is the car doing that?’” said Tom Supple, a Google safety driver during a recent test drive on the streets near Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.' This is a drum that, like privacy and encryption, we techies need to start banging hard before it's too late. The fact that laws are fundamentally limited by our abilities to enforce them, and that laws are fundamentally written to be enforced by humans with some discretion, is such a deep assumption for us that we don't see it. We irrationally tend to conceive of a law that says "It is a felony to wear your hair in a ponytail on a Tuesday" as an absolute, even though what it really means is "If a police officer spots you with your hair in a ponytail on a Tuesday, and by their discretion arrests you, and at the discretion of a prosecutor charges you, who at the discretion of a judge and jury convicts you, you will be guilty of a felony." All laws actually say that, but that's not how we humans speak or conceptualize them. Also note the importance of a human even spotting the violation in the first place. So, naturally, when we get technology that can rigidly enforce law, we don't program them with the "real" law, we program them with the text of the law. But the truth is, the text was never passed as a law. When the law was deliberated, everybody was really deliberating the version that involves all the human discretion, and prior to the introduction of computers, the law that was really enforced was the one with all the human discretion. A rigidly-enforced-by-computer law is a fundamentally different law, in the most concrete way possible; actions that you would never have been penalized by the human law result in immediate penalty in the computer world. There's no more concrete way to prove the point that it is a fundamentally different law. We CAN NOT simply translate the text of the law into computer programs. If we are going to do computer enforcement of laws (and I'm going to drop the question of whether that's a good idea, feel free to debate in replies), we must write new law. By that, I do not merely mean that society has an obligation to write new laws, but that the very act of programming a law is writing a new law into existence, one never deliberated by the processes of democracy. We literally can not simply translate laws into programs. It is impossible. The result is not the same law.

qntty 11y ago
I think you're onto something that a lot of people don't understand or don't buy into

gregwtmtno 11y ago

I think the accident statistics are a little misleading because as far as I'm aware (and please correct me if I'm wrong) Google only operates its driverless cars in good weather conditions. Not that Google doesn't have good reasons for doing so, but the safety of these vehicles might look different if they were operated in the rain and snow.

ghaff 11y ago
And mostly on highways.
Flimm 11y ago
They also only work in areas where Google already has "very detailed maps of the roads and terrain", kind of like invisible train tracks. ( http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/how-google-self-driving-car-works http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel... )
- teraflop 11y ago
  Bear in mind that the phrase you quoted is from a third party, not someone who actually works on the project. And it's from four years ago.
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beambot 11y ago
Or Google could just chose not operate their cars in rain and snow -- ever, or at least not until they're sufficiently safe. The safety strawman you suggest (that safety in rain and snow is somehow necessary) doesn't need to exist, nor do the cars need to be a panacea to provide incredible value.

civilian 11y ago

Heh, google is training cars to drive like grandmas. > But the technology, like Google’s car, drives by the book. It leaves what is considered the safe distance between itself and the car ahead. This also happens to be enough space for a car in an adjoining lane to squeeze into, and, Mr. Windsor said, they often tried. Yeah. We just don't have the infrastructure in major cities for all of us to drive safely. We've been slowly crowding our roads over the last century and we're at the point where most people are used to driving with a 1 or 2 second rule. Which isn't good, but it's how we do things. Now I wonder if google-driven cars would actually be less efficient for LA. Sure there wouldn't be any traffic-slowing accidents, but there'd be 50% less volume traveling 20mph slower.

rlpb 11y ago
I'm not convinced that leaving shorter gaps between cars increases volume. Instead it creates waves of drivers slamming on the brakes because they are unable to react gradually, creating congestion instead. If we all left bigger gaps, we'd all be able to drive faster, increasing throughput (on highways, at least). > Now I wonder if google-driven cars would actually be less efficient for LA. Sure there wouldn't be any traffic-slowing accidents, but there'd be 50% less volume traveling 20mph slower. Self-driving cars in a line could detect and link up with each other, sharing sensor data on obstacles up ahead. In the end, this has the potential to safely reduce the gaps between cars at higher speeds and thus actually increase throughput, since the congestion issues with human drivers reacting separately would not apply.
- duaneb 11y ago
  > Self-driving cars in a line could detect and link up with each other, sharing sensor data on obstacles up ahead. In the end, this has the potential to safely reduce the gaps between cars at higher speeds and thus actually increase throughput, since the congestion issues with human drivers reacting separately would not apply. Isn't this already true to a certain extent with map software? It automatically directs you to the fastest route—congestion relief is, in a way, built-in to open infrastructure. It seems to be the topology of the highway system would have a much larger impact on congestion than the drivers themselves. Among other things, it's going to be a long time (hopefully never. IMHO) before human drivers are off the road.

makeitsuckless 11y ago

Being a cyclist in Amsterdam, the lack of driver eye contact and understanding of body language is what worries me about the application of self driving cars. Amsterdam traffic is a chaos in which pedestrians and cyclists mix with cars, and the former two frequently (some would say always) ignore the rules. Not out of some anarchistic impulse, but for mutual convenience. Especially with cyclists, for whom coming to a full stop and accelerating again is both "expensive" and risky (accelerating cyclists tend to swerve), relying on eye contact and mutual understanding of intent rather than following the rules of the road by the book results in safer and more fluent traffic. I imagine a current generation Google self-driving car in Amsterdam coming to a grinding halt and not being able to move backwards or forwards. But most of all, as a cyclist I wouldn't feel safe sharing the road with "drivers" with whom communicating via eye contact and body language are impossible. To me, self-driving cars and liveable, human-scale cities are mutually exclusive, and I very much prefer the latter.

Shorel 11y ago
Until you actually live surrounded by self-driving cars, your speculation is nothing more than that. As someone who also commutes by bicycle, I would vastly prefer predictable, 100% consistent car behavior.
- ortusdux 11y ago
  I wonder if a few e-ink displays on the outside of the cars could be used to smooth out these interactions by conveying actions and intents in plain English. I would be comforting to see 'Stopped, waiting for bicyclist to pass' flash up on the front display when I bike up to a 4-way stop.
- linkregister 11y ago
  Absolutely. All of my near-misses are due to unpredictable behavior on my part (I sometimes make mistakes; and I'm improving) or unpredictable driving. I include driver rage in the unpredictable driving category.
lumberjack 11y ago

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joeclark77 11y ago

And here come the technocrats ready to say "let's ban driving and make driverless cars mandatory"...

sschueller 11y ago

Two driverless cars are about to crash into each other on a tight mountain pass (maybe a bug that couldn't for see the accident). There are 3 possible outcomes: 1. Car 1 and Car 2 crash into each other killing all passengers. 2. Car 1 with 3 passengers drives of the cliff, car 2 with 1 passenger survives. 3. Car 2 with 1 passenger drives of the the cliff, car 1 with 3 passengers survives. The cars can communicate with each other. The logical resolution would be to drive the car with the least passengers off the cliff to save as many lives as mathematically possible. I don't know how I would feel about my car killing me although logically I wouldn't have a chance of survival anyways.

dman 11y ago
What do you think happens in this situation currently with human drivers? Are we holding machines to different standards than we hold each other?
- scrabble 11y ago
  Yes. Not too long ago I had the opportunity to have a surgery performed by a robot controlled by a human surgeon. My wife was adamantly against it since there had been accidents previously with the robot other places in the world. Overall, the rate of incident was lower than the rate of incident for human surgeons, but to her that was not the important point. There are people who will definitely hold machines to higher standards, and if they don't meet them, to them they are clearly inferior.
  - bholzer 11y ago
    Surgical robots do not perform as well as traditional instruments. I've talked to a few hospital executives and all have said that in most cases, these robots only cost them money and decrease the quality of the surgical procedures. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2526934/Surgery-performed-robots-no-successful-using-humans-cost-LOT-more.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2526934/Surge...
    - 11y ago

jasonjei 11y ago

I think it would be great if at some point some lanes of the freeways are dedicated for autonomous vehicles connected to a city or state-controlled system with some fallback. I suspect there is a fallacy somewhere in my idea, but I think the first step is to make some lanes only for autonomous vehicles on the freeway, and eventually all lanes as autonomous vehicles become more commonplace. I'm not a civil engineer, but I suspect this could eliminate a lot of traffic if all the cars are placed in the most optimal lane, assuming all vehicles on highways are autonomous.

pdq 11y ago

What happens with these driverless cars at four way stop signs? With humans, generally someone waves to the other driver signaling either to take right of way or that they will go first. I presume the car doesn't understand hand gestures, so does it just start nudging into the intersection and stop if another car goes ahead?

kevinnk 11y ago
Actually, it can already understand some hand gestures [1]. Compared to all the other things an autonomous car has to deal with, gesture recognition doesn't seem like such a stretch. [1] http://road.cc/content/news/150448-google-patent-reveals-how-driverless-cars-recognise-hand-signals http://road.cc/content/news/150448-google-patent-reveals-how...

sea2summit 11y ago

Step 1. Release autonomous cars to market with lower incidence rate than humans. Step 2. Sit back and watch humans cause accidents; insurance for human drivers goes thru the roof. Step 3. ??? Step 4. Skynet.

lumberjack 11y ago
Serious question. Is computer vision so advanced that it is already so obvious that self-driving cars will definitely be safer? Yes it's a computer which is more reliable at always outputting the same answer than a human but it's not a simple application this one. As far as I know most robots get confused at times just as humans do. I think eventually they will be, because they can learn and share their knowledge and keep learning about all the real world exceptions without limitation unlike humans. But right now or when they are deployed en mass. I'm not sure they will DEFINITELY without exception be safer. And I know there exists statistics about accident rates per kilometre driven but aren't those only a few cars driving previously selected and well documented routes?

brownbat 11y ago

Driving can easily end up as a competitive game where safety is traded against efficiency. The big versions of this are terrible, assholes weaving in and out of lanes at +20 mph. But it happens in little ways too, the rolling stops at 4-ways from the article are probably a tiny example. Someone should host a programming competition where every entrant writes the AI for a fleet of simulated driverless cars, each with random starting and ending destinations. Collisions mean you instantly lose. Your score is based on how quickly you can get through traffic generated by all the other AIs. I think the results would tell us a lot about where things are heading, or maybe where they should or shouldn't be allowed to go. (Of course, if you could control the whole fleet, all the cars could just ignore all the rules and dodge each other while tearing through intersections.)

charles2013 11y ago

> “The real problem is that the car is too safe...” no. this statement is fallacious, and i believe it is dangerously misleading. it sounds like something out of the mouth of a corporate attorney, and not someone who cares about being actually safe. out here in the real world driving laws are more like guidelines. my take on the situation is the car knows and follows all of the written rules of the road, but not the unwritten ones. kind of like a 16-year-old kid who's just aced his driving exam, but doesn't yet have a feel for driving. every so often he encounters a situation not covered by the law or the driver's handbook, and he's forced to choose the safest course of action on his own. i live near google in mountain view, and (usually) encounter the self-driving SUVs many times a day, either biking around town or as they drive past my residence. in hundreds of encounters i've only witnessed one potentially dangerous incident (many months ago) involving a self-driving SUV. it wasn't clear to me who/what was at fault. whilst making a protected left turn onto west el camino real from el monte ave [0], a self-driving SUV came to a complete stop in the middle of the intersection, causing the vehicles behind it to halt and lay on their horns. since the incident occurred a few yards behind me (over my left shoulder) i don't know exactly what precipitated the incident, but reflecting on the experience has caused me to recognize some potential flaws in this generation of self-driving vehicles. that intersection's turning lanes are delineated by dotted lines. this isn't unique, but it's interesting to me because dotted lines can sometimes be more difficult to see than solid lines (especially in certain lighting or weather conditions, or when there are debris on the road). for example, i remember lanes on stretches of 101-N marked with faded dotted lines and no reflector dots. these lanes were impossible to see under wet conditions and the sun's reflection. drivers were forced to either guess where the lanes might be, or to follow other vehicles, but we could still proceed safely. how would a driverless vehicle respond? further, some human drivers completely ignore lane markers even when they are perfectly visible. in india and some central american countries, for example, driving conditions are like the polar opposite of suburban SV: lawless. yet in my experience, driving there is not without rules; it's just that the rules are unwritten. and though this is an extreme analogy, it led me to an interesting question: if self-driving vehicles can't safely navigate the crowded streets of mumbai, how comfortable are we giving them free reign in the US? or perhaps should we exclude them from certain roads until they can? the main point i'm trying to make is this: the current generation of self-driving vehicles has not developed (whether by feature or flaw) the level of intuition of an experienced and safe driver. they are quite literally like student drivers whose instructors have a foot above the brake and a hand on the steering wheel. and while it's conceptually possible to create safer roads by eliminating human error, i'm not confident replacing humans with a bunch of robotic student drivers is the best solution. i'd feel much safer as a passenger in a vehicle driven by someone or something that's A) primarily concerned with my safety (and not corporate liability), and B) knows what to do in unexpected or unpredictable circumstances. [0] satellite image of the intersection; pin at approximate incident site: https://www.google.com/maps/place/1786+El+Camino+Real,+Mountain+View,+CA+94040/@37.3920222,-122.095255,191m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x808fb0c7fbe6c66b:0x260bc9681a0e197 https://www.google.com/maps/place/1786+El+Camino+Real,+Mount...