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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.

by 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.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - 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.

by seibelj 11y ago

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.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- 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.