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The thing that worries me about semi-autonomous cars is that we might end up in the same place we've ended up with aircraft. Aircraft are sufficiently autonomou

The thing that worries me about semi-autonomous cars is that we might end up in the same place we've ended up with aircraft. Aircraft are sufficiently autonomous in nominal conditions that pilot skills atrophy, and then when the plane encounters adverse conditions, these de-skilled pilots simply do not respond correctly to the problem, crashing the plane. Specifically, I'm thinking of something like Air France Flight 447, where it turned out that the pilot and co-pilot had lost familiarity with how the Airbus A330 behaved while at cruising altitude. Similarly, I'm worried that auto-drive and smart cruise control systems will take care of highway driving in the normal case, but when things go wrong and the auto-driver disengages, the human at the wheel will have forgotten that a car traveling at 60mph behaves differently than one traveling at 25mph. With aircraft, we can mitigate this risk by forcing pilots to spend extra time in the simulator, keeing their feel for the aircraft from decaying too badly. I'm not sure what the solution is for drivers. Maybe we can force everyone to play a racing sim for a few hours every month ;)

jessaustin 11y ago
This danger will be avoided in automobiles by making human control impossible as soon as that makes any sense. There will be no steering wheel, the front seat will face backwards to facilitate conversation, and accident rates will plummet. The thing that robocars can do, which roboplanes cannot, is slow down or stop completely when faced with vexing situations.
- hguant 11y ago
  Pulling over to the side of the road and putting your blinkers on is (almost) always an acceptable solution to an automotive error. Much harder to pull that off at 35,000 feet.
  - sandworm101 11y ago
    It's apples and oranges. Overshooting a turn at by a few seconds at 35,000 feet isn't the end of the world. Missing a turn in a car by even a quarter second means blood on the pavement.
    - geon 11y ago
      > Missing a turn in a car by even a quarter second means blood on the pavement. For a race driver perhaps. In traffic, you should keep a low enough speed and large enough distance, that 250 ms isn't a big deal.
  - Animats 11y ago
    If you have a problem at cruising altitude, there's usually time to deal with it. Transport planes can glide 100-200 miles from that altitude if they have to. Most aircraft accidents happen during takeoff, approach, or landing. See NTSB reports.[1] High-altitude accidents are mostly in-flight fires, including two events involving lithium batteries. There is, however, one commercial aircraft crash from problems at altitude (no passengers, ferry flight) worthy of a Darwin Award.[2] [1] http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/aviation.aspx http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/avi... [2] http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/AAR0701.pdf http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/A...
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      That second report is fascinating. One might hope that even amateur pilots would know power curve characteristics at high altitude, and the flight team's "gosh we're saving a lot of fuel" comments on the CVR inspire a sort of grim amusement, but I wonder whether the incident might actually have saved lives in the long run. If we're going to fly budget carriers like Pinnacle, those carriers are going to employ inexperienced flight crews and attempt to make up it up with training, simulation, and rules. This misadventure identified numerous shortfalls in those. I doubt anyone flying today's Endeavor Air ignores so many stick shakes, uses the same stall procedure at all altitudes, ignores airspeed, hasn't heard of "core lock", or lies so blatantly to ATC in potential emergency situations. I can understand why the report soft-pedaled the training gaps, because after all they didn't need to give the aircrew's survivors any more leverage in the inevitable lawsuit, but I'd expect training to improve anyway. Is it common practice for pilots at budget airlines to read accident reports like this? IANAPilot, but I'd like to be!
  - kqr 11y ago
    As long as you start having problems as high as 35,000 feet there are surprisingly many (although vomit-inducing) ways to deal with your problems by pure physics – i.e. as long as you can use some of your control surfaces, you have a reasonable chance of surviving. The most important variables are velocity and lift vector. At 35,000 feet you have room to gain speed, and even just some of your control surfaces let you manipulate your lift vector in "unconventional" ways.
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  So how is the vexing situation resolved? Either the onboard computer must be able to manage 100% of all situations, or the human driver must have an option to take control to resolve it themselves. You can't have a car that makes human control impossible, and then gets itself into vexing situations. You'll be stuck there forever.
  - bloaf 11y ago
    Is it impossible for a human to get a car permanently stuck? *edit: put another way, is it possible for a human driver to extricate a car from any situation?
    - snowwrestler 11y ago
      Well the parent refers only to certain situations--those in which the robocar gets vexed and chooses to slow down or stop. I would expect humans to be able to resolve those types of situations, since we rarely find humans sitting in perfectly working cars on the side of the road just because they are vexed.
      - bloaf 11y ago
        Ah, I see that you are referring to a scenario in which the vexation and stopping are not both products of some external stimulus (e.g. [1]) or malfunction but something else altogether. For example, parents who pull their perfectly working car to the side of the road to discipline their vexatious children. It certainly seems possible that a self-driving car might occasionally get itself into a situation requiring a reboot, but that seems like an awfully low price to pay for the convenience of autonomous driving. [1] http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2007/0811/20070811_055248_op12bridge.jpg http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2007/0811...
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    For nearly every mistake that human drivers make, a good way to prevent it is to slow down. Not every situation must be navigated at maximum speed. Robocars will be better drivers than humans, but slower will still be safer. I'm not talking about cars parked in the lane indefinitely because they're confused by some dirt obscuring the center line. If that had been a thing the Google cars would already have fixed it.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  Why assume that accident rates will drop in the all-autodrive scenario? I haven't seen any such testing. I have seen many miles of google cars in amongst human-driven cars. I have yet to see any tests involving thousands of cars from a variety of manufacturers (and ages) all trying to drive together. To assume that the robots will cooperate perfectly, negating the needs for safety features ... wasn't there a movie about that? Big lizards in an autonomously-run park?
afarrell 11y ago
Silly suggestion: have the copilot pilot spend the flight playing crash-recovery scenarios that reset every `random.randint(30,90)` minutes. When there is an actual emergency, plug him in to the actual avionics. It would be kinda like [work of fiction you probably should have read by now].
- lfowles 11y ago
  Closest that comes to mind is Ender's Game. Ender doing simulations that abruptly increase in difficulty.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  Pilots might look like they are sitting on their asses up there, but they aren't. They are constantly evaluating situations. Think of them like a bodyguard. They might look like they are just standing around doing nothing, but in fact they are constantly scouting for that one-in-a-million scenario. You don't want them heads-down playing games all day.
jfoutz 11y ago
I thought the pilots got confused because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_control_modes#Alternate_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_control_modes#Alternate... not, particularly, because of de-skilling. I'm going to use a stupid metaphor, that's perhaps ton totally apt. In that case it's kind of like reversing the gas and break pedals. 99.9% of the time, practically all your time behind the wheel the car behaves one way, but in this one special circumstance, the 'normal' emergency reaction becomes exactly the wrong thing to do. Hit the brake not the gas, but the pedals are backwards. Yeah, maybe drivers will deskill. cars will fully automate much faster than planes. google's little fleet has racked up a million miles. The 80% solutions will turn into 95% solutions in a few iterations, then 99.99% solutions in a few more, then a long tail of fixing edge cases as they are discovered.
- quanticle 11y ago
  While the confusion over normal mode and alternate mode did play a role in the crash, the BEA report investigating the crash found the following six proximate causes [1]: - temporary inconsistency between the measured speeds, likely as a result of the obstruction of the pitot tubes by ice crystals, causing autopilot disconnection and reconfiguration to alternate law; - the crew made inappropriate control inputs that destabilized the flight path; - the crew failed to follow appropriate procedure for loss of displayed airspeed information; - the crew were late in identifying and correcting the deviation from the flight path; - the crew lacked understanding of the approach to stall; - the crew failed to recognize that the aircraft had stalled and consequently did not make inputs that would have made it possible to recover from the stall. Of those six, three can be attributed to skills atrophy: failure to follow procedure for loss of displayed airspeed information, lateness in identifying deviation from the flight path, and failure to recognize stall. These are all skills that pilots are taught when they're certified to fly a given aircraft. The fact that they didn't have them means that they forgot, or, in other words, they didn't have enough ongoing training to keep their skills fresh for emergencies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Final_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Final_re...
  - 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
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mrspeaker 11y ago
I wouldn't worry too much - a lot of people already die on the roads in fully non-autonomous cars. We only need fewer people to die and it's worth it.
- tonyedgecombe 11y ago
  That's a rational approach, I'm not sure that many politicians think like that though.
  - brixon 11y ago
    They do, but they will not phrase it that way.

jessaustin 11y ago

This danger will be avoided in automobiles by making human control impossible as soon as that makes any sense. There will be no steering wheel, the front seat will face backwards to facilitate conversation, and accident rates will plummet. The thing that robocars can do, which roboplanes cannot, is slow down or stop completely when faced with vexing situations.

hguant 11y ago
Pulling over to the side of the road and putting your blinkers on is (almost) always an acceptable solution to an automotive error. Much harder to pull that off at 35,000 feet.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  It's apples and oranges. Overshooting a turn at by a few seconds at 35,000 feet isn't the end of the world. Missing a turn in a car by even a quarter second means blood on the pavement.
  - geon 11y ago
    > Missing a turn in a car by even a quarter second means blood on the pavement. For a race driver perhaps. In traffic, you should keep a low enough speed and large enough distance, that 250 ms isn't a big deal.
- Animats 11y ago
  If you have a problem at cruising altitude, there's usually time to deal with it. Transport planes can glide 100-200 miles from that altitude if they have to. Most aircraft accidents happen during takeoff, approach, or landing. See NTSB reports.[1] High-altitude accidents are mostly in-flight fires, including two events involving lithium batteries. There is, however, one commercial aircraft crash from problems at altitude (no passengers, ferry flight) worthy of a Darwin Award.[2] [1] http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/aviation.aspx http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/avi... [2] http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/AAR0701.pdf http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/A...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    That second report is fascinating. One might hope that even amateur pilots would know power curve characteristics at high altitude, and the flight team's "gosh we're saving a lot of fuel" comments on the CVR inspire a sort of grim amusement, but I wonder whether the incident might actually have saved lives in the long run. If we're going to fly budget carriers like Pinnacle, those carriers are going to employ inexperienced flight crews and attempt to make up it up with training, simulation, and rules. This misadventure identified numerous shortfalls in those. I doubt anyone flying today's Endeavor Air ignores so many stick shakes, uses the same stall procedure at all altitudes, ignores airspeed, hasn't heard of "core lock", or lies so blatantly to ATC in potential emergency situations. I can understand why the report soft-pedaled the training gaps, because after all they didn't need to give the aircrew's survivors any more leverage in the inevitable lawsuit, but I'd expect training to improve anyway. Is it common practice for pilots at budget airlines to read accident reports like this? IANAPilot, but I'd like to be!
- kqr 11y ago
  As long as you start having problems as high as 35,000 feet there are surprisingly many (although vomit-inducing) ways to deal with your problems by pure physics – i.e. as long as you can use some of your control surfaces, you have a reasonable chance of surviving. The most important variables are velocity and lift vector. At 35,000 feet you have room to gain speed, and even just some of your control surfaces let you manipulate your lift vector in "unconventional" ways.
snowwrestler 11y ago
So how is the vexing situation resolved? Either the onboard computer must be able to manage 100% of all situations, or the human driver must have an option to take control to resolve it themselves. You can't have a car that makes human control impossible, and then gets itself into vexing situations. You'll be stuck there forever.
- bloaf 11y ago
  Is it impossible for a human to get a car permanently stuck? *edit: put another way, is it possible for a human driver to extricate a car from any situation?
  - snowwrestler 11y ago
    Well the parent refers only to certain situations--those in which the robocar gets vexed and chooses to slow down or stop. I would expect humans to be able to resolve those types of situations, since we rarely find humans sitting in perfectly working cars on the side of the road just because they are vexed.
    - bloaf 11y ago
      Ah, I see that you are referring to a scenario in which the vexation and stopping are not both products of some external stimulus (e.g. [1]) or malfunction but something else altogether. For example, parents who pull their perfectly working car to the side of the road to discipline their vexatious children. It certainly seems possible that a self-driving car might occasionally get itself into a situation requiring a reboot, but that seems like an awfully low price to pay for the convenience of autonomous driving. [1] http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2007/0811/20070811_055248_op12bridge.jpg http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2007/0811...
- jessaustin 11y ago
  For nearly every mistake that human drivers make, a good way to prevent it is to slow down. Not every situation must be navigated at maximum speed. Robocars will be better drivers than humans, but slower will still be safer. I'm not talking about cars parked in the lane indefinitely because they're confused by some dirt obscuring the center line. If that had been a thing the Google cars would already have fixed it.
sandworm101 11y ago
Why assume that accident rates will drop in the all-autodrive scenario? I haven't seen any such testing. I have seen many miles of google cars in amongst human-driven cars. I have yet to see any tests involving thousands of cars from a variety of manufacturers (and ages) all trying to drive together. To assume that the robots will cooperate perfectly, negating the needs for safety features ... wasn't there a movie about that? Big lizards in an autonomously-run park?

afarrell 11y ago

Silly suggestion: have the copilot pilot spend the flight playing crash-recovery scenarios that reset every `random.randint(30,90)` minutes. When there is an actual emergency, plug him in to the actual avionics. It would be kinda like [work of fiction you probably should have read by now].

lfowles 11y ago
Closest that comes to mind is Ender's Game. Ender doing simulations that abruptly increase in difficulty.
sandworm101 11y ago
Pilots might look like they are sitting on their asses up there, but they aren't. They are constantly evaluating situations. Think of them like a bodyguard. They might look like they are just standing around doing nothing, but in fact they are constantly scouting for that one-in-a-million scenario. You don't want them heads-down playing games all day.

jfoutz 11y ago

I thought the pilots got confused because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_control_modes#Alternate_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_control_modes#Alternate... not, particularly, because of de-skilling. I'm going to use a stupid metaphor, that's perhaps ton totally apt. In that case it's kind of like reversing the gas and break pedals. 99.9% of the time, practically all your time behind the wheel the car behaves one way, but in this one special circumstance, the 'normal' emergency reaction becomes exactly the wrong thing to do. Hit the brake not the gas, but the pedals are backwards. Yeah, maybe drivers will deskill. cars will fully automate much faster than planes. google's little fleet has racked up a million miles. The 80% solutions will turn into 95% solutions in a few iterations, then 99.99% solutions in a few more, then a long tail of fixing edge cases as they are discovered.

quanticle 11y ago
While the confusion over normal mode and alternate mode did play a role in the crash, the BEA report investigating the crash found the following six proximate causes [1]: - temporary inconsistency between the measured speeds, likely as a result of the obstruction of the pitot tubes by ice crystals, causing autopilot disconnection and reconfiguration to alternate law; - the crew made inappropriate control inputs that destabilized the flight path; - the crew failed to follow appropriate procedure for loss of displayed airspeed information; - the crew were late in identifying and correcting the deviation from the flight path; - the crew lacked understanding of the approach to stall; - the crew failed to recognize that the aircraft had stalled and consequently did not make inputs that would have made it possible to recover from the stall. Of those six, three can be attributed to skills atrophy: failure to follow procedure for loss of displayed airspeed information, lateness in identifying deviation from the flight path, and failure to recognize stall. These are all skills that pilots are taught when they're certified to fly a given aircraft. The fact that they didn't have them means that they forgot, or, in other words, they didn't have enough ongoing training to keep their skills fresh for emergencies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Final_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Final_re...
- 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mrspeaker 11y ago

I wouldn't worry too much - a lot of people already die on the roads in fully non-autonomous cars. We only need fewer people to die and it's worth it.

tonyedgecombe 11y ago
That's a rational approach, I'm not sure that many politicians think like that though.
- brixon 11y ago
  They do, but they will not phrase it that way.