6 ms·

> To my mind, there's "cruise control" as it exists today, and "car drives itself completely and safely even in adverse conditions". Pretending that it's safe t

by slacka 11y ago

> To my mind, there's "cruise control" as it exists today, and "car drives itself completely and safely even in adverse conditions". Pretending that it's safe to suddenly hand over to the human in an emergency is just crazy. Fine but where do you draw the line? Is it still safe if "cruise control" adds speed matching, steering, lane changing, or braking? As far as safety today, when I'm on the highway, I'd rather have a Telsa on autopilot than a human driving behind me. Pretending that it's safe or not is an issue for 2025 cars technology as there are no cars on the road that "drive itself completely and safely even in adverse conditions". Not even Google's self-driving cars are there yet. They still don't drive on in inclement weather and have a professional driver monitoring them at all times.

Someone1234 11y ago
> Is it still safe if "cruise control" adds speed matching, steering, lane changing, or braking? That ship sailed years ago. Even in the 2015 model year (mid-2014 release) all of those features are available. My car does speed matching, minor steering to keep you in the lane (at highway speeds), and auto-braking (both for auto cruise control and for collision avoidance). It works fine.
- noja 11y ago
  and on your car, if it does any of those things wrong, and you don't correct it (because you are paying less attention, and reacting quick enough would be an impossibility), who is to blame?
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    Legally me. But I suppose I could sue the manufacturer.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    We're rapidly heading toward this very "interesting" time where cars will have (indeed, some high-end cars are very close today) assistive systems, especially for highway driving, that really don't require drivers to pay much attention. It is absolutely guaranteed that people will start reading books and watching movies when they're nominally driving even though they're legally responsible. The manufacturers will fall back on the "these are only assistive systems." It says so in bold type in the user manual.
    - jcranmer 11y ago
      This is what scares me most about self-driving cars. The "last mile" of making them self-driving is by far the hardest part (Google's engineers have stated that they're at least 10 years out, and that is admittedly an optimistic estimate), so I think this is an era we'll be stuck in for quite some time.
      - ghaff 11y ago
        There's a really good video of a John Leonard talk at CMU on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs He basically took video of his commute in the Boston area over the course of a few weeks and pulled out snippets of situations that would be really difficult for an AI. IMO, a lot of people are far too eager to extrapolate from works-mostly under a controlled set of conditions to letting AI cars loose on the road in a wide variety of real-world conditions. Even if you accept that we'll never have perfection (and humans certainly aren't), you do have to get to a point where serious failures are fairly rare events as they are with driving today in the context of the millions of road miles driven.

by slacka 11y ago

Someone1234 11y ago

> Is it still safe if "cruise control" adds speed matching, steering, lane changing, or braking? That ship sailed years ago. Even in the 2015 model year (mid-2014 release) all of those features are available. My car does speed matching, minor steering to keep you in the lane (at highway speeds), and auto-braking (both for auto cruise control and for collision avoidance). It works fine.

noja 11y ago
and on your car, if it does any of those things wrong, and you don't correct it (because you are paying less attention, and reacting quick enough would be an impossibility), who is to blame?
- Someone1234 11y ago
  Legally me. But I suppose I could sue the manufacturer.
- ghaff 11y ago
  We're rapidly heading toward this very "interesting" time where cars will have (indeed, some high-end cars are very close today) assistive systems, especially for highway driving, that really don't require drivers to pay much attention. It is absolutely guaranteed that people will start reading books and watching movies when they're nominally driving even though they're legally responsible. The manufacturers will fall back on the "these are only assistive systems." It says so in bold type in the user manual.
  - jcranmer 11y ago
    This is what scares me most about self-driving cars. The "last mile" of making them self-driving is by far the hardest part (Google's engineers have stated that they're at least 10 years out, and that is admittedly an optimistic estimate), so I think this is an era we'll be stuck in for quite some time.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      There's a really good video of a John Leonard talk at CMU on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs He basically took video of his commute in the Boston area over the course of a few weeks and pulled out snippets of situations that would be really difficult for an AI. IMO, a lot of people are far too eager to extrapolate from works-mostly under a controlled set of conditions to letting AI cars loose on the road in a wide variety of real-world conditions. Even if you accept that we'll never have perfection (and humans certainly aren't), you do have to get to a point where serious failures are fairly rare events as they are with driving today in the context of the millions of road miles driven.