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See my comment above on two situations where coming to a stop is actually more dangerous. TL;DR: If the car fails while driving on a highway or crossing a busy

See my comment above on two situations where coming to a stop is actually more dangerous. TL;DR: If the car fails while driving on a highway or crossing a busy intersection, stopping will cause a wreck.

mindslight 11y ago
Sure, coming to a stop is dangerous in those situations if other drivers don't react appropriately. It's not a great idea, but I also don't mean that self-driving cars should be doing such emergency stops regularly. And obviously they should do it only as an extreme last resort, when things like pulling over have failed. I still think it's more reasonable to stop either of those two places than to suddenly hand control of a car traveling 75mph to a human who hasn't driven in a year or longer. edit: concrete example: You're biking along. Would you rather A. a car in front of you come to an abrupt stop, or B. a car passing you at twice your speed be controlled by a drowsy driver who doesn't know where the edges of his car are and doesn't have a feel for how the steering wheel reacts ?
- dawnbreez 11y ago
  A fair point. The argument really comes down to this: Is it likely that a malfunction will occur while the auto-car is closely followed by another car?
  - mindslight 11y ago
    Well, I wouldn't say "likely" comes into it. I'm explicitly describing what happens with a choke_and_die() function if say the software crashes with no recovery, or major sensors are damaged - unpredictable by definition. The "I don't know how to navigate this situation" case would be handled by gracefully pulling over, and should rarely happen because developers would be encouraged to work out the kinks rather than having such a terrible user experience be common. My point is that giving developers an easy out of forcing a human to take over just encourages sloppy non-robust software. And if there's anything that consumer technology companies are good at creating, it's non-robust software that has no place in a car.

mindslight 11y ago

Sure, coming to a stop is dangerous in those situations if other drivers don't react appropriately. It's not a great idea, but I also don't mean that self-driving cars should be doing such emergency stops regularly. And obviously they should do it only as an extreme last resort, when things like pulling over have failed. I still think it's more reasonable to stop either of those two places than to suddenly hand control of a car traveling 75mph to a human who hasn't driven in a year or longer. edit: concrete example: You're biking along. Would you rather A. a car in front of you come to an abrupt stop, or B. a car passing you at twice your speed be controlled by a drowsy driver who doesn't know where the edges of his car are and doesn't have a feel for how the steering wheel reacts ?

dawnbreez 11y ago
A fair point. The argument really comes down to this: Is it likely that a malfunction will occur while the auto-car is closely followed by another car?
- mindslight 11y ago
  Well, I wouldn't say "likely" comes into it. I'm explicitly describing what happens with a choke_and_die() function if say the software crashes with no recovery, or major sensors are damaged - unpredictable by definition. The "I don't know how to navigate this situation" case would be handled by gracefully pulling over, and should rarely happen because developers would be encouraged to work out the kinks rather than having such a terrible user experience be common. My point is that giving developers an easy out of forcing a human to take over just encourages sloppy non-robust software. And if there's anything that consumer technology companies are good at creating, it's non-robust software that has no place in a car.