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Human drivers can feel safe around other cars because of mutually assured destruction. You are both afraid of dying if you make a significant mistake. Self-dri
by stevenh 10y ago
Human drivers can feel safe around other cars because of mutually assured destruction. You are both afraid of dying if you make a significant mistake.
Self-driving cars will never have this fear holding them back from making mistakes. You could argue there is actually an incentive to let them crash once in awhile, because the valuable real world data will be phoned home and used to improve the product for the small price of a human life.
Once corruption sets in down the road, cars with autopilot capabilities will enable easy kidnapping and assassination. Simply activate backdoor remote piloting and crash the target's car (or the self-driving taxi they're in) into a tree at 70 mph, or lock the doors and drive to a pickup location to complete the kidnapping.
Driving in a traditional car wouldn't protect the target, because a group with ubiquitous optional remote control over self-driving cars could also force surrounding cars to enter kamikaze mode and ram the target off the road.
Governments will demand some kind of backdoor like this at some point, and then we have to trust they'll never abuse it (lol) and that no third parties will ever be able to hack it remotely.
Even if you think the government is your friend, the first worm using a remote code execution exploit that hops from car to car via Bluetooth and activates its payload on a specific date will be able to kill tens of millions of people.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoI am a human driver. I do not feel safe around other cars.
- snowwrestler 10y agoHere's the reality: people don't want self-driving cars. People want safer cars. Therefore, companies that want to sell self-driving cars are pitching them as safer. The fact of the matter, though, is that it remains to be seen whether self-driving cars are in fact safer. While a self-driving car will not suffer from some of the shortcomings of a human, like getting drunk or sleepy, it will suffer from other shortcomings that humans don't, like bugs and getting hacked. Ultimately the one thing we can trust about fellow humans in cars is that they want to survive their trip too. This is true with very few exceptions. The scary thing about self-driving cars is that they don't care if they survive.
- ericnolte 10y agoFor the record, I want a self-driving car and 9 out of 10 captchas confirm I am a human.
- snowwrestler 10y agoWould you still want one if the data showed it was more dangerous than driving yourself around? We don't yet know if it will be, is my point. I realize that what I wrote above makes it look like I'm saying that no person wants a self-driving car at all. As you point out, that's not true. What I was trying to say is that, for most people, safety is a bigger consideration than self-driving capability. If a company said "our car drives itself but you're more likely to die in it," I doubt they would sell many.
- drchaos 10y ago> Would you still want one if the data showed it was more dangerous than driving yourself around? We don't yet know if it will be While we might not know yet whether self-driving cars are /already/ safer than human drivers, it is virtually impossible that they won't become much safer very quick. Simply because bugs in software can (and will) be fixed, each car gets an update, and the accident in question won't happen again, ever. Humans, on the other hand, cannot be updated easily, if at all.
- snowwrestler 10y agoThis is pure supposition, and not supported by any evidence. We've been fixing bugs in software for decades but we are still finding serious bugs all the time.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- goodplay 10y agoI am also human driver and I feel safer around "dumb" cars. I don't ever intend to ride a self driving car, and will do my best to avoid being near one. Aside from being vulnerable to malicious actors, self-driving cars make "cold-hearted" mistakes that don't make sense; mistakes that humans would never make. Sure, the total number of mistakes they make will be lower than the equivalent number of accidents caused by humans. However, having human life lost to the type of mistakes self-driven cars make is, in my opinion, an unacceptable price to pay. If I must loose my life to a car-related indecent, I want the it to be caused by a human, and not some quirk or edge-case in an algorithm or neural net.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoAs someone almost killed this evening while driving home from the Thanksgiving holiday weekend by a driver texting and not paying attention behind me at highway speeds (with my wife and newborn daughter in the car), I welcome the cold, calculating embrace of self driving cars with open arms. Edit: The driver ended up impacting a semi trailer that had been in front of us, with me leaving the lane for the safety of the grassy interstate median.
- goodplay 10y agoFirstly, I'm glad you and your family were not harmed. I do not in any way mean for this to be offensive or disrespectful, but would you still welcome self-driving cars had this incident been caused by a malfunctioning self-driving car as apposed to a reckless driver? My point is that self-driving cars lack the common sense that humans have. A human would immediately halt if they hear a child scream near their car, a car would continue moving along as if nothing is happening if it isn't designed or trained to detect screams. Until machines gain sensory and cognitive capabilities that exceed ours, and a working comprehension of human values, I maintain my stance regarding this issue.
- euyyn 10y ago> A human would immediately halt if they hear a child scream near their car, a car would continue moving along as if nothing is happening if it isn't designed or trained to detect screams. I don't know to what extent they use sound as an input (makes sense that they'd do, given horns). But for what I've seen, self-driving cars are much better than humans at detecting pedestrians in their vicinity, including cases in which a child can't actually be seen by a human driver and he happens not to be screaming.
- yongjik 10y ago> Human drivers can feel safe around other cars because of mutually assured destruction. That's patently false. If that is true, nobody will walk around in Manhattan (several feet from speeding taxis), nobody will ride a motorcycle in highway, and the sight of an oncoming 18-wheeler in a rural two-lane road will send every sedan driver to the gutter. Human drivers feel safe around other cars, even though driving is one of the most dangerous activity practiced by most people, because they've been doing it so long that they're desensitized to the danger.