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I imagine in an emergency the car would show a set of options on a screen and you click one and the car will do it. For example getting out of the way of emerg

I imagine in an emergency the car would show a set of options on a screen and you click one and the car will do it. For example getting out of the way of emergency vehicles on a blocked road. It will ask you what to do and if you tell it to drive up the pavement or into a bus lane or cross to the wrong side of the road -- the car will just do it. I do wonder about all the non-verbal human-to-human communication. But a friendly baxter type screen with eyes that move (and messages that scroll across) would solve that. We have to remember that these cars are all feeding unusual situations back to the google BRAIN that is learning. It'll watch us react to an emergency and learn. It'll see that 20 or 30 times a day and generalise a response.

walrus1066 10y ago
I think it's fine if there's a human in the car, simple, they just take control to manage the incident. But to truly disrupt our lives (24 hour robot trucks, autonomous taxi fleets ), which is what all these companies are aiming for, the car needs to be able to drive without a human.
- Retric 10y ago
  Having a human on call to remote into a Car is still a viable option in most of the US. This is not a good fit for sub second response times or tunnels, but it vastly reduces the endless .0001% edge cases. ED: Not hitting kids is manditory, not blocking traffic is mandatory, parking in every random stop is optional as long as their are safe places it can drive to.
  - walrus1066 10y ago
    Yes, it may provide a good impetus to upgrade our mobile data infrastructure. It would have to be ultra fast, ultra reliable, ultra wide coverage. Because if you can't remote in, and the cars caused a huge traffic jam, it'll be very difficult to get the owner companies human in to help out the vehicle. I guess the recovery man can just use a bike :/
    - Retric 10y ago
      It still needs to work 99.99% of the time. I am more thinking extreme edge cases like: "Drove off the highway to avoid collision and stuck in a ditch. Bridge out now what? etc." Basically, you don't need a perfect solution in every case, just a safe solution in every case. A self driving car that get's to a gas station is a good enough step 1 even if you have some human attendants there to fill up. Sure, it might add $2 bucks per fill up that's still cheaper than highway driving. PS: Self driving car, only works in NYC is also useful.
    - kvz 10y ago
      And if you can remote in, I'm worried about hacks. Imagine the chaos if a terrorist group got in and turned the wheel of an entire fleet in a random direction. It seems to me anything can get hacked/any individual can be pressed, and it's alsways just a matter of if it's worth the trouble. Seems a hack like this is would be worth some, to some groups. Also: they only need to succeed Once. The rest of us need to have perfect security among all fleets of all corporations and brands for all time.
      - Retric 10y ago
        If you can call for a driverless Taxii then there is some level of remote access. So, it's going to be a concern in either case. However, you can set the car to dial out when it's confused rather than waiting for remote connections which reduces the attack surface.
MorePowerToYou 10y ago
Bringing human decision making into the loop makes things messier. If any of these human decisions need to be made quickly in the interest of safety, then the driver needs to be paying attention at all times. That won't happen. This is very dangerous. This is also complex in terms of liability. If the car hits something while driving partially autonomously, where does the responsibilty lie? The software, the driver, or somewhere else? We're far from the widespread use of autonomous cars. I'm not even going to mention the dangers of buggy software written by large companies that can't get iCloud notes syncing to work.
- legolas2412 10y ago
  But giving a computer complete control of the car with no human oversight is much more dangerous.
  - MorePowerToYou 10y ago
    Agree 100%. This back and forth between fully-autonomous and partially-autonomous highlights the largest obstacles for "self-driving" car adoption. The fully-autonomous route runs head-first into the inevitable, messy problems with software: security, maintenance, feature creep, complexity, unreliable networks etc. In theory, humans could nail all of these in car software. In practice, it's highly unlikely. The software industry can't even get basic security for IoT devices right. The human-in-the-loop route runs directly into the only problem more daunting than reliable software: human nature. Human overrides for self-driving cars that need to be activated in a timely manner will not work. The drivers won't be paying enough attention to react in sufficient time. Note that overrides add even more complexity to an already fantastically complex system.
    - legolas2412 10y ago
      I still don't see what's wrong with current systems (driver assistance systems) Say an always on self driving car, but it doesn't drive. Human has to drive, and the computer can correct any obvious mistakes the human does. Keep a really high liability for the car manufacturer though
mplewis 10y ago
That would absolutely be the wrong time to ask a human for a decision.

walrus1066 10y ago

I think it's fine if there's a human in the car, simple, they just take control to manage the incident. But to truly disrupt our lives (24 hour robot trucks, autonomous taxi fleets ), which is what all these companies are aiming for, the car needs to be able to drive without a human.

Retric 10y ago
Having a human on call to remote into a Car is still a viable option in most of the US. This is not a good fit for sub second response times or tunnels, but it vastly reduces the endless .0001% edge cases. ED: Not hitting kids is manditory, not blocking traffic is mandatory, parking in every random stop is optional as long as their are safe places it can drive to.
- walrus1066 10y ago
  Yes, it may provide a good impetus to upgrade our mobile data infrastructure. It would have to be ultra fast, ultra reliable, ultra wide coverage. Because if you can't remote in, and the cars caused a huge traffic jam, it'll be very difficult to get the owner companies human in to help out the vehicle. I guess the recovery man can just use a bike :/
  - Retric 10y ago
    It still needs to work 99.99% of the time. I am more thinking extreme edge cases like: "Drove off the highway to avoid collision and stuck in a ditch. Bridge out now what? etc." Basically, you don't need a perfect solution in every case, just a safe solution in every case. A self driving car that get's to a gas station is a good enough step 1 even if you have some human attendants there to fill up. Sure, it might add $2 bucks per fill up that's still cheaper than highway driving. PS: Self driving car, only works in NYC is also useful.
  - kvz 10y ago
    And if you can remote in, I'm worried about hacks. Imagine the chaos if a terrorist group got in and turned the wheel of an entire fleet in a random direction. It seems to me anything can get hacked/any individual can be pressed, and it's alsways just a matter of if it's worth the trouble. Seems a hack like this is would be worth some, to some groups. Also: they only need to succeed Once. The rest of us need to have perfect security among all fleets of all corporations and brands for all time.
    - Retric 10y ago
      If you can call for a driverless Taxii then there is some level of remote access. So, it's going to be a concern in either case. However, you can set the car to dial out when it's confused rather than waiting for remote connections which reduces the attack surface.

MorePowerToYou 10y ago

Bringing human decision making into the loop makes things messier. If any of these human decisions need to be made quickly in the interest of safety, then the driver needs to be paying attention at all times. That won't happen. This is very dangerous. This is also complex in terms of liability. If the car hits something while driving partially autonomously, where does the responsibilty lie? The software, the driver, or somewhere else? We're far from the widespread use of autonomous cars. I'm not even going to mention the dangers of buggy software written by large companies that can't get iCloud notes syncing to work.

legolas2412 10y ago
But giving a computer complete control of the car with no human oversight is much more dangerous.
- MorePowerToYou 10y ago
  Agree 100%. This back and forth between fully-autonomous and partially-autonomous highlights the largest obstacles for "self-driving" car adoption. The fully-autonomous route runs head-first into the inevitable, messy problems with software: security, maintenance, feature creep, complexity, unreliable networks etc. In theory, humans could nail all of these in car software. In practice, it's highly unlikely. The software industry can't even get basic security for IoT devices right. The human-in-the-loop route runs directly into the only problem more daunting than reliable software: human nature. Human overrides for self-driving cars that need to be activated in a timely manner will not work. The drivers won't be paying enough attention to react in sufficient time. Note that overrides add even more complexity to an already fantastically complex system.
  - legolas2412 10y ago
    I still don't see what's wrong with current systems (driver assistance systems) Say an always on self driving car, but it doesn't drive. Human has to drive, and the computer can correct any obvious mistakes the human does. Keep a really high liability for the car manufacturer though

mplewis 10y ago

That would absolutely be the wrong time to ask a human for a decision.