5 ms·

What would have happened if the collision avoidance system malfunctioned and slammed on the brakes while you were driving fast on the highway, causing an accide

• _delirium 16y ago
  I have some similar sentiment, but at the same time, I wonder if it's a psychological issue? In theory, I should be willing to accept even flawed software, so long as the likelihood and severity of any flaws are less bad than my own. And humans are not actually all that good at avoiding car accidents, as the rather appalling crash statistics point out, so the bar isn't even all that high for "well, at least it's better than humans" software.
  • hugh3 16y ago
    Yes, but this system seems to be worse than my driving. For instance, I wouldn't have hit the back of that goddamn truck.
    • ugh 16y ago
      How do you come to that conclusion? With the information we have it seems to me that this system can’t make your driving any worse. It’s a emergency system, it’s supposed to only kick in when you already failed. It too failed in this case, but that only means that with or without the system, sometimes you are dead either way. This system doesn’t even want to be autonomous which means that if the worst thing is does is flat out fail (and not, say, misfire) it’s no better but more importantly also no worse than a car without the system.
      • tomjen3 16y ago
        I theory you are right, but I fear that drivers don't pay so much attention to their driving, since "after all the computer will do it for me". There has been a fascinating linked posted a couple of times to a story about a guy who worked on the London road system: each time he would clear out congestion issues, more cars would go on the road - which meant that the average speed didn't change. He argued (or the article did, can't seem to recall whom) that people had a specific level of risk they were prepared to accept: make it safer than that, and people drove less safely.
        • MikeCapone 16y ago
          > He argued (or the article did, can't seem to recall whom) that people had a specific level of risk they were prepared to accept: make it safer than that, and people drove less safely. Tom Vanderbilt also writes about this in his book "Traffic". I recommend it to anyone interested in the psychology of driving and road design.
      • hugh3 16y ago
        I worry that if it's buggy enough to get false negatives (not braking when it should) then it might also get false positives (slamming on the brakes when it shouldn't). Maybe one day I'll have a car with a system like this, but I'd want to see it get quite a few years' real-world testing before I'd trust it to slam on my brakes whenever it felt like it.
        • chc 16y ago
          That's illogical. We could design a system that works exactly like brakes do now — never engaging on their own — and it would get an enormous number of false negatives. By your logic, it probably gets a lot of false positives too. In general, false negatives aren't a sign that the system is buggy, but that a heuristic is tuned to avoid false positives. Also, this wasn't a false negative — the system wasn't turned on in the first place.
• lsc 16y ago
  it doesn't need to be better than the space shuttle, it just needs to be better than /me/ and really, I'm not that great. I think this incremental approach to the self driving car (starting with ABS, then moving up to radar braking, etc...) is a good thing.