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Unexpected Consequences of Self-Driving Cars

183 points by ghosh 10y ago

umberway 10y ago
If and when all cars are computer-controlled another consequence may be that children will be free to roam about. This assumes that those same cars are built to be incapable of hitting pedestrians. Is this possible?
- bamboozled 10y ago
  Children will be able to manipulate the cars and therefore create a bottleneck for others, this is a major issue outlined in the article.
- michaelbuckbee 10y ago
  Well, this sort of behavior has (presumably) already happened [1], but this also gets to the crux of "unintended consequences". Will we see kids deliberately walking in the street, knowing full well they aren't going to get hit and extorting drivers to let them pass? 1 - https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-autopilot-saved-life-prevented-serious-injury-pedestrian-dc/ https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-autopilot-saved-life-pr...
  - umberway 10y ago
    Yes I'm sure this sort of thing will happen however I imagine the overall social consequences would be beneficial. Children are highly confined at present and the ability to roam and talk to different people, walk to school, etc, has been lost. Largely for fear of their being run over by traffic.
    - dagw 10y ago
      Largely for fear of their being run over by traffic. Are you sure? I get the feeling that good old Stranger Danger is still alive and well, and automated cars won't in any way change that.
noonespecial 10y ago
I expect as far as the social aspect of driverless cars making their way through our neighbourhoods goes, eventually most humans will just come to see them as an odd type of animal. Like a horse. It probably wouldn't hurt to give them some active animal-like cosmetic features that help nearby humans anticipate what they are "thinking". Delightful symmetry there, no? The first great task of mechanized transport was getting rid of the horse aspects, the second was building them back in.
- amelius 10y ago
  Nice thought, but as the article states, car manufacturers do not want their cars to be recognizable as autonomous, because others might take advantage.
eriknstr 10y ago
Having the description of abbreviations all the way at the bottom of the article so that one has to scroll a mile to read what they mean is a bit annoying. Instead of: >When the first IMPs^1 for the fledgling ARPANET were being built starting in 1969 at BBN^2 in Cambridge, MA, I think it safe to say that no one foresaw the devastating impact that the networking technology being developed would have on journalism thirty to fifty years later. >[A million words] >^1 Interface Message Processors. Today they would be referred to as Internet protocol routers. >^2 Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, MA, a company that was always known as BBN. As distinct from BBN, the Buckingham Browne and Nichols school in Cambridge, MA — no doubt many employees of BBN sent their kids to school at BBN. I would have preferred for at least the first of these two to be baked into the text itself.
- MikeTLive 10y ago
  While I agree to some extent, I find it funny that I've somehow been around long enough to not realize people needed your example acronyms and names to be defined. Including the reference in the BBN definition to the other bbn :) I guess that's what happens when you live it first hand.
Daishiman 10y ago
Whenever people jump up enthusiastically about autonomous cars being right around the corner, I remember taking a cab in Lima, Peru, in the middle of some horrendously chaotic traffic, where drivers were navigating with little regard for lanes, negotiation for merging is done eye-to-eye, and impatient pedestrians would throw themselves into the street, tired of waiting for minutes to cross and trusting that the driver ahead wasn't suffering from some murderous rage that day. I also remember run-down suburbs where massive potholes and ditches make navigations of certain streets a puzzle by itself, compounded by garbage trucks ahead just doing their thing, improperly placed signage ahead, and those badly-designed intersections where you can totally count on drivers misjudging distances. As the designers move away from the relatively trivial confines of well-maintained urban spaces and into different countries and cultures, I seriously question their ability to keep things reasonable for the rest of the human drivers. So far nothing in the near-future horizons of this technology indicates that the software would be able to navigate in many of these adverse situations without incurring huge time penalties or causing unacceptable delays. I really do think that a lot of the hype happens to be because certain actors (Uber comes to mind as the most significant) have basically placed all their bets in these edge cases being small enough that a small number of human drivers should suffice to get around them. I remain skeptical.
- stale2002 10y ago
  Sure, those scenarios you pointed out are difficult, but what about highway driving? Replacing highway driving with autonomous vehicles is still completely game changing for the transportation industry. It means that 90% of truck drivers are out of a job. (Truck drivers of the future will just handle the last mile). That is certainly something that is going to be disruptive.
  - mcgrath_sh 10y ago
    I'd love this as a private vehicle too. Imagine if you could turn a 12 hour drive into an hour on each end (from highway exists to local destination) with the ability to just relax or sleep in the middle? I don't think I'd fly anywhere within 10 hours of me, because an overnight drive suddenly isn't a burden!
decker 10y ago
Don't forget that once we get to level 4, every time there's rain or snow, there might even be more loss of life as everyone gets to learn how to drive again in bad weather.
known 10y ago
Social mobility is a major problem in democracy http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-24936416 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-24936416
_ph_ 10y ago
Many good points in that article. Probably self driving cars are finally going to force us to review and to fix in many occasions the way we are using cars today. Especially the ways which are already broken today. A good example is the competition for the parking in front of a Starbucks or other similar shops. The common usage pattern is still crafted by how traffic was decades ago, and you could still just drive to a location and leave your car. But that depended on there being fewer cars than parking lots. In most locations, this is a thing long past - so I would consider the current situation already as broken. Self driving cars would make it worse and such could force us to finally find solutions for these situations. There are two obvious ways of fixing that situation. The first, recognize that trying to reach a location by individual cars cannot work out and ban private cars. Many European Cities have large pedestrian zones where private cars are locked out of whole streets in city centers. The other option would be, and fortunately self driving cars would be part of the solution, to create enough parking spaces. Parking in the streets would still be disallowed, creating large pickup areas instead. So the road sides would be free of parking cars, enabling drivers to stop at any desired spot. As soon as the passengers left the car, the car would leave immediately for a nearby garage. This would of course depend on the creation of the necessary amount of parking garages.
- chx 10y ago
  Banning private cards, I believe, will be unnecessary. I know free market is often folly but in this case, I believe, the advantages of just tapping in the app to call a driverless cab will be huge. In almost all cases it must be cheaper than owning a car which doesn't work most of the time just sits there.
  - _ph_ 10y ago
    I was not speaking of a total ban of private cars, just banning cars from certain streets. Converting streets to pedestrian zones is quite successful in the center of large cities, where the distances are short and the traffic density higher than individual transport could deliver.
- neuromute 10y ago
  Self driving cars could solve the problem of congestion and the problem of parking quite easily. If all cars were autonomous, then the flow of traffic could be optimised and things like traffic lights and roundabouts could be eradicated, this would drastically improve travel times. In an ideal world, no-one would own their own self-driving car, there would be a fleet (ideally state owned and taxpayer funded) that you simply order on-demand, like uber. This way there is no need to park. You simply arrange your pickup times either on-demand or ahead of time, so a vehicle is always there to scoop you up wherever you are.
tony-allan 10y ago
If the advent of self driving cars corresponds with reduced private ownership then cars will not need to wait and our children just need to hop into the next free car and their phone or smart school bag will contain their home address. For adults, cars will not need to hand around near venues because we will just get into the next available car. I agree that the transition will be messy. Perhaps we will need to redesign our local communities a bit to help. More off street parking for example.
pfarnsworth 10y ago
I had to stop reading because the blog poster's level of thinking is really superficial. If you're going to think completely autonomous self-driving cars, why the hell would you bother with things like parking? Why would I even bother "owning" a car? What the more reasonable approach is time-sharing of multiple vehicles, like Uber. So instead of worrying about parking, you order a car, and it picks you up, and then you get dropped off. It drives off and services other customers. Then, when it comes time to get driven home, you order another car that comes and picks you up. You only pay for the car while it's driving you, not while it's sitting there doing nothing. Or, if you did own the car, when you are not using it, it could go off and service other people and earn you money, and then return to pick you up. And why would you go to Starbucks to pick up your own coffee? Why not send a self-driving car through the special self-driving car drivethru to pick up the coffee and return it to you? It could wireless transmit the order and payment details for you, and have a special slot for the coffee or food order. Seriously, the article is really superficial thinking when it comes to self-driving cars.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Hermel 10y ago
  That's certainly true for some drivers. But there are still plenty of good reasons to own your own car without sharing it. For one, sharing it won't earn you much anyway, because everyone tends use their cars at about the same time, travelling the same direction. Then, it is very convenient to keep some stuff in your car that you might need but don't want to carry around all the time, especially if you have kids. So I don't think exclusive car-ownership will disappear.
  - djsumdog 10y ago
    I don't think you can own a self driving car (or at least regulators shouldn't allow it). Safety updates and inspections need to be on the level of FAA plane inspections. I mean really, these cars should drive themselves to a service centre at least once a month. When you couple all those costs together, and the liability from car modification compromising self-driving hardware, I just don't see it as a viability safe option.
tabeth 10y ago
Weird, but somewhat relevant question (given that self driving capabilities combined with buses can potentially disrupt public transportation in urban areas): why do we even allow anything that's not a bus (say, 10+ passenger) or industrial vehicle on the road? The downsides of such a thing seem small. 1. There would be less traffic 2. The speed limit could be raised 3. Due to higher occupancy, more people could go to places, faster. 4. Cheaper per person (maybe) than most other forms of public transportation 5. High density areas can have fleets of buses go there, express. This would have only a little overhead compared to driving your own vehicle, yet would be substantially cheaper.
- amelius 10y ago
  Depending on destination, you might need to change buses several times, which is of course inconvenient. OTOH, booking a busride far in advance might mitigate this. Also different price-levels could mitigate this to some extent. I'm not sure if it would be sufficient, though.
Larrikin 10y ago
I thought it was a very good article, but disliked the comparison to the sad state of US trains. The author knew he was being a little disingenuous with his comparisons to the sad state of US infrastructure, which is why he was careful to preface every reference to poorly automated train systems with the US. There are a number of automated systems worldwide that work pretty well. The Yurikamome was the first line that came to mind. Its not an extremely packed line, but having safety systems similar, like door gates, works very well. Automating a more used line would of course be more difficult, but not impossible. Aggressive door closing seems to work pretty well in taming crowds. It might take an education period in the US, but once people realize holding a door won't allow you on the train and that it will only allow you to remove a trapped limb, people will be less inclined to do it.
- jholman 10y ago
  Haha, yeah. Entirely agreed. There is, within 15 miles of the continental United States, a Level 4 automated train, that has been running for over 30 years, with 50 miles of track, and 300,000 passengers per day. And it works great. It's off-the-shelf technology backed by a moderately sizable 70-year-old company, so you can just go out and order a system like this yourself next year, if you want to (and you have a few billion dollars). That doesn't solve any of the self-driving car problems in the article, so it's totally a side point, but Level 4 trains are a solved problem, for over 30 years.
wcummings 10y ago
I live in this area, completely agree, author is spot on.
jack9 10y ago
Bait title for blog hits. These aren't unexpected consequences, they are some of the specific benefits. It adds nothing to the discussion as it's neither comprehensive nor insightful. Why does the author think autonomous cars are a net good? Thanks, he went on and on about a few things he wants to pretend are "unexpected". SMH
njharman 10y ago
Most of #2 sounds fascinating and not anti-social to me at all. Except, very few parents are gonna send a car and forgo helicoptering over their kids. Isn't having kid unattended in car illegal most places?
zby 10y ago
One aspect that is not covered is armed conflict (or terrorism). Imagine what would happen if enemy take over a fleet of autonomous cars, be it through hacking or by physical attack on a control center. Another thing: imagine robbery with autonomous robots and cars. I am waiting for Hollywood to catch up on these ideas - this would be very cinematic.
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  Does the car need to be completely autonomous for that scenario to be a huge issue. Isn't completely controllable through on board computer bad enough? Someone could remote control and thus weaponize such a car already, could they not?
  - zby 10y ago
    Yeah - indeed, remote control would be enough. There is a problem with latencies though - so you need at least some autonomy in the car. And then there is also the thing that if it is remotely controlled - then it is easy to stop it - just jam the communication link.
    - jakeogh 10y ago
      Eliminating the passenger lets you make the tool more expendable. The attacker can control more than one and afford to lose a few.
smileysteve 10y ago
I have to disagree with Social outcasts; A study this year concluded that driver pedestrian interactions are at an all time low; likely because of both parties using cell phones. As the article states, I often enter cross walks to test if a car is going to slow down; and they often don't. Similarly, I recently had a near miss when a pedestrian ran across the street when I had a green light (late at night too). (in Atlanta) Currently, cars are 1st class , Pedestrians are 2nd class, and when I bicycle, I'm often 3rd class. Self Driving cars, I hope, will make this more equal because I'm tired of almost getting hit when I walk across the street in my residential part of town and a "showboat" enjoys flooring it (going 2x the speed limit) down my street for the 1 block between traffic lights.
- nommm-nommm 10y ago
  Twice now in the last year I've waited at intersections for the walk signal and when it came on I almost got run over and got beeped and screamed profanities at by drivers taking a right. I guess now drivers believe that they have the right to the road 100% of the time and nobody should ever be allowed to cross, even at crosswalks during the prescribed time for crossing. Drivers have become increasingly hostile in the last several years.
elihu 10y ago
One thing about self-driving cars that I'm not looking forward to is the proliferation of zero-occupant vehicles on the roads.
- jakeogh 10y ago
  Remotely connected AI with ~1MJ of KE? No thanks.
argonaut 10y ago
> taking away much of the rest of advertising revenue from print, radio, and TV TV advertising revenue continues to grow, and is still larger than online ad revenue.
confabulatron 10y ago
What about that part where all of our computers are riddled with zero-days, and wide open to shadowy government organizations with massive technical budgets, and the part where we weren't 100% cool with that. And like, what about the part where we were worried about nefarious anonymous super hackers cyber-attacking the electric grid, and the gas grid, and other critical infrastructure, and we were worried about that sort of thing spiraling out of control into a federal emergency, because heat and potable water were taken down in the middle of winter, when a utility worker's laptop was spearphish hacked, because internet of things? I guess that can't happen anymore? So now, right in the middle of this, the cars get to driver where ever they want because computers, and nothing can go wrong. One has nothing to do with the other, and we'll all be safe and totally okay, right?
chernaborg 10y ago
What about that part where all of our computers are riddled with zero-days, and wide open to shadowy government organizations with massive technical budgets, and the part where we weren't 100% cool with that. And like, what about the part where we were worried about nefarious anonymous super hackers cyber-attacking the electric grid, and the gas grid, and other critical infrastructure, and we were worried about that sort of thing spiraling out of control into a federal emergency, because heat and potable water were taken down in the middle of winter, when a utility worker's laptop was spearphish hacked, because internet of things? I guess that can't happen anymore? So now, right in the middle of this, the cars get to drive wherever they want because computers, and nothing can go wrong. One has nothing to do with the other, and we'll all be safe and totally okay, right?
Tepix 10y ago
The author is wrong, the manufacturers are already considering the problem of communicating with pedestrians. Mercedes: http://www.electronics-eetimes.com/news/mercedes-benz-self-driving-car-communicates-leds http://www.electronics-eetimes.com/news/mercedes-benz-self-d... Google: http://time.com/4129247/google-self-driving-cars-patent/ http://time.com/4129247/google-self-driving-cars-patent/ And this article in popular science: http://www.popsci.com/people-want-to-interact-even-with-an-autonomous-car http://www.popsci.com/people-want-to-interact-even-with-an-a...
- amelius 10y ago
  Do pedestrians now have to learn the UIs of different brands of cars in order to not be overrun?
aamederen 10y ago
At some point, we will debate against manual driver cars. As a petrol-head, I love driving and riding but that is the truth. the sooner we get rid of manual-drived cars, the faster we switch to self driving cars because the existence of manual cars are a big problem for self driving cars and they limit the potential the self-driving cars can achieve. We should at least do that in some cities. Imagine a town with no traffic lights and cars move in a harmony and scary precision in traffic.
- yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
  Imagine a power outage. Imagine solar flares. Imagine a town with no backup plan for complex systems suddenly encountering events with 1 in a million odds.
bamboozled 10y ago
What about privacy? There could be some serious privacy issues introduced by self-driving cars if they take off. Cameras and microphones patrolling neighborhoods of the world, constantly feeding data into "the cloud" with absolutely no accountability? Just no!
lhopki01 10y ago
The comparison to level 4 or 5 trains doesn't make sense to me. For a train you've got millions of dollars worth of hardware and track so the driver is only a tiny component in the overall cost. For trucks and taxis the driver is the biggest costs. The incentives for autonomous cars are much higher than autonomous trains.
ck425 10y ago
This is very interesting to read from a UK perspective. We don't have the concept of jaywalking, except for on motorways (I was actually shocked when an american friend explained it at uni, how the hell does anyone get anywhere, then I realised they mostly drive). So these social interactions don't just occur in certain areas, they're widespread across most roads and pedestrians technically have right of way over cars. Could autonomous vehicles cause the end of walking places?
tahoeskibum 10y ago
I think that driving in places such as India with little traffic rules might be easier for an AI because the traffic flow is self-organized. There might not be any rules, but that is not relevant as we are not talking about expert rule based systems. If the AI car sees a cow it'll just slow down and move to the side to overtake.
MR4D 10y ago
This is a great article that covers not only edge cases, but almost subliminal behavior that people perform almost every day. To me, it is clear that our behavior will change. As an American in Amsterdam a few years ago, I was horrified to learn that at some places pedestrians can just walk out in front of you, and you have to stop. After a few days of observing this (as a passenger, thankfully), I noticed that you could tell the tourists - the natives would walk into the street without looking, knowing the drivers would stop. Tourists would hesitate, looking to the driver for feedback. Oddly (to me, as an American), I found that the natives had it right, and that blind faith made things smoother. The tourists, in checking for driver feedback before waling into a street, would actually slow things down more than necessary. This is but one anecdote of thousands, but it shows how the expected behavior of a person from one place does not necessarily translate to another place. I would extend that same thinking to the future, in that or future will be a behavior change from what we do today. I'm sure it will come slowly (although occasionally startlingly), and there will be new signs, new laws, and new behaviors. But for me, the best comparison is to when we introduced cars into the streets that had previously been owned by horses and carriages. a bit of chaos, but fairly rapid adoption (within a decade). It wasn't uniform, and it was messy, and some places lagged the modern world by decades. But it came, we adjusted, and now we can't even remember what that previous world was like. What's that quote about the future not being evenly distributed? I think it applies here perfectly.
webmaven 10y ago
> Since there are no current ways that driverless cars can give social signals to people, beyond inching forward to indicate that they want to go, how will they indicate to a person that they have seen them and it safe to cross in front of the car at a stop sign? There is no reason that autonomous vehicles can't give other rudimentary social signals in ways similar to drivers that can't see each other by using their headlights, turn signals, emitting short 'beeps' from their horn, and so on. For that matter, autonomous vehicles can be given greater range of expression by adding a 100^2 pixel RGB LED display or similar behind the windshield or on the hood that can display emojis, or by actually giving them the ability to speak (KITT-style): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-UqF5ElduY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-UqF5ElduY
- amelius 10y ago
  Eventually perhaps. But until then, there is a very large uncanny valley to bridge.

183 points by ghosh 10y ago

If and when all cars are computer-controlled another consequence may be that children will be free to roam about. This assumes that those same cars are built to be incapable of hitting pedestrians. Is this possible?

bamboozled 10y ago
Children will be able to manipulate the cars and therefore create a bottleneck for others, this is a major issue outlined in the article.
michaelbuckbee 10y ago
Well, this sort of behavior has (presumably) already happened [1], but this also gets to the crux of "unintended consequences". Will we see kids deliberately walking in the street, knowing full well they aren't going to get hit and extorting drivers to let them pass? 1 - https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-autopilot-saved-life-prevented-serious-injury-pedestrian-dc/ https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-autopilot-saved-life-pr...
- umberway 10y ago
  Yes I'm sure this sort of thing will happen however I imagine the overall social consequences would be beneficial. Children are highly confined at present and the ability to roam and talk to different people, walk to school, etc, has been lost. Largely for fear of their being run over by traffic.
  - dagw 10y ago
    Largely for fear of their being run over by traffic. Are you sure? I get the feeling that good old Stranger Danger is still alive and well, and automated cars won't in any way change that.

noonespecial 10y ago

I expect as far as the social aspect of driverless cars making their way through our neighbourhoods goes, eventually most humans will just come to see them as an odd type of animal. Like a horse. It probably wouldn't hurt to give them some active animal-like cosmetic features that help nearby humans anticipate what they are "thinking". Delightful symmetry there, no? The first great task of mechanized transport was getting rid of the horse aspects, the second was building them back in.

amelius 10y ago
Nice thought, but as the article states, car manufacturers do not want their cars to be recognizable as autonomous, because others might take advantage.

eriknstr 10y ago

Having the description of abbreviations all the way at the bottom of the article so that one has to scroll a mile to read what they mean is a bit annoying. Instead of: >When the first IMPs^1 for the fledgling ARPANET were being built starting in 1969 at BBN^2 in Cambridge, MA, I think it safe to say that no one foresaw the devastating impact that the networking technology being developed would have on journalism thirty to fifty years later. >[A million words] >^1 Interface Message Processors. Today they would be referred to as Internet protocol routers. >^2 Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, MA, a company that was always known as BBN. As distinct from BBN, the Buckingham Browne and Nichols school in Cambridge, MA — no doubt many employees of BBN sent their kids to school at BBN. I would have preferred for at least the first of these two to be baked into the text itself.

MikeTLive 10y ago
While I agree to some extent, I find it funny that I've somehow been around long enough to not realize people needed your example acronyms and names to be defined. Including the reference in the BBN definition to the other bbn :) I guess that's what happens when you live it first hand.

Daishiman 10y ago

Whenever people jump up enthusiastically about autonomous cars being right around the corner, I remember taking a cab in Lima, Peru, in the middle of some horrendously chaotic traffic, where drivers were navigating with little regard for lanes, negotiation for merging is done eye-to-eye, and impatient pedestrians would throw themselves into the street, tired of waiting for minutes to cross and trusting that the driver ahead wasn't suffering from some murderous rage that day. I also remember run-down suburbs where massive potholes and ditches make navigations of certain streets a puzzle by itself, compounded by garbage trucks ahead just doing their thing, improperly placed signage ahead, and those badly-designed intersections where you can totally count on drivers misjudging distances. As the designers move away from the relatively trivial confines of well-maintained urban spaces and into different countries and cultures, I seriously question their ability to keep things reasonable for the rest of the human drivers. So far nothing in the near-future horizons of this technology indicates that the software would be able to navigate in many of these adverse situations without incurring huge time penalties or causing unacceptable delays. I really do think that a lot of the hype happens to be because certain actors (Uber comes to mind as the most significant) have basically placed all their bets in these edge cases being small enough that a small number of human drivers should suffice to get around them. I remain skeptical.

stale2002 10y ago
Sure, those scenarios you pointed out are difficult, but what about highway driving? Replacing highway driving with autonomous vehicles is still completely game changing for the transportation industry. It means that 90% of truck drivers are out of a job. (Truck drivers of the future will just handle the last mile). That is certainly something that is going to be disruptive.
- mcgrath_sh 10y ago
  I'd love this as a private vehicle too. Imagine if you could turn a 12 hour drive into an hour on each end (from highway exists to local destination) with the ability to just relax or sleep in the middle? I don't think I'd fly anywhere within 10 hours of me, because an overnight drive suddenly isn't a burden!

decker 10y ago

Don't forget that once we get to level 4, every time there's rain or snow, there might even be more loss of life as everyone gets to learn how to drive again in bad weather.

known 10y ago

Social mobility is a major problem in democracy http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-24936416 http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-24936416

_ph_ 10y ago

Many good points in that article. Probably self driving cars are finally going to force us to review and to fix in many occasions the way we are using cars today. Especially the ways which are already broken today. A good example is the competition for the parking in front of a Starbucks or other similar shops. The common usage pattern is still crafted by how traffic was decades ago, and you could still just drive to a location and leave your car. But that depended on there being fewer cars than parking lots. In most locations, this is a thing long past - so I would consider the current situation already as broken. Self driving cars would make it worse and such could force us to finally find solutions for these situations. There are two obvious ways of fixing that situation. The first, recognize that trying to reach a location by individual cars cannot work out and ban private cars. Many European Cities have large pedestrian zones where private cars are locked out of whole streets in city centers. The other option would be, and fortunately self driving cars would be part of the solution, to create enough parking spaces. Parking in the streets would still be disallowed, creating large pickup areas instead. So the road sides would be free of parking cars, enabling drivers to stop at any desired spot. As soon as the passengers left the car, the car would leave immediately for a nearby garage. This would of course depend on the creation of the necessary amount of parking garages.

chx 10y ago
Banning private cards, I believe, will be unnecessary. I know free market is often folly but in this case, I believe, the advantages of just tapping in the app to call a driverless cab will be huge. In almost all cases it must be cheaper than owning a car which doesn't work most of the time just sits there.
- _ph_ 10y ago
  I was not speaking of a total ban of private cars, just banning cars from certain streets. Converting streets to pedestrian zones is quite successful in the center of large cities, where the distances are short and the traffic density higher than individual transport could deliver.
neuromute 10y ago
Self driving cars could solve the problem of congestion and the problem of parking quite easily. If all cars were autonomous, then the flow of traffic could be optimised and things like traffic lights and roundabouts could be eradicated, this would drastically improve travel times. In an ideal world, no-one would own their own self-driving car, there would be a fleet (ideally state owned and taxpayer funded) that you simply order on-demand, like uber. This way there is no need to park. You simply arrange your pickup times either on-demand or ahead of time, so a vehicle is always there to scoop you up wherever you are.

tony-allan 10y ago

If the advent of self driving cars corresponds with reduced private ownership then cars will not need to wait and our children just need to hop into the next free car and their phone or smart school bag will contain their home address. For adults, cars will not need to hand around near venues because we will just get into the next available car. I agree that the transition will be messy. Perhaps we will need to redesign our local communities a bit to help. More off street parking for example.

pfarnsworth 10y ago

I had to stop reading because the blog poster's level of thinking is really superficial. If you're going to think completely autonomous self-driving cars, why the hell would you bother with things like parking? Why would I even bother "owning" a car? What the more reasonable approach is time-sharing of multiple vehicles, like Uber. So instead of worrying about parking, you order a car, and it picks you up, and then you get dropped off. It drives off and services other customers. Then, when it comes time to get driven home, you order another car that comes and picks you up. You only pay for the car while it's driving you, not while it's sitting there doing nothing. Or, if you did own the car, when you are not using it, it could go off and service other people and earn you money, and then return to pick you up. And why would you go to Starbucks to pick up your own coffee? Why not send a self-driving car through the special self-driving car drivethru to pick up the coffee and return it to you? It could wireless transmit the order and payment details for you, and have a special slot for the coffee or food order. Seriously, the article is really superficial thinking when it comes to self-driving cars.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Hermel 10y ago
That's certainly true for some drivers. But there are still plenty of good reasons to own your own car without sharing it. For one, sharing it won't earn you much anyway, because everyone tends use their cars at about the same time, travelling the same direction. Then, it is very convenient to keep some stuff in your car that you might need but don't want to carry around all the time, especially if you have kids. So I don't think exclusive car-ownership will disappear.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I don't think you can own a self driving car (or at least regulators shouldn't allow it). Safety updates and inspections need to be on the level of FAA plane inspections. I mean really, these cars should drive themselves to a service centre at least once a month. When you couple all those costs together, and the liability from car modification compromising self-driving hardware, I just don't see it as a viability safe option.

tabeth 10y ago

Weird, but somewhat relevant question (given that self driving capabilities combined with buses can potentially disrupt public transportation in urban areas): why do we even allow anything that's not a bus (say, 10+ passenger) or industrial vehicle on the road? The downsides of such a thing seem small. 1. There would be less traffic 2. The speed limit could be raised 3. Due to higher occupancy, more people could go to places, faster. 4. Cheaper per person (maybe) than most other forms of public transportation 5. High density areas can have fleets of buses go there, express. This would have only a little overhead compared to driving your own vehicle, yet would be substantially cheaper.

amelius 10y ago
Depending on destination, you might need to change buses several times, which is of course inconvenient. OTOH, booking a busride far in advance might mitigate this. Also different price-levels could mitigate this to some extent. I'm not sure if it would be sufficient, though.

Larrikin 10y ago

I thought it was a very good article, but disliked the comparison to the sad state of US trains. The author knew he was being a little disingenuous with his comparisons to the sad state of US infrastructure, which is why he was careful to preface every reference to poorly automated train systems with the US. There are a number of automated systems worldwide that work pretty well. The Yurikamome was the first line that came to mind. Its not an extremely packed line, but having safety systems similar, like door gates, works very well. Automating a more used line would of course be more difficult, but not impossible. Aggressive door closing seems to work pretty well in taming crowds. It might take an education period in the US, but once people realize holding a door won't allow you on the train and that it will only allow you to remove a trapped limb, people will be less inclined to do it.

jholman 10y ago
Haha, yeah. Entirely agreed. There is, within 15 miles of the continental United States, a Level 4 automated train, that has been running for over 30 years, with 50 miles of track, and 300,000 passengers per day. And it works great. It's off-the-shelf technology backed by a moderately sizable 70-year-old company, so you can just go out and order a system like this yourself next year, if you want to (and you have a few billion dollars). That doesn't solve any of the self-driving car problems in the article, so it's totally a side point, but Level 4 trains are a solved problem, for over 30 years.

wcummings 10y ago

I live in this area, completely agree, author is spot on.

jack9 10y ago

Bait title for blog hits. These aren't unexpected consequences, they are some of the specific benefits. It adds nothing to the discussion as it's neither comprehensive nor insightful. Why does the author think autonomous cars are a net good? Thanks, he went on and on about a few things he wants to pretend are "unexpected". SMH

njharman 10y ago

Most of #2 sounds fascinating and not anti-social to me at all. Except, very few parents are gonna send a car and forgo helicoptering over their kids. Isn't having kid unattended in car illegal most places?

zby 10y ago

One aspect that is not covered is armed conflict (or terrorism). Imagine what would happen if enemy take over a fleet of autonomous cars, be it through hacking or by physical attack on a control center. Another thing: imagine robbery with autonomous robots and cars. I am waiting for Hollywood to catch up on these ideas - this would be very cinematic.

ajmurmann 10y ago
Does the car need to be completely autonomous for that scenario to be a huge issue. Isn't completely controllable through on board computer bad enough? Someone could remote control and thus weaponize such a car already, could they not?
- zby 10y ago
  Yeah - indeed, remote control would be enough. There is a problem with latencies though - so you need at least some autonomy in the car. And then there is also the thing that if it is remotely controlled - then it is easy to stop it - just jam the communication link.
  - jakeogh 10y ago
    Eliminating the passenger lets you make the tool more expendable. The attacker can control more than one and afford to lose a few.

smileysteve 10y ago

I have to disagree with Social outcasts; A study this year concluded that driver pedestrian interactions are at an all time low; likely because of both parties using cell phones. As the article states, I often enter cross walks to test if a car is going to slow down; and they often don't. Similarly, I recently had a near miss when a pedestrian ran across the street when I had a green light (late at night too). (in Atlanta) Currently, cars are 1st class , Pedestrians are 2nd class, and when I bicycle, I'm often 3rd class. Self Driving cars, I hope, will make this more equal because I'm tired of almost getting hit when I walk across the street in my residential part of town and a "showboat" enjoys flooring it (going 2x the speed limit) down my street for the 1 block between traffic lights.

nommm-nommm 10y ago
Twice now in the last year I've waited at intersections for the walk signal and when it came on I almost got run over and got beeped and screamed profanities at by drivers taking a right. I guess now drivers believe that they have the right to the road 100% of the time and nobody should ever be allowed to cross, even at crosswalks during the prescribed time for crossing. Drivers have become increasingly hostile in the last several years.

elihu 10y ago

One thing about self-driving cars that I'm not looking forward to is the proliferation of zero-occupant vehicles on the roads.

jakeogh 10y ago
Remotely connected AI with ~1MJ of KE? No thanks.

argonaut 10y ago

> taking away much of the rest of advertising revenue from print, radio, and TV TV advertising revenue continues to grow, and is still larger than online ad revenue.

confabulatron 10y ago

What about that part where all of our computers are riddled with zero-days, and wide open to shadowy government organizations with massive technical budgets, and the part where we weren't 100% cool with that. And like, what about the part where we were worried about nefarious anonymous super hackers cyber-attacking the electric grid, and the gas grid, and other critical infrastructure, and we were worried about that sort of thing spiraling out of control into a federal emergency, because heat and potable water were taken down in the middle of winter, when a utility worker's laptop was spearphish hacked, because internet of things? I guess that can't happen anymore? So now, right in the middle of this, the cars get to driver where ever they want because computers, and nothing can go wrong. One has nothing to do with the other, and we'll all be safe and totally okay, right?

chernaborg 10y ago

What about that part where all of our computers are riddled with zero-days, and wide open to shadowy government organizations with massive technical budgets, and the part where we weren't 100% cool with that. And like, what about the part where we were worried about nefarious anonymous super hackers cyber-attacking the electric grid, and the gas grid, and other critical infrastructure, and we were worried about that sort of thing spiraling out of control into a federal emergency, because heat and potable water were taken down in the middle of winter, when a utility worker's laptop was spearphish hacked, because internet of things? I guess that can't happen anymore? So now, right in the middle of this, the cars get to drive wherever they want because computers, and nothing can go wrong. One has nothing to do with the other, and we'll all be safe and totally okay, right?

Tepix 10y ago

The author is wrong, the manufacturers are already considering the problem of communicating with pedestrians. Mercedes: http://www.electronics-eetimes.com/news/mercedes-benz-self-driving-car-communicates-leds http://www.electronics-eetimes.com/news/mercedes-benz-self-d... Google: http://time.com/4129247/google-self-driving-cars-patent/ http://time.com/4129247/google-self-driving-cars-patent/ And this article in popular science: http://www.popsci.com/people-want-to-interact-even-with-an-autonomous-car http://www.popsci.com/people-want-to-interact-even-with-an-a...

amelius 10y ago
Do pedestrians now have to learn the UIs of different brands of cars in order to not be overrun?

aamederen 10y ago

At some point, we will debate against manual driver cars. As a petrol-head, I love driving and riding but that is the truth. the sooner we get rid of manual-drived cars, the faster we switch to self driving cars because the existence of manual cars are a big problem for self driving cars and they limit the potential the self-driving cars can achieve. We should at least do that in some cities. Imagine a town with no traffic lights and cars move in a harmony and scary precision in traffic.

yjftsjthsd-h 10y ago
Imagine a power outage. Imagine solar flares. Imagine a town with no backup plan for complex systems suddenly encountering events with 1 in a million odds.

bamboozled 10y ago

What about privacy? There could be some serious privacy issues introduced by self-driving cars if they take off. Cameras and microphones patrolling neighborhoods of the world, constantly feeding data into "the cloud" with absolutely no accountability? Just no!

lhopki01 10y ago

The comparison to level 4 or 5 trains doesn't make sense to me. For a train you've got millions of dollars worth of hardware and track so the driver is only a tiny component in the overall cost. For trucks and taxis the driver is the biggest costs. The incentives for autonomous cars are much higher than autonomous trains.

ck425 10y ago

This is very interesting to read from a UK perspective. We don't have the concept of jaywalking, except for on motorways (I was actually shocked when an american friend explained it at uni, how the hell does anyone get anywhere, then I realised they mostly drive). So these social interactions don't just occur in certain areas, they're widespread across most roads and pedestrians technically have right of way over cars. Could autonomous vehicles cause the end of walking places?

tahoeskibum 10y ago

I think that driving in places such as India with little traffic rules might be easier for an AI because the traffic flow is self-organized. There might not be any rules, but that is not relevant as we are not talking about expert rule based systems. If the AI car sees a cow it'll just slow down and move to the side to overtake.

MR4D 10y ago

This is a great article that covers not only edge cases, but almost subliminal behavior that people perform almost every day. To me, it is clear that our behavior will change. As an American in Amsterdam a few years ago, I was horrified to learn that at some places pedestrians can just walk out in front of you, and you have to stop. After a few days of observing this (as a passenger, thankfully), I noticed that you could tell the tourists - the natives would walk into the street without looking, knowing the drivers would stop. Tourists would hesitate, looking to the driver for feedback. Oddly (to me, as an American), I found that the natives had it right, and that blind faith made things smoother. The tourists, in checking for driver feedback before waling into a street, would actually slow things down more than necessary. This is but one anecdote of thousands, but it shows how the expected behavior of a person from one place does not necessarily translate to another place. I would extend that same thinking to the future, in that or future will be a behavior change from what we do today. I'm sure it will come slowly (although occasionally startlingly), and there will be new signs, new laws, and new behaviors. But for me, the best comparison is to when we introduced cars into the streets that had previously been owned by horses and carriages. a bit of chaos, but fairly rapid adoption (within a decade). It wasn't uniform, and it was messy, and some places lagged the modern world by decades. But it came, we adjusted, and now we can't even remember what that previous world was like. What's that quote about the future not being evenly distributed? I think it applies here perfectly.

webmaven 10y ago

> Since there are no current ways that driverless cars can give social signals to people, beyond inching forward to indicate that they want to go, how will they indicate to a person that they have seen them and it safe to cross in front of the car at a stop sign? There is no reason that autonomous vehicles can't give other rudimentary social signals in ways similar to drivers that can't see each other by using their headlights, turn signals, emitting short 'beeps' from their horn, and so on. For that matter, autonomous vehicles can be given greater range of expression by adding a 100^2 pixel RGB LED display or similar behind the windshield or on the hood that can display emojis, or by actually giving them the ability to speak (KITT-style): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-UqF5ElduY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-UqF5ElduY

amelius 10y ago
Eventually perhaps. But until then, there is a very large uncanny valley to bridge.