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I expect this will be one of the problems with self driving cars. People will simply walk in front of them crossing the street whenever they want, knowing they
by dmortin 8y ago
I expect this will be one of the problems with self driving cars. People will simply walk in front of them crossing the street whenever they want, knowing they won't be hit.
And also human drivers will cut off self driving cars all the time knowing the robot driver is extra careful and won't be aggressive.
- ForHackernews 8y agoGood! Maybe cities will finally be able to reclaim their streets from automobiles https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/when-pedestrians-ruled-streets-180953396/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/when-pedestrians-r...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- buboard 8y agothey can still honk aggressively. and they can take pictures of license plates
- dmortin 8y agoHonking won't mean much if it comes from a robot. People won't care about that. License plates photos may help, but will the car send each of these to the police automatically? Police can quickly get swamped then by these reports from self driving cars.
- SquareWheel 8y agoThat seems like a solvable problem. If there's so many reports as to be swamping them, then just those with multiple violations would be reviewed.
- dmortin 8y agoEven taking a photo of the licensing plate is not trivial. If the robot car does not follow the violating car directly then its license plate may be at an angle where it can't be captured and if it can it may be distorted or angled, so a human is needed to view the footage (if a video is captured) to detect the actual license plate numbers, so automation can be a problem in practice.
- SquareWheel 8y agoI feel like I'm repeating myself, but that too seems like a solvable problem. A car covered in sensors is likely a lot better at capturing and remember license plates than a human. Even keeping a memory of the last 60 seconds would be more than enough. Technology-wise, Google is already very good at OCR. They even have algorithms to specifically identify license plates (as seen in Google Maps where they're fuzzed out). This seems more a problem of policy (how would it be implemented?) than technology. And that too would evolve as necessity grew.
- buboard 8y ago> People won't care about that. The people around them will notice the honking as well. That creates social pressure against people who cause the honking. Police only needs to act on a few of these violations to create a new consensus behavior.
- tim333 8y agoPresumably the passengers could shout at the pedestrians if they like. Starship Technologies autonomous delivery bots you might think would have a problem of people trapping or stealing them but seem ok - they have trackers, cameras and a loudspeaker that people at the base can say 'oi put me down' though. http://elitebusinessmagazine.co.uk/interviews/item/street-smarts-how-ahti-heinla-s-starship-technologies-is-revolutionising-deliveries-with-robots http://elitebusinessmagazine.co.uk/interviews/item/street-sm...
- peteretep 8y agoI can see the first "greedy" local authority insisting that the cars upload footage of human drivers breaking rules in no time. These autonomous cars provide excellent surveillance capability at scale.
- kart23 8y agoOh yeah. Also they have huge following distances so everyone is going to be merging in front of them. Honestly, I would feel so frustrated riding in one of these.