3 ms·

I look forward to fully self-driving cars, but I fear this halfway situation of semi-automated safety aids is going to make things worse, not better.

by beat 7y ago

kelnos 7y ago
There's a similar (yet generally not as bad) problem with airliner automation: the less a pilot has to do, the less experience they will have actually actively flying the plane. And when the automation hits a corner case where it can't control the plane, the pilot has fewer skills and experience on hand to keep the plane in the air. The more automation allows people to avoid paying full attention to driving, the more crashes we will have when the automation fails and the human driver is unable to take control or react appropriately fast enough to avoid a collision. This problem all goes away when we have perfect automation (or at least automation that performs better than humans do without the automation), but we're certainly not there yet, and it's not clear that we're even close. And even if you have automation that's better than a human driver, when the automation does fail, and people die, there's an emotional backlash because, even if they're entirely wrong, people feel like they could have done better, if they just had control of the situation themselves. And even without that, you still need to assign blame. Does it go to the human in the car, even though they weren't driving? Does it go to the manufacturer of the automation? Or do we have to go through a huge cultural shift and dispense with the notion of blame in these sorts of situations?
- beat 7y ago
  It's funny... I am an adamant stickshift driver. I don't like driving cars with automatic transmissions. I feel less in control, less attentive. If even the difference between shifting myself and having some hydraulics do it for me bothers me, what about all this automatic other stuff? We also hang on to cars for a long time, but my spouse recently got a new car and it has, among other things, a lane-keeping feature. It annoys the crap out of me. I use it on highway driving, but not in urban driving. On the other hand, it has a context-sensitive cruise control I really like.
  - kelnos 7y ago
    I've had a car with a manual transmission for 12 years now; I dunno about feeling more in control. I personally find it more fun to drive a manual transmission car, but I recognize that I have no logical basis for this. Modern automatic transmissions (or CVTs) likely get better fuel economy than I do. And I honestly don't even really think about shifting that much when I'm driving; after doing it for so long, it just comes automatically (despite the fact that I drive very little, on the order of 1500 miles per year at most). It's extremely annoying if I'm ever in stop-and-go traffic, to the point that I'll probably get an automatic transmission car whenever I need a new one. I can also count on one hand the number of friends who can drive stick, so if I'm ever driving people on a long road trip, there's no one to share the driving.

I look forward to fully self-driving cars, but I fear this halfway situation of semi-automated safety aids is going to make things worse, not better.

by beat 7y ago

I look forward to fully self-driving cars, but I fear this halfway situation of semi-automated safety aids is going to make things worse, not better.

kelnos 7y ago

There's a similar (yet generally not as bad) problem with airliner automation: the less a pilot has to do, the less experience they will have actually actively flying the plane. And when the automation hits a corner case where it can't control the plane, the pilot has fewer skills and experience on hand to keep the plane in the air. The more automation allows people to avoid paying full attention to driving, the more crashes we will have when the automation fails and the human driver is unable to take control or react appropriately fast enough to avoid a collision. This problem all goes away when we have perfect automation (or at least automation that performs better than humans do without the automation), but we're certainly not there yet, and it's not clear that we're even close. And even if you have automation that's better than a human driver, when the automation does fail, and people die, there's an emotional backlash because, even if they're entirely wrong, people feel like they could have done better, if they just had control of the situation themselves. And even without that, you still need to assign blame. Does it go to the human in the car, even though they weren't driving? Does it go to the manufacturer of the automation? Or do we have to go through a huge cultural shift and dispense with the notion of blame in these sorts of situations?

beat 7y ago
It's funny... I am an adamant stickshift driver. I don't like driving cars with automatic transmissions. I feel less in control, less attentive. If even the difference between shifting myself and having some hydraulics do it for me bothers me, what about all this automatic other stuff? We also hang on to cars for a long time, but my spouse recently got a new car and it has, among other things, a lane-keeping feature. It annoys the crap out of me. I use it on highway driving, but not in urban driving. On the other hand, it has a context-sensitive cruise control I really like.
- kelnos 7y ago
  I've had a car with a manual transmission for 12 years now; I dunno about feeling more in control. I personally find it more fun to drive a manual transmission car, but I recognize that I have no logical basis for this. Modern automatic transmissions (or CVTs) likely get better fuel economy than I do. And I honestly don't even really think about shifting that much when I'm driving; after doing it for so long, it just comes automatically (despite the fact that I drive very little, on the order of 1500 miles per year at most). It's extremely annoying if I'm ever in stop-and-go traffic, to the point that I'll probably get an automatic transmission car whenever I need a new one. I can also count on one hand the number of friends who can drive stick, so if I'm ever driving people on a long road trip, there's no one to share the driving.