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My main takeaway from your story is that fully autonomous driving requires a universal deployment of a system which allows police and emergency services to depl

My main takeaway from your story is that fully autonomous driving requires a universal deployment of a system which allows police and emergency services to deploy updates to the road network map in real time. (Sure, it would be nicer if the car was intelligent enough to understand a man waving at it, but that's the lower bound that I take from these reports.)

_Understated_ 7y ago
Yep and the problem I have with that is that you can be sure it will be used for everything else including tracking my movements in real time and using them against me at some point or for insurance companies or some other org I don't currently know about.
Ntrails 7y ago
The builders blocking a road for a delivery of bricks are not emergency services. The Water company is not an emergency service. The actual emergency services do not have time to spend their time micro managing every ad hoc road blockage that will come about (and for damned sure someone will forget to turn the blockage off again). You are not going to get perfect centralised road status information for driving cars.
- phkahler 7y ago
  Right. Its complete narcissism when people think having the world bend to support their inferior AI is going to solve all these problems.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    100-150 years ago, the world bent hard to integrate cars into the existing traffic infrastructure. I don't see why we won't be able to adjust our infrastructure again to support new developments.
pwinnski 7y ago
More than once in Texas I've seen situations like the above-described in which the waving man was a civilian, no police involvement at all. I think that's the point of self-driving's limitations. There are many, many ways in which human drivers fail, to the tune of 35k dead per year. But there are also many, many, many ways in which human drivers handle situations safely that would result in self-driving cars either plowing straight ahead or stopping confused, either situation being worse than what happens today. I think these latter situations affect far more than 35k people per year. They might affect more than 35k people per day. Death vs inconvenience is an obvious trade, self-driving isn't all or nothing. Safety features like auto-stopping and lane-keeping probably reduce that 35k number dramatically if they're more widespread, without taking human hands off the wheel for the other situations.

_Understated_ 7y ago

Yep and the problem I have with that is that you can be sure it will be used for everything else including tracking my movements in real time and using them against me at some point or for insurance companies or some other org I don't currently know about.

Ntrails 7y ago

The builders blocking a road for a delivery of bricks are not emergency services. The Water company is not an emergency service. The actual emergency services do not have time to spend their time micro managing every ad hoc road blockage that will come about (and for damned sure someone will forget to turn the blockage off again). You are not going to get perfect centralised road status information for driving cars.

phkahler 7y ago
Right. Its complete narcissism when people think having the world bend to support their inferior AI is going to solve all these problems.
- majewsky 7y ago
  100-150 years ago, the world bent hard to integrate cars into the existing traffic infrastructure. I don't see why we won't be able to adjust our infrastructure again to support new developments.

pwinnski 7y ago

More than once in Texas I've seen situations like the above-described in which the waving man was a civilian, no police involvement at all. I think that's the point of self-driving's limitations. There are many, many ways in which human drivers fail, to the tune of 35k dead per year. But there are also many, many, many ways in which human drivers handle situations safely that would result in self-driving cars either plowing straight ahead or stopping confused, either situation being worse than what happens today. I think these latter situations affect far more than 35k people per year. They might affect more than 35k people per day. Death vs inconvenience is an obvious trade, self-driving isn't all or nothing. Safety features like auto-stopping and lane-keeping probably reduce that 35k number dramatically if they're more widespread, without taking human hands off the wheel for the other situations.