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All of the current gen assisted/self driving tech seems like it's operating in a legal grey area like Uber. Every car manufacturer assumes people are still beh

All of the current gen assisted/self driving tech seems like it's operating in a legal grey area like Uber. Every car manufacturer assumes people are still behind the wheel, and the government is (naively?) going along with it. "By operating this vehicle you agree to..." seems to dissolve them of any responsibility, including around quality of software, and it honestly scares the hell out of me. I don't know what the fix is for this, the genies out of the bottle here. We won't have reliable self driving cars for years (decades?), and until then we're stuck in this horrible wild west where an off by one error can cause a pileup on the highway. Let's stop the the assisted/self driving stuff until we have a regulatory framework that can prove the tech works in various conditions, much like seatbelts and collision testing.

throwaway122378 6y ago
We need a digital infrastructure plan. Nationwide upgrade to create a universal platform for autonomous vehicles including a common protocol language, smart signs, smart traffic lights, location beacons, improved highway infrastructure, upgrades laws and more.
z6 6y ago
We have these accidents and pileups constantly without involvement of assisted driving technology. By your logic we should disallow anything that could ever hurt anybody.
- candiddevmike 6y ago
  Exactly, why add another way for humans to be negligent? I would absolutely love to see mass transit replace self driving cars as the panacea to our transportation issues.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    Exactly. I don't think people realize just how terrible cars at at scaling, whether they are human driven or completely controlled centrally as a fleet. Even parking a single car requires as much square footage as the typical worker requirement for office space. And if you don't have onsite parking, you have double the miles travelled as cars leave the central business district to temporary storage far away, only to come back to pick people up for their commutes back. The past century of car-based thinking has damaged the US's planning brains. We need to go back to first principles and think about serving the needs and wants of humans, rather than serving the needs of a hugely space inefficient and health-damaging transit mode.
  - mlindner 6y ago
    Mass transit doesn't take you to every location and cannot. Cars must exist in some form or another for access to many locations. Mass transit has not replaced all cars in any (non-city-state) country on this planet.
    - epistasis 6y ago
      Cars and transit are not mutually exclusive. The more people that use mass transit, the better the experience fire people that still use cars. However we are hampered from enabling better mass transit in the US by those who refuse to let the two coexist and want to force everyone into cars.
      - Gravityloss 6y ago
        There are indeed lots of ways of getting around. Walk, tram, bike, e-scooter, escalator, funicular, metro, schwebebahn, car, train, taxi, rickshaw, boat, bus. The best cities utilize a mix of those that work for them. Rental solutions have exploded in recent years. You can't pick just one and say it's the best for everything.
dcgudeman 6y ago
"genies out of the bottle"... "wild west where an off by one error can cause a pileup on the highway"... really? More likely we are at the beginning of a long journey towards increasingly autonomous vehicles and we have had very few accidents and fatalities with what is currently on the road.

throwaway122378 6y ago

We need a digital infrastructure plan. Nationwide upgrade to create a universal platform for autonomous vehicles including a common protocol language, smart signs, smart traffic lights, location beacons, improved highway infrastructure, upgrades laws and more.

z6 6y ago

We have these accidents and pileups constantly without involvement of assisted driving technology. By your logic we should disallow anything that could ever hurt anybody.

candiddevmike 6y ago
Exactly, why add another way for humans to be negligent? I would absolutely love to see mass transit replace self driving cars as the panacea to our transportation issues.
- epistasis 6y ago
  Exactly. I don't think people realize just how terrible cars at at scaling, whether they are human driven or completely controlled centrally as a fleet. Even parking a single car requires as much square footage as the typical worker requirement for office space. And if you don't have onsite parking, you have double the miles travelled as cars leave the central business district to temporary storage far away, only to come back to pick people up for their commutes back. The past century of car-based thinking has damaged the US's planning brains. We need to go back to first principles and think about serving the needs and wants of humans, rather than serving the needs of a hugely space inefficient and health-damaging transit mode.
- mlindner 6y ago
  Mass transit doesn't take you to every location and cannot. Cars must exist in some form or another for access to many locations. Mass transit has not replaced all cars in any (non-city-state) country on this planet.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    Cars and transit are not mutually exclusive. The more people that use mass transit, the better the experience fire people that still use cars. However we are hampered from enabling better mass transit in the US by those who refuse to let the two coexist and want to force everyone into cars.
    - Gravityloss 6y ago
      There are indeed lots of ways of getting around. Walk, tram, bike, e-scooter, escalator, funicular, metro, schwebebahn, car, train, taxi, rickshaw, boat, bus. The best cities utilize a mix of those that work for them. Rental solutions have exploded in recent years. You can't pick just one and say it's the best for everything.

dcgudeman 6y ago

"genies out of the bottle"... "wild west where an off by one error can cause a pileup on the highway"... really? More likely we are at the beginning of a long journey towards increasingly autonomous vehicles and we have had very few accidents and fatalities with what is currently on the road.