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> they shipped a feature which breaks traffic laws, which is a serious error in a company asking us to trust their judgement in a safety-critical system You're

> they shipped a feature which breaks traffic laws, which is a serious error in a company asking us to trust their judgement in a safety-critical system You're not wrong per se, but there is significantly more nuance with self-driving technologies than you're suggesting. A more famous example in the self-driving car world is the Pittsburgh left [0], where in Pittsburgh a driver turning left will often get conventional precedence over vehicles going through the intersection despite there being no explicit left turn light. This move is technically illegal, but when the self-driving cars didn't do this it drove traffic to a halt regularly and held up every intersection where the self-driving car was turning left. Eventually this had to be added to the software. Examples like these are why self-driving technologies are so hard to get 100% right, driving is a mix of intuition and rules. A significant amount of driving is doing what other drivers expect you to do. If the cars don't behave like human drivers expect, it often causes more problems than doing what the car is "supposed" to do. That said, as a pedestrian who has frequently almost been hit by people rolling stop signs, I'm with the NHTSA here... [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left

newsbinator 5y ago
> Examples like these are why self-driving technologies are so hard to get 100% right, modern driving is a mix of intuition and rules. Indeed! The hardest part of switching to driverless cars overall is that driverless vehicles have to exist on the road for some number of years surrounded by ones driven by primates, with primate reflexes and a variety of ad-hoc behaviors. If every car on the road were to go driverless at midnight tonight, would the number of accidents and death and disability plummet compared to yesterday's stats?
alistairSH 5y ago
There are better solutions to this problem than coding cars to behave like bad drivers. Round-a-bouts. Banning left turns during peak hours. Adding a dedicated left turn signal at the beginning of the cycle. The Pittsburg left is a terrible convention... It puts pedestrians at risk (assuming the cross-walk signal follows the traffic signal). And nobody from outside Pittsburg knows it's a thing - if I were visiting Pittsburg, I'd run into the car turning in front of me (well, hopefully not, but it's a risk).
jjoonathan 5y ago
> driving is a mix of intuition and rules Intuition and rules and rule breaking. I remember back in Driver's Ed I was alarmed to discover that through sloppy definitions Colorado legislators had managed to make it illegal to take a right turn within 150ft of a stop sign (or similar, I forget the details). Of course, in reality nobody follows the sloppily defined portion of the rule, nobody enforces the sloppily defined rule, and it isn't a problem -- but the gap between rules and realities is substantial, self-driving cars are going to tease apart this gap, and spiders will come crawling out.
elil17 5y ago
Rolling stops, while all to common, are not at all like a Pittsburgh left. Police everywhere will pull you over for rolling through a stop sign. Police in Pittsburgh probably won’t, unless they have something against you personally.

newsbinator 5y ago

> Examples like these are why self-driving technologies are so hard to get 100% right, modern driving is a mix of intuition and rules. Indeed! The hardest part of switching to driverless cars overall is that driverless vehicles have to exist on the road for some number of years surrounded by ones driven by primates, with primate reflexes and a variety of ad-hoc behaviors. If every car on the road were to go driverless at midnight tonight, would the number of accidents and death and disability plummet compared to yesterday's stats?

alistairSH 5y ago

There are better solutions to this problem than coding cars to behave like bad drivers. Round-a-bouts. Banning left turns during peak hours. Adding a dedicated left turn signal at the beginning of the cycle. The Pittsburg left is a terrible convention... It puts pedestrians at risk (assuming the cross-walk signal follows the traffic signal). And nobody from outside Pittsburg knows it's a thing - if I were visiting Pittsburg, I'd run into the car turning in front of me (well, hopefully not, but it's a risk).

jjoonathan 5y ago

> driving is a mix of intuition and rules Intuition and rules and rule breaking. I remember back in Driver's Ed I was alarmed to discover that through sloppy definitions Colorado legislators had managed to make it illegal to take a right turn within 150ft of a stop sign (or similar, I forget the details). Of course, in reality nobody follows the sloppily defined portion of the rule, nobody enforces the sloppily defined rule, and it isn't a problem -- but the gap between rules and realities is substantial, self-driving cars are going to tease apart this gap, and spiders will come crawling out.

elil17 5y ago

Rolling stops, while all to common, are not at all like a Pittsburgh left. Police everywhere will pull you over for rolling through a stop sign. Police in Pittsburgh probably won’t, unless they have something against you personally.