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Everyone seems really concerned with the edge cases right now. What about insurance and liability? What about when X happens and it's raining? These are (usuall

Everyone seems really concerned with the edge cases right now. What about insurance and liability? What about when X happens and it's raining? These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology. Under given circumstances the car will be safer than a human or it isn't. The moment it crosses that threshold (for most conditions) the world is going to change for the better. From there it's just a matter of optimization until a human watcher isn't even required. Self-driving cars are worth every penny of research. They will some day be safer than human drivers. With a full network of communicating cars and fail-safes we could almost eliminate traffic-related injury and death. Some day your insurance company will probably charge you more per mile you choose to take control of your car. Beyond safety, this could make life way more convenient and make living far more convenient. We won't need to waste 4-10%+ of our entire lives staring at the road doing nothing. That's huge! Once the cars are safe enough, you'll be able to read, write, or take a nap. Life also gets a lot more efficient. We won't all need cars. Think about the social ramifications. We won't need all that parking space we waste at home, work, at grocery stores, or downtown. Rather than needing 2 cars for me and my wife, I could send it back to get her once I get to work - or maybe just sign up for a service that completely eliminates the need to own.

scarmig 12y ago
I agree with your overall vision. But there's a lot being swept under the rug in saying, "These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology." It comes close to a "sufficiently advanced compiler" or "just an implementation question." Autocars are going to be held to a much higher standard than human drivers. This sucks, is irrational, and is unfair, but thems the breaks. Given that media and social environment, a single fatal car crash will cause a firestorm that could delay widespread introduction of driverless cars for years. People are terrified of new technology: see the shit show about a Tesla catching on fire, or the people who think people wearing Google Glass deserve to get assaulted. We absolutely have to tread carefully here.
- andrewfong 12y ago
  I suspect the higher standard question will be resolved in a couple of ways: * NTSB review: Airplanes face higher scrutiny than automobiles (despite the lower overall casualty rate). Part of the reason people have grown comfortable with air travel nonetheless is because the NTSB analyzes what went wrong after each crash and recommends (mandates) certain changes. Moreover, as far as government agencies go, the NTSB does its job reasonably competently and independently. * Gradual introduction: It's unlikely fully self-driving cars will be introduced all at once. What's more likely is the gradual automation of certain driving functions (sort of like cruise control, automatic parking, and other feature sets). I think any system that hands off control from a robot to a human introduces its own safety risks, but you might see something like a dedicated autonomous lane on a freeway with special parking areas where humans can safely resume control for driving in the city. There's also augmented driving where a car is primarily human driven, but will do things like pre-charge brakes and give advanced warning to a human diver when it believes the human is about to screw up. * Economies of scale: Large business organizations will probably get comfortable more quickly with autonomous cars than individual consumers. If FedEx and UPS support policies like "no left turns," they'll probably be among the first to get on board with fully automated trucks. And you'll certainly see some support for the insurance business, if autonomous vehicles really do result in lower overall accident rates.
  - pyre 12y ago
    UPS employees are unionized, and driving routes (vs. working in the warehouses) is a sought-after position that is one of the benefits of seniority (as I understand it). I expect that they might have issues rolling out a computerized delivery fleet.
    - jfoster 12y ago
      So they'll just get replaced. Amazon and Google do seem keen to get into that space.
      - jrockway 12y ago
TheEzEzz 12y ago
There must be at least 50 million residential garages in the US alone. If we automate all cars and switch to a Cars-as-a-Service model that is 50 million large rooms suddenly available. That's a lot of reclaimed real estate. Edit: If the average garage is 250 sq ft (pretty small), average cost of real estate is $100/sq ft (pretty low), then this is a $1.25 trillion windfall. Not bad for a small side-effect of autonomous cars.
- dsr_ 12y ago
  If the average self-driving car-as-a-service costs $100,000, then replacing 50 million old cars with 25 million new cars is a $2.5 trillion dollar expense to get your "windfall".
  - TheEzEzz 12y ago
    Paying for the self-driving cars will likely be a cost savings by itself, since we won't need as many auto-cars as regular cars. Most cars are only used maybe 5-8% of the time, and sit unused otherwise. An auto-car service could probably get at least 50% usage out of a car, potentially much more. That means a 10x reduction in the number of cards needed.
    - aetherson 12y ago
      For this to be true, we have to assume that, during rush hour, at least 90% of all cars are parked and unused. 90%? That's a hell of a lot, dude. It's certainly true that most cars spend most of their time being parked and unused. But they tend to do so during times of day when there is very low demand. The vast majority of cars are unused at 4am (and, indeed, at 2pm), certainly. But even if every car that was on the roads at 4am was shared, that doesn't increase utilization of the car-pool very much. And you have to be able to handle the routine car-use spikes around rush hour.
      - TheEzEzz 12y ago
        Great point, was not considering that. I'd love to see some stats on maximum car utilization as a percentage during each minute of rush hour. You could imagine that in addition to single-serve autocab services, you could have auto "micro" buses, sitting 4 people. Your "bus" is guaranteed to stop at no more than 7 other stops. With tens of thousands of people using the service it should be possible to pick optimal batches of people for each bus, to minimize how far the bus has to deviate from an ideal path for any given rider. It would be a giant logistical problem, but I think theoretically you can get a service working that was almost as seamless as an autocab service. Would be interesting to work on.
untog 12y ago
There's the simple issue of legal liability, though. If you crash into someone, it's your fault and you can be taken to court for it. If a Google driverless car crashes into someone then it's Google's fault. That's an extremely large number of potential crashes and legal challenges. Absent any higher concern, Google has to be very careful about this out of their own self-interest.
- Nicholas_C 12y ago
  I'm thinking there could be an agreement you sign when the car is purchased that states that the self-driving abilities are not to be fully relied on and the driver must be fully aware and ready to take over at all times. Thus if the car ever crashed by fault of Google they can say the driver should have been paying attention. This would have a lot of downsides. For instance, DWI's would still be a thing.
  - josephlord 12y ago
    Getting humans to participate only in emergencies is almost the worst of all approaches. With reduced practice the human is deskilled and they are less likely to be alert and aware of the situation if they have to take over suddenly. Signing an agreement will not make people alert and ready.
    - stormbrew 12y ago
      Even ignoring the issue of the driver's skill reducing as they practice less, switching from the thing with microsecond-range reaction times to the thing with second-range reaction time when an emergency has already started will almost never result in an optimal outcome.
- dandrews 12y ago
  Should you step in front of a Googlecar and get hurt, remember before you sue that it bristles with sensors and recording devices, and that it'll all be admissible in court.
chillingeffect 12y ago
I. You shift the goalposts a lot. E.g. in the same sentence you mix statements about the future and the present, e.g. "we will" and "today's technology". > I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology. BTW, LIDAR doesn't work in snow and rain. Today. It's not clear that it works for multiple independent vehicles, either. We may only have self-driving car, singular. II. Also, in your scenario, even if you do send that car over to your wife to use once you get to work, the same car will get more wear and tear than two individual cars b/c it's doing the same work plus more to go between you two. III. You also mix up the moment when self-driving cars become as safe as humans with the moment they become safER than humans. IV. You also overly dichotomize safer vs. not safer. What if they kill fewer auto drivers, but more pedestrians? What if they kill fewer adults and more childen? It's not that simple- our values are reflected in our choices to deploy technology.
- fancyketchup 12y ago
  > It's not clear that it works for multiple independent vehicles, either. We may only have self-driving car, singular. I'm no LIDAR expert, but I do design and build synchronous detectors (think: boxcar/lock-in amplifier/gated counter). Maybe this has been tried and there's some reason it wouldn't work, but I don't see why you couldn't apply a pseudo-random modulation to the LIDAR emitter and then run the received signal through a correlator. Besides bringing some conversion gain and allowing for more accurate distance determination (compared to a simple pulsed-ToF), PRN modulation allows you to share the channel with other transmitters (CDMA, if you will). > BTW, LIDAR doesn't work in snow and rain. Today. Isn't this just a matter of the wavelength used by today's LIDARs? There's a huge hole in the liquid and solid water absorption spectrum in the visible range.
  - diydsp 12y ago
    I don't know the system, but I'm sure it's already synchronous in that there are numerous receiver channels and their acquisition values are correlated with the illumination angle. If the system has to deallocate time channels for other vehicles to use, it loses bandwidth, proportional to the number of vehicles in the vicinity. Sharing the data between vehicles is possible, however, it invokes geographical/networking problems, such as how to partition the acquisition, how to synchronize the acquisition and how to share it, including the necessary bandwidth, which I'm sure is quite high. As soon as multiple vehicles sharing data enters the picture, security must also get factored in. Besides the link control concerns, the system will be sensitive to jamming with that much multiplexed sampling taking place. PP is correct in hinting that the leap to multiple self-driving vehicles from one self-driving vehicle will be large indeed.
dclowd9901 12y ago
I don't understand why we're so hung up on trying to proactively create legislation around this. Why don't we let someone get maimed/killed first, and then go from there? In the world of things, you can't foresee every possible outcome, and it's silly to draw up legislation, which has a nasty habit of becoming rather sticky, for something so potentially earth shattering. Let it fail, turn it off remotely, and then we'll figure out who to blame and what to do next. For now, this tech is so beyond us, we don't even have a frame of reference for how to properly legislate it.
jameshart 12y ago
"a full network of communicating cars and fail-safes" is a long way away, though. And to get there you have to go through a long period of some self-driving cars, sharing the road with old-fashioned human piloted ones. As a human driver, I spend a lot of my time anticipating the behavior of my fellow road-users. That car coming up from the side street - did they see me? They're on their phone, maybe they didn't see me... they're going to pull out... better brake...; now I'm coming up to an exit; the car in the lane to my left just changed speed, probably going to try to cut across in front of me, better give them some room...; cyclist coming up on the right, am I going to get past him before I need to slow for my right turn, or should I slow up behind him? Understanding and anticipating all those human behaviors seems to me to be well beyond the capabilities of current AI.
- couchand 12y ago
  I don't know, it seems to me that a computer is particularly suited to this problem. I think a computer would be much more accurate in judging the speed of the approaching bike or the car coming up the side street or in the left lane. The essentially negligible reaction time compared with a human would give significant power to a defensive driving algorithm. And I'd guess probabalistic models are a better predictor of behavior than most people's intuition.
- Sammi 12y ago
  Self driving cars see 360 around themselves at all times. Real world data is used to train self tuning algorithms that drive the cars. These cars see everything and they know everything about how irrationally other human drivers are, and they don't take any chances. They drive slowly when they identify a danger, and they react almost immediately when there is a surprise, compared to the relatively sluggish reactions of humans. And humans make mistakes, lapses in judgement, are tired, and take stupid chances all the time. Self driving cars drive perfectly all the time. Sure they can't do much if someone deliberately drives into them, but it won't be their fault.
- adav 12y ago
  There's always a more cautious option in each of those scenarios. If the self-driving car always errs towards that, hopefully it'll mitigate disaster. Following good driving principles to the letter - accounting for stopping distances etc, like in the Highway Code (UK) - will hopefully allow time for those unpredictable road users. Humans are more risky in that we give ourselves less time to react to begin with.
midas007 12y ago
Parking structures might become high-security, automated bldgs that people don't enter. Further, local parking spaces may be unnecessary as your car (or the car you rent) will pick you up.
jfoster 12y ago
It's funny how none of the critics think about the human edge-cases. What happens when someone decides to drink and drive? What happens when someone falls asleep or gets distracted on the freeway? The answer, of course, is that edge cases are just that. They don't impede general use, and though they occasionally cause some worst-case outcomes to occur, we all just decide to live with them.
torrent-of-ions 12y ago
> We won't need to waste 4-10%+ of our entire lives staring at the road doing nothing. No you don't. That's why many people use public transport or combine travelling with exercise (bike). Self driving cars doesn't solve the real problem which is that people have the idea that cars are actually sustainable.
- justinpaulson 12y ago
  You must not live any where in the entire center of the United States
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Self-driving Teslas charged with nuclear-generated electricity seems very sustainable for me. Make them rented on-demand instead of owned and you have a PRT system, combining the convenience of a car with efficiency of public transport.

scarmig 12y ago

I agree with your overall vision. But there's a lot being swept under the rug in saying, "These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology." It comes close to a "sufficiently advanced compiler" or "just an implementation question." Autocars are going to be held to a much higher standard than human drivers. This sucks, is irrational, and is unfair, but thems the breaks. Given that media and social environment, a single fatal car crash will cause a firestorm that could delay widespread introduction of driverless cars for years. People are terrified of new technology: see the shit show about a Tesla catching on fire, or the people who think people wearing Google Glass deserve to get assaulted. We absolutely have to tread carefully here.

andrewfong 12y ago
I suspect the higher standard question will be resolved in a couple of ways: * NTSB review: Airplanes face higher scrutiny than automobiles (despite the lower overall casualty rate). Part of the reason people have grown comfortable with air travel nonetheless is because the NTSB analyzes what went wrong after each crash and recommends (mandates) certain changes. Moreover, as far as government agencies go, the NTSB does its job reasonably competently and independently. * Gradual introduction: It's unlikely fully self-driving cars will be introduced all at once. What's more likely is the gradual automation of certain driving functions (sort of like cruise control, automatic parking, and other feature sets). I think any system that hands off control from a robot to a human introduces its own safety risks, but you might see something like a dedicated autonomous lane on a freeway with special parking areas where humans can safely resume control for driving in the city. There's also augmented driving where a car is primarily human driven, but will do things like pre-charge brakes and give advanced warning to a human diver when it believes the human is about to screw up. * Economies of scale: Large business organizations will probably get comfortable more quickly with autonomous cars than individual consumers. If FedEx and UPS support policies like "no left turns," they'll probably be among the first to get on board with fully automated trucks. And you'll certainly see some support for the insurance business, if autonomous vehicles really do result in lower overall accident rates.
- pyre 12y ago
  UPS employees are unionized, and driving routes (vs. working in the warehouses) is a sought-after position that is one of the benefits of seniority (as I understand it). I expect that they might have issues rolling out a computerized delivery fleet.
  - jfoster 12y ago
    So they'll just get replaced. Amazon and Google do seem keen to get into that space.
    - jrockway 12y ago

TheEzEzz 12y ago

There must be at least 50 million residential garages in the US alone. If we automate all cars and switch to a Cars-as-a-Service model that is 50 million large rooms suddenly available. That's a lot of reclaimed real estate. Edit: If the average garage is 250 sq ft (pretty small), average cost of real estate is $100/sq ft (pretty low), then this is a $1.25 trillion windfall. Not bad for a small side-effect of autonomous cars.

dsr_ 12y ago
If the average self-driving car-as-a-service costs $100,000, then replacing 50 million old cars with 25 million new cars is a $2.5 trillion dollar expense to get your "windfall".
- TheEzEzz 12y ago
  Paying for the self-driving cars will likely be a cost savings by itself, since we won't need as many auto-cars as regular cars. Most cars are only used maybe 5-8% of the time, and sit unused otherwise. An auto-car service could probably get at least 50% usage out of a car, potentially much more. That means a 10x reduction in the number of cards needed.
  - aetherson 12y ago
    For this to be true, we have to assume that, during rush hour, at least 90% of all cars are parked and unused. 90%? That's a hell of a lot, dude. It's certainly true that most cars spend most of their time being parked and unused. But they tend to do so during times of day when there is very low demand. The vast majority of cars are unused at 4am (and, indeed, at 2pm), certainly. But even if every car that was on the roads at 4am was shared, that doesn't increase utilization of the car-pool very much. And you have to be able to handle the routine car-use spikes around rush hour.
    - TheEzEzz 12y ago
      Great point, was not considering that. I'd love to see some stats on maximum car utilization as a percentage during each minute of rush hour. You could imagine that in addition to single-serve autocab services, you could have auto "micro" buses, sitting 4 people. Your "bus" is guaranteed to stop at no more than 7 other stops. With tens of thousands of people using the service it should be possible to pick optimal batches of people for each bus, to minimize how far the bus has to deviate from an ideal path for any given rider. It would be a giant logistical problem, but I think theoretically you can get a service working that was almost as seamless as an autocab service. Would be interesting to work on.

untog 12y ago

There's the simple issue of legal liability, though. If you crash into someone, it's your fault and you can be taken to court for it. If a Google driverless car crashes into someone then it's Google's fault. That's an extremely large number of potential crashes and legal challenges. Absent any higher concern, Google has to be very careful about this out of their own self-interest.

Nicholas_C 12y ago
I'm thinking there could be an agreement you sign when the car is purchased that states that the self-driving abilities are not to be fully relied on and the driver must be fully aware and ready to take over at all times. Thus if the car ever crashed by fault of Google they can say the driver should have been paying attention. This would have a lot of downsides. For instance, DWI's would still be a thing.
- josephlord 12y ago
  Getting humans to participate only in emergencies is almost the worst of all approaches. With reduced practice the human is deskilled and they are less likely to be alert and aware of the situation if they have to take over suddenly. Signing an agreement will not make people alert and ready.
  - stormbrew 12y ago
    Even ignoring the issue of the driver's skill reducing as they practice less, switching from the thing with microsecond-range reaction times to the thing with second-range reaction time when an emergency has already started will almost never result in an optimal outcome.
dandrews 12y ago
Should you step in front of a Googlecar and get hurt, remember before you sue that it bristles with sensors and recording devices, and that it'll all be admissible in court.

chillingeffect 12y ago

I. You shift the goalposts a lot. E.g. in the same sentence you mix statements about the future and the present, e.g. "we will" and "today's technology". > I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology. BTW, LIDAR doesn't work in snow and rain. Today. It's not clear that it works for multiple independent vehicles, either. We may only have self-driving car, singular. II. Also, in your scenario, even if you do send that car over to your wife to use once you get to work, the same car will get more wear and tear than two individual cars b/c it's doing the same work plus more to go between you two. III. You also mix up the moment when self-driving cars become as safe as humans with the moment they become safER than humans. IV. You also overly dichotomize safer vs. not safer. What if they kill fewer auto drivers, but more pedestrians? What if they kill fewer adults and more childen? It's not that simple- our values are reflected in our choices to deploy technology.

fancyketchup 12y ago
> It's not clear that it works for multiple independent vehicles, either. We may only have self-driving car, singular. I'm no LIDAR expert, but I do design and build synchronous detectors (think: boxcar/lock-in amplifier/gated counter). Maybe this has been tried and there's some reason it wouldn't work, but I don't see why you couldn't apply a pseudo-random modulation to the LIDAR emitter and then run the received signal through a correlator. Besides bringing some conversion gain and allowing for more accurate distance determination (compared to a simple pulsed-ToF), PRN modulation allows you to share the channel with other transmitters (CDMA, if you will). > BTW, LIDAR doesn't work in snow and rain. Today. Isn't this just a matter of the wavelength used by today's LIDARs? There's a huge hole in the liquid and solid water absorption spectrum in the visible range.
- diydsp 12y ago
  I don't know the system, but I'm sure it's already synchronous in that there are numerous receiver channels and their acquisition values are correlated with the illumination angle. If the system has to deallocate time channels for other vehicles to use, it loses bandwidth, proportional to the number of vehicles in the vicinity. Sharing the data between vehicles is possible, however, it invokes geographical/networking problems, such as how to partition the acquisition, how to synchronize the acquisition and how to share it, including the necessary bandwidth, which I'm sure is quite high. As soon as multiple vehicles sharing data enters the picture, security must also get factored in. Besides the link control concerns, the system will be sensitive to jamming with that much multiplexed sampling taking place. PP is correct in hinting that the leap to multiple self-driving vehicles from one self-driving vehicle will be large indeed.

dclowd9901 12y ago

I don't understand why we're so hung up on trying to proactively create legislation around this. Why don't we let someone get maimed/killed first, and then go from there? In the world of things, you can't foresee every possible outcome, and it's silly to draw up legislation, which has a nasty habit of becoming rather sticky, for something so potentially earth shattering. Let it fail, turn it off remotely, and then we'll figure out who to blame and what to do next. For now, this tech is so beyond us, we don't even have a frame of reference for how to properly legislate it.

jameshart 12y ago

"a full network of communicating cars and fail-safes" is a long way away, though. And to get there you have to go through a long period of some self-driving cars, sharing the road with old-fashioned human piloted ones. As a human driver, I spend a lot of my time anticipating the behavior of my fellow road-users. That car coming up from the side street - did they see me? They're on their phone, maybe they didn't see me... they're going to pull out... better brake...; now I'm coming up to an exit; the car in the lane to my left just changed speed, probably going to try to cut across in front of me, better give them some room...; cyclist coming up on the right, am I going to get past him before I need to slow for my right turn, or should I slow up behind him? Understanding and anticipating all those human behaviors seems to me to be well beyond the capabilities of current AI.

couchand 12y ago
I don't know, it seems to me that a computer is particularly suited to this problem. I think a computer would be much more accurate in judging the speed of the approaching bike or the car coming up the side street or in the left lane. The essentially negligible reaction time compared with a human would give significant power to a defensive driving algorithm. And I'd guess probabalistic models are a better predictor of behavior than most people's intuition.
Sammi 12y ago
Self driving cars see 360 around themselves at all times. Real world data is used to train self tuning algorithms that drive the cars. These cars see everything and they know everything about how irrationally other human drivers are, and they don't take any chances. They drive slowly when they identify a danger, and they react almost immediately when there is a surprise, compared to the relatively sluggish reactions of humans. And humans make mistakes, lapses in judgement, are tired, and take stupid chances all the time. Self driving cars drive perfectly all the time. Sure they can't do much if someone deliberately drives into them, but it won't be their fault.
adav 12y ago
There's always a more cautious option in each of those scenarios. If the self-driving car always errs towards that, hopefully it'll mitigate disaster. Following good driving principles to the letter - accounting for stopping distances etc, like in the Highway Code (UK) - will hopefully allow time for those unpredictable road users. Humans are more risky in that we give ourselves less time to react to begin with.

midas007 12y ago

Parking structures might become high-security, automated bldgs that people don't enter. Further, local parking spaces may be unnecessary as your car (or the car you rent) will pick you up.

jfoster 12y ago

It's funny how none of the critics think about the human edge-cases. What happens when someone decides to drink and drive? What happens when someone falls asleep or gets distracted on the freeway? The answer, of course, is that edge cases are just that. They don't impede general use, and though they occasionally cause some worst-case outcomes to occur, we all just decide to live with them.

torrent-of-ions 12y ago

> We won't need to waste 4-10%+ of our entire lives staring at the road doing nothing. No you don't. That's why many people use public transport or combine travelling with exercise (bike). Self driving cars doesn't solve the real problem which is that people have the idea that cars are actually sustainable.

justinpaulson 12y ago
You must not live any where in the entire center of the United States
TeMPOraL 12y ago
Self-driving Teslas charged with nuclear-generated electricity seems very sustainable for me. Make them rented on-demand instead of owned and you have a PRT system, combining the convenience of a car with efficiency of public transport.