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The human-driven driverless car
- DanielBMarkham 12y agoI wish the author the best in navigating this quagmire. Economics always struck me as political wonks arguing policy using calculus instead of rhetoric. That said, this looks like a reply to Slate's recent article: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/google_self_driving_car_it_may_never_actually_happen.single.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/... What I immediately thought on reading the headline, without realizing we were diving into "robots are taking our jobs!" was this: how about people sitting at home driving our cars for us? If the packet was dropped or latency got high, the car would slow/stop/switch-to-auto-cruise. Badda boom, badda bing, you have the best of both worlds. And it gets better. Since you're using real humans to drive, you can take the sensor input and match it up with the real-world driving patterns to try to tease out some edge case behaviors. It'd be like Uber with your own car.
- peterjancelis 12y agoI like my human driver to share the incentive with me that a crash can have fatal consequences.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoA reasonable impulse. Yet I have the feeling that an expert driver with some emotional distance from the situation may do better than me in an emergency.
- janesvilleseo 12y agoThe argument being made here, while quite real and a possibility is irrational. But I guess humans are irrational. This reminds me of a recent decision that was made by a fellow parent. They have 2 young kids. 1 in kindergarten and 1 in daycare. The oldest is a smart young girl. In fact she often gets bored during class because she already knows the material. Because of this she gets in a little trouble for goofing around. Her parents came to the decision that because she knows the material and is goofing around, they are not going to work with their youngest as much as they did with her. That way he will be ready for kindergarten. I feel this irrational decision shares the same thought process as deciding to pick cheaper manual labor over advanced technology. But I do understand that we may eventually need some jobs to keep all us busy and active. But lets now slow down our education to do so.
- philbarr 12y agoI have a young daughter and have come to the same conclusion; not to teach her too much before she starts school. My own parents, being teachers themselves, taught me as much as they could before I attended school. I remember being bored senseless in classes and, whilst doing great in tests, started to harbour a deep resentment against education from a young age. "Like, why is everyone forcing me to do this 100 times?! I get it already!" Gradually realising that the other kids hate your for being too smart didn't help. I don't think you can call this irrational, it's just accepting of human behaviour.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoHow about, teach her at home, period? Then you don't have to stifle her just so the state can have an easier time domesticating her. Home schooling is for more than religious nuts these days.
- philbarr 12y agoBecause I also believe that one of the most important aspects of school is learning about social interaction.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoIts a myth that home-schooling shorts social interaction. Its part of the curriculum like anything else. You manage it with outings, sports, music groups. Instead of dumping your child into a zoo for 5 hours a day to fend for herself, you can plan her socialization like you plan her dental hygiene for instance.
- ska 12y agoIt's true that home-schooling does not necessarily short on social interaction, but I've met enough people who were home schooled and did poorly in social setting to wonder how many people do well at this aspect of it for their children. Outings, sports, music etc. are great but not enough on their own. For a lot of people doing home schooling, it must be difficult to arrange for several hours most days in the company a largish group of children with varied backgrounds and personalities. Not having this can make it difficult for children to develop socially.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- pak 12y agoWhat if driverless cars can call upon a network of remote human drivers that can, in the case of computer confusion, take over and drive the car through the troublesome area? Sort of like an on-demand remote pilot, drone style. That's actually what I figured this article was about, based on the title.
- m0nty 12y agoI think Volvo is working on such a concept - a human driver in the front-most car, with other cars following in a train. Cars can join and leave the train as their occupiers want. This is envisioned for use on the freeway, no idea of the actual development progress or if it's just a concept.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoIowa has been part of this at our National Advanced Driving Simulator institution. When I was in school decades ago it was all the rage. But freeways still aren't automated nor regulated enough to permit automatic driving. Lately they've been turning their attention to more pressing needs, like learning how to help the handicapped drive.
- jerf 12y agoI think the problem is just "automated". "Regulation" can't solve the problem of humans being just plain too slow to deal with that sort of scenario. It's a bad idea for humans to draft each other today; fuel economy gains will be offset by all the other negative effects. It's not ever clear to me that automation can solve the problem either; people imagining complicated driving arrangements often seem to forget that there will still be variances in cars. It does no good to build a 50-car train on the highway if car #34 turns out to have 15% less effective brakes and in the slightest emergency stop damages 15 cars in front of it. If that sounds absurd, it's not. If you're trying to take advantage of the computer driving to run up against your safety margin, that has further effects. Sure, most of the time the computerized cars could in fact drive mere inches from each other's bumpers, but in an emergency situation this means you have no margin. You can't both spend your margin and have it when you need it. If anything I expect robotic cars to end up being more cautious than humans in the end. Automated cars will be able to precisely calculate the risks of given driving behaviors just by their nature, and I seriously doubt that car companies are going to have any stomach for permitting their cars to engage in complicated gas-saving car behaviors that will provably be more dangerous than driving safely, which I suspect will look rather a lot like what highways do now, except with less variance in the speeds. One of the things I'm really curious about is whether during a winter storm the cars will simply refuse to drive. That will be an interesting cultural change up here where snow is actually a thing.
- krmtl 12y agoWhat to do when the connection to the remote driver is broken?
- mrfusion 12y agoThis is a great argument for a high minimum wage.
- innguest 12y agoMinimum wage is a ban on jobs. It means the government passes a law forbidding people from selling their labor for less than $X. Before you defend minimum wage, you should try and come up with a coherent explanation as to how is it that any good can come from curtailing people's freedoms by prohibiting them from setting their own prices for the labor they wish to sell.
- Symmetry 12y agoWhat, to encourage automation instead of using humans? If it really is cheaper to use humans there's no reason to prevent that, there are plenty of places we need automation that will cause technology to keep advancing. Better to let the market chose humans or automation as it wills (and then buff up the social safety net if this throws too many people out of work).
- ethbro 12y agoHow is this an argument for a high minimum wage, as opposed to a basic human (non-employment-linked) wage?
- mrfusion 12y agoI think either would solve the problem the article describes. I actually prefer your solution.
- innguest 12y agoWhat would be the good or service sold in order to generate the wealth to be distributed to all humans as basic wage? And who would be the generous folks doing all the work to produce those goods and services, while being OK with sharing, with everyone, the goods (i.e. money) that they trade their goods for? I'm just trying to understand your suggestion.
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- mrfusion 12y agoI guess a counter-argument against this idea would be all of the restrictions on commercial drivers. I think truck drivers are only allowed to drive so many hours per day. Imagine self driving trucks could drive through the night, 24 hours per day. That alone could make quite a difference.
- incongruity 12y agoIf the article is right and the cost of human labor really does fall, isn't it conceivable that you'd see teams of drivers driving day and night in shifts? (This would be much like pilots on long-haul flights).
- Shivetya 12y agoWell a driver less car is certainly more expensive than the uber provided driver if your ignore the costs of the drivers car, the costs of getting them to the age the can drive, teaching them to drive, and on and on and on. The issue I see is that driver less cars have to be better than the better than average driver. Equal to an average driver is not sufficient. Even an average driver can tell the difference between a cardboard box and a block of concrete in the road, can follow detour signs, and more. Driver less cars and public transportation may end up either competing or playing off each other. Who knows. Though I would expect driver less buses and semi trucks far sooner than individual cars - there is at least a market fo those. Heck I see still drives on trains, I guess until we can end that position how do we expect cars to go it alone? (and train drivers are responsible for some major accidents both with people and cargo)
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoNot fair! You don't get to count the entire cost of raising a child, in the cost of a human driver. Just the marginal cost of convincing an adult to take on the job of 'driver'. Driverless cars are better because they are available. Recently here (on HN) was a post about why you can't find a taxi in the rain. (The answer was demand.) But another part is, many cabs are parked in the garage most of the time. Because drivers work only a few hours a day, and are not on-call during peak demand hours like rainstorms. Automated cabs could be scheduled and deployed minute by minute. That's a clear win.
- wavefunction 12y agoOwner/operators often rent out their taxis to other drivers. The real win will be getting all the idle passenger cars out of parking garages/lots and freeing up all that space imo.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago> The real win will be getting all the idle passenger cars out of parking garages/lots and freeing up all that space imo. That space is of trivial importance compared to limited road space. Roads need to be used as efficiently as possible, as there's only so much asphalt/concrete between two points.
- ColinDabritz 12y agoFor me, the driverless car isn't about providing a chauffeur service that is otherwise too expensive. That's a nice side benefit. To me, the main benefit is safety, as automated systems can be more 'alert' at all times, and have carefully tuned algorithms to know what the safe limits are, and keep enough 'slack' in the system to react etc etc. Automated cars are consistent drivers.
- abruzzi 12y ago>At the same time firms like Uber are making the use of hired cars cheaper and more convenient More convenient maybe, but I was under the impression that Uber was significantly more expensive than hailing a cab? (This is based on what I have read, as I don't live or visit anywhere near where Uber has services.)
- inigoesdr 12y agoIt probably depends on where you are I imagine. In my area it's roughly the same cost as a cab.