6 ms·

I can already imagine intense debates about whether to outlaw human-driven cars in a (perhaps not so) distant future.

by Zirro 11y ago

fixermark 11y ago
I imagine this going one of two ways: either human-operated vehicles might be outlawed, or auto companies will apply market pressure to favor people not manually driving (steep, steep discounts in insurance for self-driving vehicles, since many states still require insurance but if the self-driving cars reach the safety goals they're aiming at, it's basically free money for insurers to insure them at any price).
koenigdavidmj 11y ago
I've been thinking a bit about good places to adopt this early. Lānaʻi might be a good candidate: absolute isolation from other road systems, a small population (3000 people), and a single owner (Larry Ellison) who's just the sort of filthy rich technophile who might be willing to replace an entire island's cars. Singapore could be the first major city to make the move, due to its authoritarian government (hey, I don't like it, but it might make this easier), strict rules to keep the stock of vehicles relatively new, and relative isolation from other road systems (only two bridges to Malaysia).
- astrocat 11y ago
  I'm not entirely sure just how much Larry can do - it's really the 2% of the island that's state owned that includes the public roads. Hawaii in general seems like a great place to start a lot of "infrastructure 2.0" (if I may carelessly make up a term) projects geographically, but the logistics are tough because so much of the population is desperately poor, there's already a lot of class/ethnic tension and to top it all off, local government is a mess.
branchan 11y ago
Probably very unlikely unless you solve poverty.
- thrownaway2424 11y ago
  It's a myth that poor people drive. They depend on biking, walking, bumming rides from their friends and relatives, and public transportation.
  - branchan 11y ago
    Public transportation is not cheap and/or available in many places in the world. Look at all the cheap beater cars (even in the US), those aren't going driverless anytime soon.
    - thrownaway2424 11y ago
      Your can downvote me for days but that won't make your statements correct. In the 2000 Bay Area Travel Survey, driving was a minority share of trips for people in the bottom income quintile. Walking, biking, transit, riding as passengers in cars, and "other" are 50% more popular than driving.
      - branchan 11y ago
        Jokes on you. My account cannot downvote people yet. See, that's the thing with Hacker News. A lot of people here think Silicon Valley is the center of the world and everywhere is just like us, when the fact, we are living in a little bubble and a lot of the US operates very differently.
        thrownaway2424 11y ago
        It doesn't matter how big the empty part of the United States is. The Bay Area is as populous as Sweden and therefore big enough to do things its own way. It may in fact be true that the poor person in Pecos County, Texas, drives around in his own car, it is also an irrelevant fact on a population-weighted basis.
        branchan 11y ago
grecy 11y ago
I see a future where governments will make a laws about "manual control" like they make laws about airbags, minimum mileage and TPMS now. In 2025 automakers simply won't be allowed to make a "manual control" car, and by 2050 there will be basically none left on the roads.
- abruzzi 11y ago
  While I don't doubt things will move in this direction, dates like this seem extremely optimistic. Just speaking of the US, there are something like 250 million cars on the roads, and we buy cars at the rate of about 12-16 million a year. While I can see fully autonomous cars becoming available in the next decade, it will be some time before all manufacturers have refined enough systems, and legalization is in place, let alone mandating. Then you have the slow process of manual cars cycling out and getting replaced by autonomous vehicles. Another question is for the low income people that subsist on sub $1000 used cars, does a junker autonomous car continue to function, or are the poor now having to devote a significantly larger portion of their income to transportation? Then what happens to motorcyclists? I can't see them functioning autonomously. In some countries that would be a huge hit given the ubiquity of small displacement motorcycles. To be entirely honest, I don't expect to see the elimination of occupant driven motor vehicles in my lifetime.
  - spullara 11y ago
    In a world with self-driving cars and a way to summon one at will, how many do you think we will need?
    - malka 11y ago
      In a world where autonomous car are effectively autonomous on ALL roads, that could work. But we are really far from here. How does autonomous car fare when the infrastructure sucks ?
  - EvanAnderson 11y ago
    I think the existing auto fleet can be overcome fairly easily, albeit by a company that enters the market in a position that's initially losing. The model I see that will remove individually-owned, occupant driven vehicles will some variation of: My company will purchase your auto and credit you some amount of haulage on my autocar network, and perhaps some cash. For the low income people using sub-$1,000 cars a token amount of credit will be sufficient. The real value for them will be the convenience and reliability of transport they get from my system. Imagine not losing your hard-won job because your "beater" car failed at an inopportune time. Imagine not having unexpected car expenses that make you choose between, say, food and transportation. The higher-end market will be a tougher sell, but there are likely productivity, personal time, and environmental impact arguments that can be made there. I'll sell your car (likely at a loss) in some area when I haven't achieved market penetration yet (or for salvage). Once you're bought-in to my network you might leave me for a competitor, but ideally I'll use regulation, contractual lock-in, and other tools to attempt to keep Customers tied to my product until I've recouped my initial investment. I think it could work. I don't particularly like it, but I think it has at least a non-zero possibility of happening.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
superuser2 11y ago
If we can require all self-driving cars to take orders from a central authority, we can do some pretty amazing things: - Most traffic problems are a result of human (over)caution and poor merging technique. A centrally coordinated system of self-driving cars are perfectly aware of each other's intentions and could run much smaller safety margins, as well as make lane/exit access perfectly equitable. The effective carrying capacity of highways would increase immensely, and traffic jams would be a thing of the past. - 100% of cars on the same coordination system would also allow us to do away with most stoplights, as it could simply modulate speed so that intersections are always running in both directions, but cars never collide. (This could be overridden for pedestrian crossings, and wouldn't be much of a benefit in the city, but in places that are already pedestrian-hostile - i.e. most of Real America - it wouldn't make things much worse and pedestrians would be pretty rare.)
- EvanAnderson 11y ago
  Designing such a system to use a centralized authority, as opposed to having a distributed architecture, sounds like an invitation for all kinds of chaos. Given how seductively "easy" centralized solutions seem to be I don't doubt things will go this way, with results varying from hilarious to frustrating to tragic. (I'm not saying that distributed architecture is a panacea, but it seems like a centralized system is both wholly disempowering to the individual and much more vulnerable to all sorts of corruption.)
  - superuser2 11y ago
    A distributed system would let people behave in ways advantageous to themselves, to everyone else's detriment, by causing their safety systems to yield to the dangerous driver (i.e. what happens currently). If there's nothing stopping people from creating an "everyone needs to wait for me" situation, they will.
    - EvanAnderson 11y ago
      That's a problem that has to be worked around in a system with a centralized control architecture, too. Presumably there will be some safety systems acting autonomously in the car (latency and network reliability being what they are) and those systems will be gamed. To boil my position down: I want to see an Internet-style architecture rather than a "Bell System" style architecture. I'd rather have "smarter cars" with "dumber roads" and as little mandated centralized control as possible. In a decentralized system attestation of identity (likely tied to one or more existing civil methods) and attribution of actions observed to individual vehicles would definitely have to be a component. Any identity system cannot approach 100% reliability, but if every car is able to report to law enforcement (or private driver reputation-tracking networks) the observations it makes of the behavior of other drivers I would expect that "cheaters" would be visible as statistical outliers. "The car to my left doesn't answer as a known transponder challenge/response in the vehicle reputation database I am querying. I am going to assign a lower priority to any non-emergency events it is reporting to me." "Hey-- that car just started broadcasting a different transponder response. Something is really, really funny where. I'm going to alert cars in my proximity that something is up so that they can physically identify the car with their LIDAR / imaging / etc. and treat it cautiously. If enough funny-business occurs eventually law enforcement will be alerted and physical interdiction can occur." "According to the vehicle database I'm subscribed to this car always traverses statistically similar routes 15% more quickly than other cars. Other cars in its proximity on these routes have their traversal slowed as compared to their traversal of the same routes when this care is not present. It sounds like funny business is at-play. I'm going to cast a vote for this car to be more likely to be subject to an inspection." etc. I'd prefer such a world to not involve the ability for totalitarian (or-- ahem-- certain republics who purport to be democratic in nature and are filled with power-mad bureaucrats conducting dragnet surveillance) to use these tools for public surveillance, but I'm resigned to that fate. Self-driving cars themselves aren't a threat to freedom, but the infrastructures of surveillance and control that will grow up around them almost certainly will be. Freedom aside, whatever happens is going to end up being an information security nightmare. Too many disciplines who have never had any exposure to information security are going to intersect with this technology, and each of those intersections is going to be ripe with all kinds of interesting threats and failure modes. People will be inconvenienced. People will be robbed, physically assaulted, and violated. People will die. I have no illusions that criminals are unsophisticated and that these systems won't be attacked in every possible way.

I can already imagine intense debates about whether to outlaw human-driven cars in a (perhaps not so) distant future.

by Zirro 11y ago

I can already imagine intense debates about whether to outlaw human-driven cars in a (perhaps not so) distant future.

I imagine this going one of two ways: either human-operated vehicles might be outlawed, or auto companies will apply market pressure to favor people not manually driving (steep, steep discounts in insurance for self-driving vehicles, since many states still require insurance but if the self-driving cars reach the safety goals they're aiming at, it's basically free money for insurers to insure them at any price).

koenigdavidmj 11y ago

I've been thinking a bit about good places to adopt this early. Lānaʻi might be a good candidate: absolute isolation from other road systems, a small population (3000 people), and a single owner (Larry Ellison) who's just the sort of filthy rich technophile who might be willing to replace an entire island's cars. Singapore could be the first major city to make the move, due to its authoritarian government (hey, I don't like it, but it might make this easier), strict rules to keep the stock of vehicles relatively new, and relative isolation from other road systems (only two bridges to Malaysia).

astrocat 11y ago
I'm not entirely sure just how much Larry can do - it's really the 2% of the island that's state owned that includes the public roads. Hawaii in general seems like a great place to start a lot of "infrastructure 2.0" (if I may carelessly make up a term) projects geographically, but the logistics are tough because so much of the population is desperately poor, there's already a lot of class/ethnic tension and to top it all off, local government is a mess.

branchan 11y ago

Probably very unlikely unless you solve poverty.

thrownaway2424 11y ago
It's a myth that poor people drive. They depend on biking, walking, bumming rides from their friends and relatives, and public transportation.
- branchan 11y ago
  Public transportation is not cheap and/or available in many places in the world. Look at all the cheap beater cars (even in the US), those aren't going driverless anytime soon.
  - thrownaway2424 11y ago
    Your can downvote me for days but that won't make your statements correct. In the 2000 Bay Area Travel Survey, driving was a minority share of trips for people in the bottom income quintile. Walking, biking, transit, riding as passengers in cars, and "other" are 50% more popular than driving.
    - branchan 11y ago
      Jokes on you. My account cannot downvote people yet. See, that's the thing with Hacker News. A lot of people here think Silicon Valley is the center of the world and everywhere is just like us, when the fact, we are living in a little bubble and a lot of the US operates very differently.
      - thrownaway2424 11y ago
        It doesn't matter how big the empty part of the United States is. The Bay Area is as populous as Sweden and therefore big enough to do things its own way. It may in fact be true that the poor person in Pecos County, Texas, drives around in his own car, it is also an irrelevant fact on a population-weighted basis.
        branchan 11y ago

grecy 11y ago

I see a future where governments will make a laws about "manual control" like they make laws about airbags, minimum mileage and TPMS now. In 2025 automakers simply won't be allowed to make a "manual control" car, and by 2050 there will be basically none left on the roads.

abruzzi 11y ago
While I don't doubt things will move in this direction, dates like this seem extremely optimistic. Just speaking of the US, there are something like 250 million cars on the roads, and we buy cars at the rate of about 12-16 million a year. While I can see fully autonomous cars becoming available in the next decade, it will be some time before all manufacturers have refined enough systems, and legalization is in place, let alone mandating. Then you have the slow process of manual cars cycling out and getting replaced by autonomous vehicles. Another question is for the low income people that subsist on sub $1000 used cars, does a junker autonomous car continue to function, or are the poor now having to devote a significantly larger portion of their income to transportation? Then what happens to motorcyclists? I can't see them functioning autonomously. In some countries that would be a huge hit given the ubiquity of small displacement motorcycles. To be entirely honest, I don't expect to see the elimination of occupant driven motor vehicles in my lifetime.
- spullara 11y ago
  In a world with self-driving cars and a way to summon one at will, how many do you think we will need?
  - malka 11y ago
    In a world where autonomous car are effectively autonomous on ALL roads, that could work. But we are really far from here. How does autonomous car fare when the infrastructure sucks ?
- EvanAnderson 11y ago
  I think the existing auto fleet can be overcome fairly easily, albeit by a company that enters the market in a position that's initially losing. The model I see that will remove individually-owned, occupant driven vehicles will some variation of: My company will purchase your auto and credit you some amount of haulage on my autocar network, and perhaps some cash. For the low income people using sub-$1,000 cars a token amount of credit will be sufficient. The real value for them will be the convenience and reliability of transport they get from my system. Imagine not losing your hard-won job because your "beater" car failed at an inopportune time. Imagine not having unexpected car expenses that make you choose between, say, food and transportation. The higher-end market will be a tougher sell, but there are likely productivity, personal time, and environmental impact arguments that can be made there. I'll sell your car (likely at a loss) in some area when I haven't achieved market penetration yet (or for salvage). Once you're bought-in to my network you might leave me for a competitor, but ideally I'll use regulation, contractual lock-in, and other tools to attempt to keep Customers tied to my product until I've recouped my initial investment. I think it could work. I don't particularly like it, but I think it has at least a non-zero possibility of happening.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

superuser2 11y ago

If we can require all self-driving cars to take orders from a central authority, we can do some pretty amazing things: - Most traffic problems are a result of human (over)caution and poor merging technique. A centrally coordinated system of self-driving cars are perfectly aware of each other's intentions and could run much smaller safety margins, as well as make lane/exit access perfectly equitable. The effective carrying capacity of highways would increase immensely, and traffic jams would be a thing of the past. - 100% of cars on the same coordination system would also allow us to do away with most stoplights, as it could simply modulate speed so that intersections are always running in both directions, but cars never collide. (This could be overridden for pedestrian crossings, and wouldn't be much of a benefit in the city, but in places that are already pedestrian-hostile - i.e. most of Real America - it wouldn't make things much worse and pedestrians would be pretty rare.)

EvanAnderson 11y ago
Designing such a system to use a centralized authority, as opposed to having a distributed architecture, sounds like an invitation for all kinds of chaos. Given how seductively "easy" centralized solutions seem to be I don't doubt things will go this way, with results varying from hilarious to frustrating to tragic. (I'm not saying that distributed architecture is a panacea, but it seems like a centralized system is both wholly disempowering to the individual and much more vulnerable to all sorts of corruption.)
- superuser2 11y ago
  A distributed system would let people behave in ways advantageous to themselves, to everyone else's detriment, by causing their safety systems to yield to the dangerous driver (i.e. what happens currently). If there's nothing stopping people from creating an "everyone needs to wait for me" situation, they will.
  - EvanAnderson 11y ago
    That's a problem that has to be worked around in a system with a centralized control architecture, too. Presumably there will be some safety systems acting autonomously in the car (latency and network reliability being what they are) and those systems will be gamed. To boil my position down: I want to see an Internet-style architecture rather than a "Bell System" style architecture. I'd rather have "smarter cars" with "dumber roads" and as little mandated centralized control as possible. In a decentralized system attestation of identity (likely tied to one or more existing civil methods) and attribution of actions observed to individual vehicles would definitely have to be a component. Any identity system cannot approach 100% reliability, but if every car is able to report to law enforcement (or private driver reputation-tracking networks) the observations it makes of the behavior of other drivers I would expect that "cheaters" would be visible as statistical outliers. "The car to my left doesn't answer as a known transponder challenge/response in the vehicle reputation database I am querying. I am going to assign a lower priority to any non-emergency events it is reporting to me." "Hey-- that car just started broadcasting a different transponder response. Something is really, really funny where. I'm going to alert cars in my proximity that something is up so that they can physically identify the car with their LIDAR / imaging / etc. and treat it cautiously. If enough funny-business occurs eventually law enforcement will be alerted and physical interdiction can occur." "According to the vehicle database I'm subscribed to this car always traverses statistically similar routes 15% more quickly than other cars. Other cars in its proximity on these routes have their traversal slowed as compared to their traversal of the same routes when this care is not present. It sounds like funny business is at-play. I'm going to cast a vote for this car to be more likely to be subject to an inspection." etc. I'd prefer such a world to not involve the ability for totalitarian (or-- ahem-- certain republics who purport to be democratic in nature and are filled with power-mad bureaucrats conducting dragnet surveillance) to use these tools for public surveillance, but I'm resigned to that fate. Self-driving cars themselves aren't a threat to freedom, but the infrastructures of surveillance and control that will grow up around them almost certainly will be. Freedom aside, whatever happens is going to end up being an information security nightmare. Too many disciplines who have never had any exposure to information security are going to intersect with this technology, and each of those intersections is going to be ripe with all kinds of interesting threats and failure modes. People will be inconvenienced. People will be robbed, physically assaulted, and violated. People will die. I have no illusions that criminals are unsophisticated and that these systems won't be attacked in every possible way.