That’s a really interesting point I never considered.
Just where is the line between requiring community buy-in vs allowing the elected representatives free rein?
(This is an honest question if anybody with more political savvy than meself wants to chime in.)
Sir? You there with the fire arm? Yes, you have been determined to be unqualified to live in the future. Please board the vehicle via the rear passenger portal and we will transport you to the proper facility for processing.
I’m fully aware of the shortcomings of our current system, but self driving cars are still having difficulty with basic weather conditions, like rain and snow. So yeah, I’d like to see some type of certification that they are at least as capable as existing humans before we introduce something potentially lethal with hazy legal status to people with no say. The long term viability of self driving cars requires slow cautious steps in the beginning because if we have a few high profile deaths without a sufficient track record to outweigh them, then they will end up banned even if they are on balance better.
With the caveat that driverless electric cars, if they work the way they do in the movies*, could serve as a reasonable stop-gap between now and when we finally get around to re-engineering our cities so that cars aren’t an almost universal requirement (which driverless vehicles may well further delay), and the further caveat that brandishing a firearm at people and deliberately trying to run them off the road is not okay…
*As a side note, near-future sci-fi movies tend to have autonomous vehicles operating only in highly controlled environments, like the restricted-access freeways in Minority Report and I, Robot. Everywhere else, characters are driving manually.
2018 has been a year loaded with hype bubbles around autonomous vehicles popping left and right as tech and car companies finally realize that, actually, creating an AI that’s smart and general-purpose enough to operate a multi-ton vehicle at speed alongside people in an uncontrolled environment is actually way more complicated than they thought it would be (if I had a nickel, Silicon Valley…). Uber’s overtly reckless and unregulated testing killing someone in Phoenix is only the most egregious example. Tesla’s self-driving technology, while actually quite limited, has been so over-sold that people have relied on it to drive them directly into trucks that got mistaken for a cloudless sky and concrete crash barriers at highway speeds. GM’s Cruize has had trouble differentiating traffic sign poles and plastic bags from actual obstructions in the roadway, resulting in erratic and sometimes dangerous driving, even though collisions thus far have ultimately been the legal fault of the driver following the Cruize who expected it to behave like a normal vehicle. Waymo’s own autonomous taxi service, announced to great press accolades as launching by the end of this year, is still limited to the people who were already in the closed beta test for the service, and there’s still a safety driver behind the wheel (they said there wouldn’t need to be one). The self-driving car industry seems to be approaching this problem with the same “move fast and break things” attitude that Facebook has toward its social network, I think it’s understandable that people are just a little bit put off by that.
Compounding the technical problems is the complete lack of transparency and oversight surrounding the development and testing of these platforms, which is also understandably something that makes people anxious. Nobody but Waymo, Uber, Cruize, and Tesla knows how good their technology is, and this isn’t exactly a “revolt against the Jacquard Loom” scenario where people are just afraid of change. People are being forced to interact with unproven technology in dangerous situations without their consent, or sometimes even their knowledge. California is the only state, afaik, that has strict reporting requirements for all autonomous vehicle incidents (both in terms of reporting everything as well as reporting it in a timely manner), which is why almost everyone moved their testing to Arizona, where the state government basically welcomed them in and promised not to pay any attention to what was going on.
There’s also the distressing Big Brother implications of these vehicles, which almost never seem to make headlines. Generally speaking, the people who get up in arms about red light cameras, the UK’s addiction to CCTV, and the creepy GPS-enabled driving trackers being pushed by auto insurance companies have a lot of sympathy around here, and yet the fully-3D, real-time, multimedia surveillance necessary for autonomous vehicles to even operate (let alone be audited in the event of a collision) is somehow expected to be exempt from that concern.
Yes, there are stupid people who do dangerous things on the roads every day. But those things are still being done by people. We’re quite good at assigning blame for incidents and punishing those responsible when they’re people. Assigning blame and prosecuting the person responsible when a faceless corporations with beta-quality (at best) blackbox machine learning algorithms fails to properly identify a pedestrian in the roadway because “well, we’re going to have to start testing on the open road someday, so why not now?” is a much thornier issue.
I’m not disputing that people are bad drivers. We are. We’re awful at it. But getting a computer to drive safely and accurately in an uncontrolled environment is trying to accomplish about 10 different things at the same time, all of them wickedly complex and deeply inter-related, and most of them things that we as humans are still way better at than computers (object recognition and categorization, understanding when someone is about to step off the sidewalk versus just standing there, knowing when someone is waving you on at an intersection, having a reasonable suspicion that the BMW driver is about to cut you off, interacting with cyclists at intersections, knowing where the road is when it’s covered with snow, etc.). While LIDAR technology and the eternal vigilance of computers means that they can in theory do a much better job than we can, contrary to what these companies’ PR departments say, I don’t think they’re anywhere close to actually being ready for prime-time. Reality is basically nothing but edge-cases, and most of these companies still seem to be having trouble with the basics.
I’m with you about urban planning that doesn’t take into account people who don’t travel by private car. Many urban and suburban areas are pedestrian and transit hostile and lack consistent ADA compliance. As to autonomous cars, I think they are a double edged sword for people with disabilities, and for all people who share the road with cars including pedestrians. With a driver, I can make eye contact with them before crossing the street at a light or a crosswalk to make sure they see me and won’t run me over. I can’t do that with an autonomous car.
Autonomous cars have the potential to be a great boon for many people with disabilities, but also, I think, I great danger until they are perfected, which I’m not convinced is possible for driving on city streets that lack special infrastructure for autonomous vehicles.
I’m off-topic here, but you mean “free rein”. It’s a reference to equestrianism, not monarchy. Kings can do as they please.
We are witnessing the second rising of the Luddites.
There will be blood. Unfortunately it will be human blood and the humans lose.
What happened to the good old days of cottage industries when we would knit our own automobiles and spear the fuel?
Bring back cottage industries…we already have tiny houses…steampunk rules. I wanna see slow moving vehicles with footmen ringing bells. Anything to employ the masses.
Yes, quite, thank you, that’ll teach me not to proof before posting, auto-corrupt FTW!
This one is huge. Most of the time I can’t tell you how I knew, I just knew. You get good at picking up on these things, sometimes. There’s no particular one thing of “if driver does x, y, and z, then they will cut in front.” You sometimes just know. Take into account road-rage, too. As long as humans are behind some wheel, it’ll be a problem. Is the AI trained to recognise when the driver next to you is shouting, or even just mouthing “Fuck You”? If so, does it then recognise that such things could be threats and drive accordingly? Can it dial 911 if the passengers are being threatened?
How does it manage a toddler who suddenly says “I gotta pee,” or a passenger who needs, suddenly, to puke? Is it programmed to recognise those phrases and pull over or find the closest bathroom? All of these are things human drivers recognise every day, even without words spoken. Until those needs are also met, adoption by your average person will be slow, once the novelty wears off.
We don’t need driverless cars. We need public transit that actually meets the needs of the public.
much better to just stand in front of it since it’s programmed to yield to pedestrians.
Just wait until driverless trucks hit the road and the millions of layoffs begin. Then we’ll see interesting levels of violence against autonomous vehicles
Large companies buying politicians is the way everything happens. At least with the tech companies, we sometimes get something nice out of it, vs. how it works with the “health care” companies, prison industry, military industry, food industry, etc… These Warriors for Humanity types need better targeting algorithms.
Implementations of “representative democracy” do not equate to consent. People are born into such systems, and those with minority interests are non-consensually fucked by such systems by design. Add in garbage like gerrymandering, voter suppression, and electoral college systems, and you’ve fucked the majority too. I doubt any consensual form of government has ever existed yet, but it’s even clearer that US doesn’t get anywhere close.
That said, this isn’t actually a consent issue. I don’t “consent” to absolute moron humans having drivers licenses, but I’m not one to grant or withhold such consent on the common roadways: I’m given zero control over those roads already, and I didn’t “buy in” to those roads consensually… not my circus, not my monkeys.
You already have cottage industries- Uber and the gig economy were brought to you by big tech.
Large tech companies don’t differ from the other large companies in any respect in this issue. They occasionally also provide things some people value.
Hell yeah, that’s my boy.
Funny how people can continuously commit crimes and there is never a shortage of others flocking to their defense.
Charge criminals with crimes. Even if they’re white. Even if they’re good 'ol boys who wouldn’t really hurt nobody.
Say hello to next years model!
Speed limits are based on balancing the risk of death vs cost and convenience.
Then again I’ve never seen an autonomous car actively trying to run someone of the road or wave a gun at them.
