Me too. At 28 I’ve totalled one car, and had several fender-benders. I honestly shouldn’t be driving because I lack the focus for it. But it’s absolutely economically infeasible for me to not drive.
The jobs I’ve had all are at times when there’s no bus service, and my colleagues who do take the bus end up spending 3 or more hours just going 30 miles. That’s stealing time.
I can’t wait until I never have to drive again. There’s so many more fun and interesting and productive things I could be doing while in transit.
I’m probably safer “behind the figurative wheel” of an autonomous car than behind the wheel of a real car. So… I welcome the autonomous cars of the future-- as long as they can be taught to value the lives of pedestrians.
Could be… the software should be able to identify a pedestrian and should be able to identify a cyclist, but someone pushing a bike might confuse the software.
No, it’s not AI yet, it’s a very powerful expert system.
I’ve been in one accident that was my fault, but my main concern is just how irresponsible a good portion of drivers are. Blocking the fast lane when they’re obviously driving below the speed limit, erratic lane changes, no signaling, being on the phone, slowing down to rubberneck an accident, etc, etc. But on top of that i just don’t like to drive, and sometimes i do feel myself lose concentration and i get this weird almost out-of-body experience where i don’t feel fully present even though i have complete control of the car. I’d rather leave it to a computer to handle it and i can take a nap or whatever.
Yep, how the courts rule on this one could have major implications for the future of autonomous vehicles.
It would be a shame if the responsibility for accidents is borne entirely by the human passengers, especially since the biggest paradigm-shifting potential for this technology is to provide independence for those who would be otherwise unable to drive (such as the disabled or the elderly).
I don’t think we know what that means yet for a “safety driver” of an autonomous vehicle. How quickly are you supposed to be able to take control in a dangerous situation? In a real life car crash 1 second seems way too slow to really help mitigate an accident, but one third of a second seems impossibly fast to actually pull of a switch.
My friend just joked the driver would be responsible for doing everything they would have to do if they were driving the actual car, and if they need their inputs to matter they yell, “HUMAN GO!” How else can the safety driver interact quickly enough with the car?
Humans have enough trouble acting appropriately and quickly IRL, which is the argument for self-driving vehicles. How is a ‘safety driver’ supposed to take over in time to prevent an accident? The only thing they could do is perhaps mitigate a breakdown of the self-driving system that would have caused more mayhem.
But it could very well have been the victim’s fault, couldn’t it? I mean, people dart out into traffic and do all manner of stupid things as pedestrians as well as drivers.
I mean, I think they can take over right away. Like at least if they hit the breaks the breaks will respond immediately. Maybe if they grab the wheel it immediately registers that it’s in manual, although I can see that being a problem too… ok I am 100% speculating and too lazy right now to look up a real answer X-D
The nice thing is that there is, presumably video. That will be helpful for the investigator, whoever is to blame. It should be a requirement that autonomous cars record video.
I like driving well enough, but long trips are boring and painful. When I am old, I’ll be find turning it over to a robot.
I am confused. We will keep needing to move more people around, so there will be passengers. So that won’t go away. Just you can surf Boing Boing or put on your makeup or read a book or nap or shave instead of manually driving.
I am sure they will have a list of rules that will try to save lives. But let’s be honest, there are people who get hit because the driver either doesn’t see them, or doesn’t react, or doesn’t react properly. In fact I predict they might even do something random in “hopeless situation” where someone will die with either choice, and just like a real person, it does one of 2 or 3 possible responses. Possibly they have a few million hours of simulated driving by real people and map their responses. Then one can say, yeah, the car killed someone, but odds are if a person was driving you would have 3 deaths, here is the data.
The safety driver is a workaround to a legal problem, not the solution to a technical problem. The point of autonomous vehicles is for them not to need a human driver.
