Be Excellent To Each Other

Bit of a random entry to the thread, this piece was linked off from a Guardian article about autonomous cars (and the fact that at some point they're going to have a fatal accident).



http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business ... -447-crash

Fascinating read, highly recommended.

I remember reading all about that crash before, tragic that they pieced it together just too late. Although if automation pans out the same way with driverless cars then worrying about how to prevent the tiny number of remaining accidents would surely be a good problem to have.

It's amazing to think that a modern aeroplane can end up crashing as a result of a single system going slightly wrong and doing exactly what it was supposed to in the circumstances.

As for the driverless cars, I can appreciate they make sense in all sorts of ways, although I have no idea how the transition from 'no driverless cars' to 'all driverless cars' is going to happen, as there's going to be a long period of time in the middle where there are both all over the place.

So what? As long as the driverless cars aren't set up requiring all cars to be driverless then it doesn't matter.

I didn't read the article Hearthly said it was linked from but I'm not sure how much of it can really relate to cars. The problem in that article is one of people operating machines that are fully autonomous 99% of the time becoming deskilled and therefore unable to intervene correctly when required to do so. Unlike a plane at 35,000ft a computer driving a car that starts getting bad data could be programmed to just stop the thing and usually nobody would be killed as a result.

Yes. There are far fewer no-win scenarios for a confused driverless car than there are for a pilotless aereoplane.

Quite. How are the driverless trains doing, btw?

Very well.



I do wonder if unions are going to do their best to fuck this up too, though.

Oh, they will. Just look at Southern Rail and the need for a Guard as an example of how any change to a system that is currently accepted elsewhere without question can cause all stinks of shit.

I guess the suggestion is that if you eventually have a generation of drivers who've never really driven a car, and who might not know what to do or how to react in an emergency situation, then the consequences could be serious.

However I do take the point that in a car, it could just stop safely if it detected something was wrong. Unless something went wrong with the bit that was supposed to work out if something had gone wrong, and then something else went wrong.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about driverless cars, I can totally understand them making lots of sense, but it'll be a massive cultural shift as for lots of people driving is a pleasure and cars are seen as far more than just a mode of transport.

If you're allowed to get pissed and then have your car drive you home though, I'm all for it. (As I understand it the current thinking is that you'll have to be fit to drive in case you need to take over from the computer, which sounds like the worst of both worlds.)

Opinions differ. That's one idea. The other idea is that the moment of transfer of control from computer to human is so perilous that it's best avoided entirely; hence driverless cars should have no manual controls at all beyond a hidden override joystick for service mode. The humans are only ever passengers in this scenario.

While this is true, the percentage of people for which this is true is tiny compared to those who just see them as white goods to get them from A to B.

As long as they don't legislate "driverless-less" cars off the roads, I'm all for driverless cars. Bring it on!

Obligatory

Yeah, Christ, when I get a driverless car I don't expect it to have any controls except for "go" and "emergency shutdown" (which I think should be fitted to all cars).

Beer holders fitted outside the windows.

Will the car be deciding where to go then?

Voice or phone activated

This.
I'm only surprised they haven't demanded a ticket inspector, conductor, driver, co-driver, trolley-dolly, coal tender and stoker for each driverless train as well...

As for driverless cars - bleh. (Although, at least the car-driving computers will be checking their mirrors, so it's not all bad for us bikers).

Yay, JohnnyCab!

(Total Recall... just so awesome...)

If it works -- fairly big if, although IMO the problems are large-but-solvable -- I think it'll be like drink-driving. You'll have a generational shift where manual driving quickly comes to be seen as unconscionably reckless. I think it's possible we live to see manual driving banned, even.

Cavey can already just sit in a car and say 'drive' for it to move without him touching the controls.

I don't. I'd be surprised if most new cars are driverless within twenty years, then you have to replace all the existing cars. It would take decades even from then. Unless the government were going start letting people swap their cars for driverless ones for free or something, which they won't.

I think long term you're probably right, Doc, though frankly it pains me to say it.

I think you're overstating it a little, but even if you're correct that's still only forty years. That's going to be within the bounds of "some of us live to see."

Killer self-driving car feature no-one has mentioned yet: potentially life-changing mobility people for who can't drive. The disabled, the elderly, the injured, kids, ...

Second killer self-driving feature: you don't need to park them near your destination. They drop you off, then you send them away. This could turn urban planning upside-down. (Maybe manually driven cars naturally fade away because we stop building large car parks on valuable inner-city land.)

Self-driving car question: do we own them, or does everyone just take self-driving Ubers?

Silicon valley talks a lot of hoo-hah about changing the world, but this really could live up to the hype.

I like the idea of dropping you off, then parking. Although these car parks would have to be close, or a lot of fuel/electric could be wasted by driving out of the town etc.

i would opt for a self drive car, for my commute to work, as I would get time, to do work on the go.

They'd park up, charge, and come back. 10 miles or so isn't going to hurt.

Picking you up is somewhat more complicated, especially if you have your own car, because it has to know when to fetch you. Maybe little short-term parking sites will pop up for that. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

I'd be quite surprised if they ban driving all together because it's safer to do so, although my thinking comes from the fact that they haven't banned less safe (old) cars.

Yeah, I wouldn't bet much against it but I still do highly doubt we'll live to see it. Although I can see how public opinion might force the issue once driverless cars are the majority. e.g. the first time a family are quietly going along in their driverless car when someone kills them all because they were wanting to enjoy the thrill of driving but made a terrible mistake.

At rijkswaterstaat (the dutch infrastructure agency where i work), we're already doing scenario's for a world full of driverless cars... what would it mean for the space in the city (drop off?),what would it mean for the interaction with all those bicycles (who would 'own' the city),and safety (would a kid just cross the street for fun to stop a whole bunch of driverless cars)

It will go in phase btw.. in ten years most new cars will be " driver assisted" for most things , and when we get used to it we'll be driverless

I can't see them banning either.

Would be like taking the guns off the yanks.

I like the idea of car trains on motorways and busy a roads etc.

How would the payment model work there? Like a cab for the journey, or would you buy a package of X miles?

Also wonder if like Uber how long it would take for them to be available outside of big towns.

Old cars are mostly less safe for the driver and passengers who have chosen to get in it, though (barring some questions around bonnet hard points for collisions with pedestrians.) Whereas in a world of near-perfect driverless cars, manual cars are going to be more dangerous for everyone around you. So there's a consent angle there that means the two scenarios are not the same.

But I broadly agree that the adoption cycle would have to work around the economic and ecological concerns of forcing everyone to junk still-working cars before their time. Still, I imagine the car companies would love it, it'd be like the early 00s when everyone upgraded to HDTV in the space of a few years.

The rest of Europe will get it sorted and we'll all be going round on carts made of bits of their old cars, pulled along on our decayed roads by horses.

What happens when you choose emergency shutdown and it was the wrong decision, causing you to crash?

Certain large software companies have a gaggle of lawyers trying to work that out at the moment.

The same thing that happens now if I do something wrong and crash, I would presume.

I doubt it, otherwise you'd have to be paying attention to what's going on all the time. And if I ain't drinkin' in my technocar, I'm bangin' hawt chix in my technocar.

You have to wash technocar and take the kiddies to the park.

Don't marry her, bang me!

Bravo!

No, if the car is driving and you intervene causing an accident it is your fault, irrelevant of alcohol. It counts as driving with undue care and attention. There is no expectation that you would need to use the emergency stop button, but should you do so frivolously then in the car of an accident, you are to blame.

Ah, I read that backwards, as in what happens if you don't press the button but doing so would have avoided crashing.

I bet there won't be a button anyway.

I'm actually really quite excited about the idea of driverless cars. If the cars don't have any human 'over-ride' controls then they can just tootle along by themselves, right? I could see useful scenarios from this - go pick up the kids from school/park/club and bring them home safely. Go collect my shopping/takeaway dinner and bring it home. Come pick me up from the airport after my plane lands (saving expensive parking costs).

Sleeping while the car drives overnight to a holiday destination would be ace.

Boozing and banging chix would be awesome too.

That's what insurance is for, right? Just like it is now.

I was thinking about it some more, and suppose it depends, is the emergency shutdown is going to be 'cut all power, apply 100% brakes immediately' or a 'stop ASAP'? If the cars can not only drive themselves but also communicate with each other (I'm sure I read about car-car communication to warn of upcoming dangers a while ago) and react faster than a person could, they should be protected even more against poor use of the stop button.

Personally think the emergency button should lock the brakes on and shut off the power, and entirely bypass any self-driving stuff.

Imagine what you'd want it to do if the car suddenly took off across a field and kept accelerating - that's what I'd want the big red button for.

Also more mundane things like a fire or the inevitable folk getting carsick.

You need two emergency buttons, I think. "Pull over and stop safely to the best of your ability, computer," and "holy shit stop right now."

And a turbo boost button.

And the all-important blue shell launcher.

The button aims you at the fat man on the bridge.

Nah.

Insurance will fall to the manufacturers, under liability policies. Nobody is entirely sure, to be fair, but that is the way it is headed. Now where it all falls between hardware/software will be for them to sort out. They could theoretically be dicks about it and make you pay a premium for it anyway, but then one manufacturer will be confident enough to add in free insurance for all their cars, and it'll be hard for the others not to follow suit. Though, people being people, they'll just work out what the insurance costs them and build it into the road price.

Unless more people prefer the Uber-model of not actually owning your driverless car, but whilst that does have loads of benefits, it's not much help if the former user pisses themself or does some other shitty thing in the cab.