Posted on 08/30/2018 7:11:25 AM PDT by budj
he 18th of March, 2018, was the day tech insiders had been dreading. That night, a new moon added almost no light to a poorly lit four-lane road in Tempe, Arizona, as a specially adapted Uber Volvo XC90 detected an object ahead. Part of the modern gold rush to develop self-driving vehicles, the SUV had been driving autonomously, with no input from its human backup driver, for 19 minutes.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
I have a real world example of the no stripes question. My wife’s Toyota Rav4 has radar controlled cruise control. In situations where the fog line is not continued through an exit ramp her car will decelerate along with the exiting car.
Sounds like a feature worth turning off... Stuff like that is why I’ll “never” buy a car that auto-brakes for me so I can be rear-ended by the inattentive driver behind me.
That isolation sounds somewhat like a return to the 70’s when we all thought self-driving cars would be following embedded wires in the road surface. That would create the constraints you are talking about.
I also see the legal industry driving everything to a common set of “govt-approved” software/algorithms to remove liability from the individual car companies.
I believe something like this already exists for large aircraft and their mandated TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) system. When every plane is using the same algorithm then you absolutely know the reaction of the other aircraft.
Correct on all counts. It would require a completely different / separate set of roads.
Until it suddenly has to share a sky with an unautomated Piper Cub.
As yet, a computer can't be programmed to react and predict every known and unknown situation and action.
The car was in the testing phase and the driver, IIRC, was instructed to keep his/her eyes on the road and monitor the car. He/she deliberately disregarded instructions and was looking at his/her phone.
The bike rider, for reasons I will never understand, slowly walked her bike in front of a car speeding toward her. What on earth was she thinking? She could out walk it? It would slow down or stop? It would move around her?
I can understand why automated are car be less safe. The driver of the Uber proved that. He/she totally believed the car driving in auto mode was safe.
You can't fix or anticipate stupid.
Both the Uber driver and the slow bike walker acted obliviously to their situations.
No computer can anticipate stupid. Hence auto-drive car can never be made safe from stupid.
Perhaps, but once self-driving cars dominate traffic, the screw-ups that do occur will be monumental.
I agree. I think freeways will eventually be restricted to autonomous vehicles, which will then travel bumper-to-bumper, increasing their capacity significantly.
Street-level traffic may never fully automate.
Good point, we do keep attention focused during it’s use. On a trip in July with the cruise control engaged a car in the left lane on a four lane freeway decided to make last second exit on the right. I was driving in the second lane from the right side my vehicle detected the hazard far faster then I did and braked on it’s own saving me from a possible collision.
I see a similar situation with GPS. If you rely entirely upon GPS for directions to your destination, if something goes wrong you are clueless as to how to extricate yourself.
I am teaching my grandchildren to map out their destinations even if they plan to use GPS. That way they have a knowledge of their surroundings and are not helpless and dependent.
I imagine street-level (presumably down town) will go away. Those streets are a huge waste of space, to be replaced with skyway / subway type transportation, or walk/bike ways.
Rural drivers will be the only ones that still have to steer.
As the Uber incident shows, at this point you're a fool to fully trust a self-driving computer car.
There are incidents of GSP steering people into roads blocked off or under repair.
Carry a paper map in the glove compartment.
I saw that episode of The Office.
Until it suddenly has to share a sky with an unautomated Piper Cub.
Even more reason for a govt-approved set of algorithms to remove liability from the auto makers.
And stripes are stripes are stripes...:^)
My Hyundai gives lane departure warnings from crack-filling strips in the road when they are wet and the sun is low. They must stand out better to the sensing camera than the faded, painted white lane lines.
Having been semi-exposed to computer trading systems, I have both an appreciation as well as fear of these systems.
You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube.
“It gives a straight-forward description of the human and computer actions that led to the death of Elaine Herzberg (though I would add she foolishly walked her bike in dark section of the road. Did she not see the headlights coming at her? Did she believe she had enough time to cross the street? Did she believe the car would see her and slow down or swerve to miss her? I have no idea what she was thinking as her actions showed complete lack of situational awareness or disregard of her actions).”
I see drivers, bicyclists, and people do irrational things every day when I’m driving, usually multiple times a day. But they don’t deserve to automatically die because of it, because some WAY-less-than-perfect computer code can’t handle those situations ... most of my focus while driving is anticipating and looking out for other drivers to do incredibly brain-dead things that put our lives and our vehicles in danger and be prepared to compensate and avoid the consequences of such bad driving ...
I would really like to see some top notch mathematicians versed in chaos/complexity theory take a look at the driving environment as a whole, involving the tens of thousands of factors involved in driving on all roads ranging from dirt trails to interstate highways, city driving to driveways, all weather and driving conditions, all levels of skills, all behaviors of driving, all types of vehicles, et. al., and render a verdict on the level of chaos/complexity involved and the resulting probability of success in building an autonomous driving vehicle ... my guess is that the verdict would be that driving is a chaotic system that is literally mathematically impossible to program a solution for ... after decades of trying, we STILL cannot automatically translate accurately from one language to another, a MUCH simpler task in terms of complexity than driving ...
But that’s not how it works. They set the algorithms off and they learn and change and run themselves.
Facebook intervene in their running periodically, but they really don’t control them. And particular programs don’t just run on their own, they call on libraries, deep operating systems and so on ...”
That last underlined sentence should send chills to every human being on the planet, computer user or driver of a normal vehicle on public roads.
By far, the most numerous system in the world is Microsoft, more and more allowed to issue "updates" to their operating system with the full intention of expecting their users to be the beta testers of the changes or wholesale OS revisions.
Microsoft has no ethics, morals or a conscience.
Criminally so.
Any algorythm-rich application is almost certain to fail fatally if based on such an OS.
If Microsoft can't be bothered to troubleshoot revisions to their OS, what chance do commercial users of their OS have (Without killing a few dozen users.)?
Hah! Damned close. And innocent people like that poor bicyclist are the unwitting beta-testers.
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