
Can't wait until the first "endangered Tortoise" gets ran over. There will be hell to pay then...
Totally autonomous cars with no drivers, no passengers nor steering wheels are set to roll out onto California's streets under rules proposed by the US state's Department of Motor Vehicles. The regulator's suggested changes to the Golden State's red tape, published Wednesday, would grease the wheels for testing next-gen self- …
California is letting the autonomous car genie out of the bottle in the expectation that they will collect improved accident data that will bolster their position. Maybe that will happen, but first they will need to deal with accidents that kill people due to self-driving errors. It's already happened once, and will no doubt happen more as time goes on.
Imagine you have lost a loved one because someone else's auto-drive car screwed up. Will you be willing to just accept the loss as the price of progress? Unlikely. Most people will decide their loved one would still be alive were it not for the new law allowing such cars on the road, and will go to court for damages.
So there will be a need for a second law, blocking survivors from taking this sort of action. In short, it's gonna get messy real fast.
A load of warnings? You mean like "Hey! there's a truck in front of me that I can't see, and it's gonna rip your head off any second!" Like that?
I know I know, you mean the warnings from Tesla to always watch what the car is doing. But he didn't, and when millions have these cars there will be many who act the same way. Basically, what's the point having of such cars if someone needs to stay on the alert at all times and be ready to snatch back control instantly? Might as well just drive the damned things ourselves.
He was treating it like an autonomous vehicle because Tesla didn't take any measures to prevent people from doing so, and gave it a name that implied it had more autonomous ability than it really did. So yeah, I think calling it the first autonomous vehicle fatality isn't inaccurate.
There will obviously be more fatalities when they start operating autonomously "for real", and unfortunately many are likely to be similar to that Tesla crash - an accident that a human driver never would have had. True, they will no doubt prevent deaths that would have happened if a human driver had been present, due to the fact it will always be paying attention, follow traffic laws, etc. but that's not what people will focus on. Using statistics that say "over X miles we'd have expected Y fatalities but we had less, so autonomous vehicles are a success!" won't assuage the fears of people when self driving cars get in accidents humans wouldn't have.
That's why I keep saying that autonomous cars need to be proven to drop fatalities by 90% over the average sober human driver before they gain wide acceptance. It needs to be 90% because most people think they're a much better driver than the average person, and needs to only count non alcohol related fatalities because most people don't drive drunk.
Yes, much more so than people who set cruise control and fall asleep! The cause of those crashes isn't cruise control it is falling asleep! Comparing that with letting the Tesla "drive" for you, without it doing anything that forces you to pay attention or keep your hands on the wheel is utterly ridiculous!
Gedanken: supplies autonomous cars were standard, and then someone proposed letting humans control them. I suspect the scenario would be like aspirin not being able to get thru modern pharma trials (ISTR it wouldn't even make stage 2 trials because the ratio of clinical to LD50 level is far too low), or tobacco or alcohol being illegal if they'd only just been discovered.
Will autonomous vehicles kill people? Probably. How many can they kill daily and still be preferable? 3,286. That is one less than the average number who die daily from humans driving (asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-facts/road-crash-statistics). They don't have to be perfect. Simply better.
How many can they kill daily and still be preferable? 3,286.
That's so utterly wrong I can't believe anyone would be stupid enough to post something like that! Let me give you a choice of playing two games to illustrate. In one game the average player has a 1 in 1000 chance of dying, but your skill and attention when playing the game has a strong (but not absolute) influence over your chance of dying. In the other game the average player has a 1 in 1001 chance of dying, but it is completely random and nothing you do has any influence whatsoever on the odds of dying.
If you had to play one, which game would you choose to play? Hint: its a trick question, there is only one right answer and it isn't the one you suggested in your post.
What you said may be correct from the perspective of society as a whole, but no rational individual would choose a self-driving vehicle in which they had only slightly less chance of dying than the statistical average. First, because most people consider themselves better than average drivers, and second and more importantly because those figures include stuff like drunk drivers, deliberate suicides, people on drugs, people who have been awake for 48 hours and can't keep their eyes open, people who are extremely stressed, people who are texting while driving, etc. Now if you're a habitual texting-while-drunk-driving-and-sleep-deprived driver, then yes you should want the autonomous car, but you'll be the only one.
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I like the ad hominem attack opening. Very classy.
I'm actually suprised you actually mention illusory superiority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority) and then prove that example.
Your arguement is flawed since you assume that someone's skill and attention is "strong" for one of the "games". As you mentioned repeated studies have proven people suck at that judgement. Would your arguement still be valid if people were far (45%+) less skilled and more distracted then they believe they are?
You are also making the assumption that the driver/player's skill will always improve their odds. However, ham fisted attempts could make it worse and actually decrease the odds of success.
Finally, is the 1/1000 before or after your skill is added? If that is the odds after your skill then I'd still take random chance because it is still my best bet for success.
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Great, we're gonna have Uber auto /*driver supervisors that can barely navigate without a screen in front of them currently... how are they gonna be monitored to make sure they ain't, when responsible, distracted by tweeting? Certainly it's time for traffic cops to be able to give out moving violation tickets and suspend licenses to those that are supposedly paying attention.
Before anyone else at El Reg gets to do one of these Super Cali headlines they must be made to listen to the song on infinite reloop for a whole morning so they get the &*^%ing scansion right.
It isn't hard:
8 syllables / 6 syllable / 8 syllables / 6 syllables.
Get it right! *headslapping noises*
I'll let you in on a little secret: we don't really care if the scansion doesn't quite match up - worrying about a syllable here or there, life's too short for that.
In this case, we couldn't fit the 'the' in because then the headline would not fit in its little space on the front page, break over many many lines and just look ugly. And I'd rather have a tidy looking headline than one that fits the 14 syllables perfectly.
Sorry, not sorry. But thanks for appreciating the headline. We couldn't write one anywhere else in the enterprise IT news world.
C.
I think you'll find that we're* in the minority.
Most people couldn't give a shit as long as they get where they want to go, in as short a time as possible, with minimal amounts of other cars getting in the way. Just look at the way most people drive now, it's a hassle. If they could be using the time for other things (FB, emails, calls, eating etc) they would.
As long as the autonomous cars can look like status symbols as well as doing the job of getting from A-B most people will be happy.
* petrolheads
Properly self driving car would be good. Out in the sticks with dismal public transport (that stops early in teh evening) then a night out means driving (or if the night out involves alcohol, then taxis).
Given the car is an ongoing cost (for general use due to aforesaid dismal public transport, frequent taxis not affordable due to expense (I would have to run a big, very expensive car to make taxis a cheaper option ) - then automation so that whoever is (currently) designated driver could instead have an alcohol containing drink would be good.
That's main selling point (IMHO) of fully automated cars, a night out, without having to soft drinks
If vehicles are truly "fully autonomous" what happens on the roads of Norfolk when the country lane narrows to effectively single track and you meet a vehicle coming the other way. You know there's a field gateway big enough to get into 50 yards back but the vehicle doesn't, and nor does the autonomous pilot of the oncoming vehicle. You could just reverse ... oops, no user controls ...
The fun part comes when two of them meet head to head in such a scenario...
And it's not just Norfolk, had exactly the same on a recent holiday in Cornwall, indeed more than once. And there it was quite often at least two vehicles going in each direction, just to add to the fun of synchronised reversing and manoeuvring.