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Unexpected Consequences of Self-Driving Cars

183 pointsby ghoshover 8 years ago

27 comments

Daishimanover 8 years ago
Whenever people jump up enthusiastically about autonomous cars being right around the corner, I remember taking a cab in Lima, Peru, in the middle of some horrendously chaotic traffic, where drivers were navigating with little regard for lanes, negotiation for merging is done eye-to-eye, and impatient pedestrians would throw themselves into the street, tired of waiting for minutes to cross and trusting that the driver ahead wasn&#x27;t suffering from some murderous rage that day.<p>I also remember run-down suburbs where massive potholes and ditches make navigations of certain streets a puzzle by itself, compounded by garbage trucks ahead just doing their thing, improperly placed signage ahead, and those badly-designed intersections where you can totally count on drivers misjudging distances.<p>As the designers move away from the relatively trivial confines of well-maintained urban spaces and into different countries and cultures, I seriously question their ability to keep things reasonable for the rest of the human drivers. So far nothing in the near-future horizons of this technology indicates that the software would be able to navigate in many of these adverse situations without incurring huge time penalties or causing unacceptable delays.<p>I really do think that a lot of the hype happens to be because certain actors (Uber comes to mind as the most significant) have basically placed all their bets in these edge cases being small enough that a small number of human drivers should suffice to get around them. I remain skeptical.
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Larrikinover 8 years ago
I thought it was a very good article, but disliked the comparison to the sad state of US trains.<p>The author knew he was being a little disingenuous with his comparisons to the sad state of US infrastructure, which is why he was careful to preface every reference to poorly automated train systems with the US. There are a number of automated systems worldwide that work pretty well. The Yurikamome was the first line that came to mind. Its not an extremely packed line, but having safety systems similar, like door gates, works very well. Automating a more used line would of course be more difficult, but not impossible. Aggressive door closing seems to work pretty well in taming crowds. It might take an education period in the US, but once people realize holding a door won&#x27;t allow you on the train and that it will only allow you to remove a trapped limb, people will be less inclined to do it.
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smileysteveover 8 years ago
I have to disagree with Social outcasts; A study this year concluded that driver pedestrian interactions are at an all time low; likely because of both parties using cell phones.<p>As the article states, I often enter cross walks to test if a car is going to slow down; and they often don&#x27;t. Similarly, I recently had a near miss when a pedestrian ran across the street when I had a green light (late at night too).<p>(in Atlanta) Currently, cars are 1st class , Pedestrians are 2nd class, and when I bicycle, I&#x27;m often 3rd class.<p>Self Driving cars, I hope, will make this more equal because I&#x27;m tired of almost getting hit when I walk across the street in my residential part of town and a &quot;showboat&quot; enjoys flooring it (going 2x the speed limit) down my street for the 1 block between traffic lights.
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Tepixover 8 years ago
The author is wrong, the manufacturers are already considering the problem of communicating with pedestrians.<p>Mercedes: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.electronics-eetimes.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;mercedes-benz-self-driving-car-communicates-leds" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.electronics-eetimes.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;mercedes-benz-self-d...</a><p>Google: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;time.com&#x2F;4129247&#x2F;google-self-driving-cars-patent&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;time.com&#x2F;4129247&#x2F;google-self-driving-cars-patent&#x2F;</a><p>And this article in popular science: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.popsci.com&#x2F;people-want-to-interact-even-with-an-autonomous-car" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.popsci.com&#x2F;people-want-to-interact-even-with-an-a...</a>
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_ph_over 8 years ago
Many good points in that article. Probably self driving cars are finally going to force us to review and to fix in many occasions the way we are using cars today. Especially the ways which are already broken today. A good example is the competition for the parking in front of a Starbucks or other similar shops. The common usage pattern is still crafted by how traffic was decades ago, and you could still just drive to a location and leave your car. But that depended on there being fewer cars than parking lots. In most locations, this is a thing long past - so I would consider the current situation already as broken. Self driving cars would make it worse and such could force us to finally find solutions for these situations.<p>There are two obvious ways of fixing that situation. The first, recognize that trying to reach a location by individual cars cannot work out and ban private cars. Many European Cities have large pedestrian zones where private cars are locked out of whole streets in city centers.<p>The other option would be, and fortunately self driving cars would be part of the solution, to create enough parking spaces. Parking in the streets would still be disallowed, creating large pickup areas instead. So the road sides would be free of parking cars, enabling drivers to stop at any desired spot. As soon as the passengers left the car, the car would leave immediately for a nearby garage. This would of course depend on the creation of the necessary amount of parking garages.
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deckerover 8 years ago
Don&#x27;t forget that once we get to level 4, every time there&#x27;s rain or snow, there might even be more loss of life as everyone gets to learn how to drive again in bad weather.
MR4Dover 8 years ago
This is a great article that covers not only edge cases, but almost subliminal behavior that people perform almost every day.<p>To me, it is clear that our behavior will change. As an American in Amsterdam a few years ago, I was horrified to learn that at some places pedestrians can just walk out in front of you, and you have to stop. After a few days of observing this (as a passenger, thankfully), I noticed that you could tell the tourists - the natives would walk into the street without looking, knowing the drivers would stop. Tourists would hesitate, looking to the driver for feedback. Oddly (to me, as an American), I found that the natives had it right, and that blind faith made things smoother. The tourists, in checking for driver feedback before waling into a street, would actually slow things down more than necessary.<p>This is but one anecdote of thousands, but it shows how the expected behavior of a person from one place does not necessarily translate to another place. I would extend that same thinking to the future, in that or future will be a behavior change from what we do today.<p>I&#x27;m sure it will come slowly (although occasionally startlingly), and there will be new signs, new laws, and new behaviors. But for me, the best comparison is to when we introduced cars into the streets that had previously been owned by horses and carriages. a bit of chaos, but fairly rapid adoption (within a decade). It wasn&#x27;t uniform, and it was messy, and some places lagged the modern world by decades. But it came, we adjusted, and now we can&#x27;t even remember what that previous world was like.<p>What&#x27;s that quote about the future not being evenly distributed? I think it applies here perfectly.
tabethover 8 years ago
Weird, but somewhat relevant question (given that self driving capabilities combined with buses can potentially disrupt public transportation in urban areas): why do we even allow anything that&#x27;s not a bus (say, 10+ passenger) or industrial vehicle on the road?<p>The downsides of such a thing seem small.<p>1. There would be less traffic<p>2. The speed limit could be raised<p>3. Due to higher occupancy, more people could go to places, faster.<p>4. Cheaper per person (maybe) than most other forms of public transportation<p>5. High density areas can have fleets of buses go there, express. This would have only a little overhead compared to driving your own vehicle, yet would be substantially cheaper.
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umberwayover 8 years ago
If and when <i>all</i> cars are computer-controlled another consequence may be that children will be free to roam about. This assumes that those same cars are built to be incapable of hitting pedestrians. Is this possible?
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noonespecialover 8 years ago
I expect as far as the social aspect of driverless cars making their way through our neighbourhoods goes, eventually most humans will just come to see them as an odd type of animal. Like a horse. It probably wouldn&#x27;t hurt to give them some active animal-like cosmetic features that help nearby humans anticipate what they are &quot;thinking&quot;.<p>Delightful symmetry there, no? The first great task of mechanized transport was getting rid of the horse aspects, the second was building them back in.
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tony-allanover 8 years ago
If the advent of self driving cars corresponds with reduced private ownership then cars will not need to wait and our children just need to hop into the next free car and their phone or smart school bag will contain their home address. For adults, cars will not need to hand around near venues because we will just get into the next available car.<p>I agree that the transition will be messy. Perhaps we will need to redesign our local communities a bit to help. More off street parking for example.
webmavenover 8 years ago
<i>&gt; Since there are no current ways that driverless cars can give social signals to people, beyond inching forward to indicate that they want to go, how will they indicate to a person that they have seen them and it safe to cross in front of the car at a stop sign?</i><p>There is no reason that autonomous vehicles can&#x27;t give other rudimentary social signals in ways similar to drivers that can&#x27;t see each other by using their headlights, turn signals, emitting short &#x27;beeps&#x27; from their horn, and so on.<p>For that matter, autonomous vehicles can be given greater range of expression by adding a 100^2 pixel RGB LED display or similar behind the windshield or on the hood that can display emojis, or by actually giving them the ability to speak (KITT-style): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=i-UqF5ElduY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=i-UqF5ElduY</a>
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lhopki01over 8 years ago
The comparison to level 4 or 5 trains doesn&#x27;t make sense to me. For a train you&#x27;ve got millions of dollars worth of hardware and track so the driver is only a tiny component in the overall cost. For trucks and taxis the driver is the biggest costs. The incentives for autonomous cars are much higher than autonomous trains.
chernaborgover 8 years ago
What about that part where all of our computers are riddled with zero-days, and wide open to shadowy government organizations with massive technical budgets, and the part where we weren&#x27;t 100% cool with that.<p>And like, what about the part where we were worried about nefarious anonymous super hackers cyber-attacking the electric grid, and the gas grid, and other critical infrastructure, and we were worried about that sort of thing spiraling out of control into a federal emergency, because heat and potable water were taken down in the middle of winter, when a utility worker&#x27;s laptop was spearphish hacked, because internet of things? I guess that can&#x27;t happen anymore?<p>So now, right in the middle of this, the cars get to drive wherever they want because computers, and nothing can go wrong. One has nothing to do with the other, and we&#x27;ll all be safe and totally okay, right?
elihuover 8 years ago
One thing about self-driving cars that I&#x27;m not looking forward to is the proliferation of zero-occupant vehicles on the roads.
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eriknstrover 8 years ago
Having the description of abbreviations all the way at the bottom of the article so that one has to scroll a mile to read what they mean is a bit annoying. Instead of:<p>&gt;When the first IMPs^1 for the fledgling ARPANET were being built starting in 1969 at BBN^2 in Cambridge, MA, I think it safe to say that no one foresaw the devastating impact that the networking technology being developed would have on journalism thirty to fifty years later.<p>&gt;[A million words]<p>&gt;^1 Interface Message Processors. Today they would be referred to as Internet protocol routers.<p>&gt;^2 Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, MA, a company that was always known as BBN. As distinct from BBN, the Buckingham Browne and Nichols school in Cambridge, MA — no doubt many employees of BBN sent their kids to school at BBN.<p>I would have preferred for at least the first of these two to be baked into the text itself.
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bamboozledover 8 years ago
What about privacy?<p>There could be some serious privacy issues introduced by self-driving cars if they take off.<p>Cameras and microphones patrolling neighborhoods of the world, constantly feeding data into &quot;the cloud&quot; with absolutely no accountability?<p>Just no!
pfarnsworthover 8 years ago
I had to stop reading because the blog poster&#x27;s level of thinking is really superficial.<p>If you&#x27;re going to think completely autonomous self-driving cars, why the hell would you bother with things like parking? Why would I even bother &quot;owning&quot; a car? What the more reasonable approach is time-sharing of multiple vehicles, like Uber.<p>So instead of worrying about parking, you order a car, and it picks you up, and then you get dropped off. It drives off and services other customers. Then, when it comes time to get driven home, you order another car that comes and picks you up. You only pay for the car while it&#x27;s driving you, not while it&#x27;s sitting there doing nothing.<p>Or, if you did own the car, when you are not using it, it could go off and service other people and earn you money, and then return to pick you up.<p>And why would you go to Starbucks to pick up your own coffee? Why not send a self-driving car through the special self-driving car drivethru to pick up the coffee and return it to you? It could wireless transmit the order and payment details for you, and have a special slot for the coffee or food order.<p>Seriously, the article is really superficial thinking when it comes to self-driving cars.
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ck425over 8 years ago
This is very interesting to read from a UK perspective. We don&#x27;t have the concept of jaywalking, except for on motorways (I was actually shocked when an american friend explained it at uni, how the hell does anyone get anywhere, then I realised they mostly drive). So these social interactions don&#x27;t just occur in certain areas, they&#x27;re widespread across most roads and pedestrians technically have right of way over cars. Could autonomous vehicles cause the end of walking places?
aamederenover 8 years ago
At some point, we will debate against manual driver cars. As a petrol-head, I love driving and riding but that is the truth. the sooner we get rid of manual-drived cars, the faster we switch to self driving cars because the existence of manual cars are a big problem for self driving cars and they limit the potential the self-driving cars can achieve. We should at least do that in some cities. Imagine a town with no traffic lights and cars move in a harmony and scary precision in traffic.
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zbyover 8 years ago
One aspect that is not covered is armed conflict (or terrorism). Imagine what would happen if enemy take over a fleet of autonomous cars, be it through hacking or by physical attack on a control center.<p>Another thing: imagine robbery with autonomous robots and cars.<p>I am waiting for Hollywood to catch up on these ideas - this would be very cinematic.
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njharmanover 8 years ago
Most of #2 sounds fascinating and not anti-social to me at all.<p>Except, very few parents are gonna send a car and forgo helicoptering over their kids. Isn&#x27;t having kid unattended in car illegal most places?
argonautover 8 years ago
&gt; taking away much of the rest of advertising revenue from print, radio, and TV<p>TV advertising revenue continues to grow, and is still larger than online ad revenue.
jack9over 8 years ago
Bait title for blog hits. These aren&#x27;t unexpected consequences, they are some of the specific benefits. It adds nothing to the discussion as it&#x27;s neither comprehensive nor insightful. Why does the author think autonomous cars are a net good? Thanks, he went on and on about a few things he wants to pretend are &quot;unexpected&quot;. SMH
tahoeskibumover 8 years ago
I think that driving in places such as India with little traffic rules might be easier for an AI because the traffic flow is self-organized. There might not be any rules, but that is not relevant as we are not talking about expert rule based systems. If the AI car sees a cow it&#x27;ll just slow down and move to the side to overtake.
wcummingsover 8 years ago
I live in this area, completely agree, author is spot on.
knownover 8 years ago
Social mobility is a major problem in democracy <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk-politics-24936416" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;uk-politics-24936416</a>