MCity:NY Times article about autonomous car research.
Front page article in NY Times business section this morning. My wife works at NCRC (old Pfizer campus) so I'm hoping she gets clipped by a driverless bus and I can retire 'cuz of her MGoLawsuit. (Simon & Geherin or Call Sam)?
/s
Link: https://nyti.ms/2uZFral
link gets you to NY times front page scroll to business and click to find this article. If someone can get better link please embed.
I wonder if they will automate the lawyers to keep up?
Full automation with cars will never be a thing, I don't think. People, overall, like driving. Making cars automated takes the fun out of it. Plus, there are too many potential problems with automated driving. I know there are problems with humans' driving, too, but there are some things humans are meant to do and one of them is driving. There are certain things humans can do that machines cannot.
Full automation also takes the 30,000+ deaths per year out of it.
I think people have a really hard time imagining fully autonomous vehicles because they're not ready yet - it's still very early in testing. It's a little like trying to imagine the iPhone ten years before it came out.
You cannot say that for sure. What if something with the computers in the cars go wrong and causes accidents?
like, for example, if the computers learn how to drink alcohol or start texting on their iPhones? I was rear-ended by a lady texting while driving. I'll take the computers over the dipshit drivers any day, thank you very much.
That's true. It won't go away entirely. But the machines don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than us. Which they already are.
My TV froze up this morning. It would be terrible if that happened to someone's car computer. However, my TV was designed using commercial availability standards. A car will be designed to more stringent, high-reliability, mission critical, 99.9999% availability standards. This means you will have redundant systems, possibly even TMR (triple-modular redundancy) architectures. And even then, you should still have a human in the vehicle to take over if the computer completely shuts down. You are correct that stuff happens, but I would be surprised if the numbers of fatalities didn't decrease significantly. To add to my list above, how often will the car's computer get distracted by a cute jogger? How often will it be distracted by putting on it's make-up or shaving in the morning (things I've seen other drivers do all too frequently,) or even just changing the radio station. I know someone who had to quit driving because they fell asleep at the wheel on multiple occasions.
In addition to being the country most famous for it's gun culture, we are also famous for our car culture. So I suspect the US of A may not be the first adapter of this technology, but it will come eventually once the data from Europe starts rolling in showing how safety has improved. Besides, who wouldn't want to pay less on their auto insurance?
I am convinced this is coming in the future and it will be safer. Why? Because we humans only have two eyes and to be safe drivers we need to assess safety hazards in front of us, to the left and right, and behind us. And our "blind spots" force us to turn our heads to the sides taking our eyes off of what is in front of us. Computers can do all this simultaneously. Our reaction time is also slower than a computers.
You're probably right about those stringent, high-reliability, etc. etc. standards. But that adds exponentially more difficulty, cost, and time to the development. Everyone knows that the last 10% of an engineering problem is 90% of the investment. Far more so with a complex thing like this.
The computer will never be distracted by a cute jogger or a text message....but if we barrel toward these great connected vehicles and smart systems that are necessary for the full benefit of autonomous cars, then the computer will be hackable. Bad enough there's ransomware that encrypts your files if you don't pay up. How about ransomware that crashes your car if you don't pay?
I suspect autonomous tech would be safer on 99.99% of your average days. On that one day when some dickhead succeeds in hacking the system, it could kill millions.
If cars are fully automated and drive safely all the time, I wonder what it's going to do to a lot of municipal budgets. Traffic tickets are a cash cow for them.
It's my understanding that the technology isn't there at the moment for these cars to adapt to weather and changing road conditions. That's a big deal. I can see autonomous cars becoming a thing in pockets of places like California, but here in the Midwest we are a long ways from it. I don't see it my lifetime.
as demonstrated by the many SUV's rolled over on the side of M-14 on my morning commute after a snowstorm.
The technology you describe is not that complicated as it simply relies on data from the TCM and ECM. This is one of the simpler challeges as the data is all onboard the vehicle.
Adjustments between acceleration and braking will be made instantaneously unlike the current situation where a middle-aged guy listening to sports radio and drinking coffee is trying to process at 7 am on Monday Moanin'. .
Just out of curiosity, what sensing can your body do that digital sensors can't? Cars can already sense your level of traction thousands of times per second, look in every direction at all times, sense and make decisions based upon your proximity to other objects and vehicles, park itself, etc.
Is it just some human "secret sauce" that's missing?
The technology for this kind of thing tends to move relatively slowly for a while and then explode as breakthroughs compound upon eachother. As the brains of these autonomous cars get better, I don't think rain and snow are going to be the massive obstacle they seem to be at the moment.
Just out of curiosity, what sensing can your body do that digital sensors can't?
The advantage humans have is that their sensors won't be covered up by the snow. Unless you put the cameras and lidars inside the car.
And yes, there is a human secret sauce as well: the ability to recognize a completely unfamiliar situation outside the usual rules and decide what to do; communicate with another driver in those situations; and understand unwritten rules. I sort of doubt a computer will notice that there is a nearly unending line of cars at a traffic light and stop to let another computer out of a driveway where it might otherwise spend hours patiently waiting for an opening.
Your windshield is constantly covered by snow, how do you get that off?
As for your second example, why does that seem so far fetched? Devices that are small enough to be injected into your body are able to communicate wirelessly, why wouldn't cars be able to express their intentions to other vehicles and have the system adjust accordingly?
Most people use windshield wipers. Cameras, lidar, and other sensors on cars are tiny and typically dome-shaped to some extent. Are you suggesting tiny little windshield wipers everywhere there's a sensor?
And the moment you open up a network where cars talk to each other, you open up the entire worldwide driving system to hacking, which trades off one human advantage for another, much more important one.
I imagine a future where all highways and most main roadways may be "autonomous vehicle only" routes, but people will still be able to drive freely on side streets, rural roads, etc. and people will still have their field cars, Jeeps for offroading, etc. I doubt we ever get to the point that human driving is outlawed, but I could definitely see it only being allowed in unpopulated areas
The savings will be immense.
And, imagine, no air polution from vehicles...
Equally immeasurable is the amount of times there have been grand predictions of a world made so much better by a certain technology, and it's been wrong. Very often those predictions begin with "imagine a world." One way to screw that up, for example, is one that's already been thought of: the car did not really reduce commute time or efficiency just because it goes faster than a horse. It just convinced people to move farther away from work. Hence, suburbia. The autonomous car, if it meets all its efficiency promises, could easily rev suburban sprawl up to 11 again.
it's happening -- transporatation as a service is on its way.
Yes, the Amish still exist. And Mackinac Island still exists!!!
Children being born today will likely never learn to drive. Sooner than you think, getting a driver's license will be akin to getting a pilot's license. When a fully automated car is seen to be safer than a human operated car, the tipping point will come very quickly.
It's not just the ~30,000 deaths/year in the USA. Think of all the other health, legal, and infrastructure costs associated with human drivers. Auto accidents are an immense industry -- and very little of it is value added. Parking spaces no longer need to consume valuable real estate in cities or near where you work. Your home's two car garage can be used for better things than storing your cars.
Seniors who are no longer able to drive can extend their quality of life for years by being able to get around without finding someone to drive them. Same with the handicapped.
I look forward to the day when -- instead of taking an airplane -- I can simply get in a car in the evening and get a good sleep while it drives through the night to my destination.
The timing may be inaccurate, but "full automation never happening" is simply short-sighted.
Actually, people overall DO NOT like driving. Weirdo gearheads like me, and presumably you, like driving. We're also the oddballs who insist on buying manuals. But we aren't representative of the general population. Also, if I'm being honest, I wouldn't mind having an autonomous car. I commute 3 hours round trip every day and having that time to work, relax, nap, etc. would be really great. It's draining to drive that long every day in stop and go rush hour traffic.
Not to mention, autonomous cars open up a transport option for a large and growing segment of our population: the elderly. That's a big deal in terms of maintaining independence through aging.
approx. 70% of drivers tailgate on the expressway. It's like they never took driver's training, or even heard of the 2 second rule.
I'm for automation just because of that. I'm sure people will be able to overide, & they will be causing most of the problems.
How would that work with automated driving? Would your car always obey the speed limit, or could you tell it to go faster if you're running late?
Probably obey the speed limit because otherwise it's technically breaking the law.
You should never drive differently because you're late anyway, it's things like that that make humans terrible at driving. There's always an exceptional reason for *your* speeding/cutting people off/etc. but whenever anyone else does it, they're a terrible driver.
Yeah yeah, if someone's bleeding out in your car, yada yada. I think saving the thousands of lives by not having people driving far outweighs those situations.
Of course you should obey the limit and all that. But is it going to be literally impossible to exceed the limit? If so, that's going to be an adjustment for a lot of people.
I'm curious about how parking would work as well. Would your car automatically park in the first available spot within X feet of the place or would it hunt around for a better one?
Why not drop you off at the door and go find a spot for itself? Of course it will be an adjustment, and that's fine. But getting in the car 15 minutes earlier isn't an issue if you can keep getting ready during your commute.
All of those convenience things will have a million different solutions, and they'll all have tradeoffs, which is great! Choice is good!
In my opinion, the toughest question is that of triage. If the car is smart enough to analyze situations to a point where it needs to make "moral" decisions like the streetcar problem (person on the track, pull a lever to save the person but the car crashes with everyone on board, leave the lever and the person on the track dies) then there will always be an uproar from those that get the short end of the stick in a given situation, but the goal always should be to avoid those situations altogether if at all possible.
People, overall, like driving.
I used to think the same thing about shifting. But it's getting harder and harder to find a car with a manual clutch and shifter.
Turns out people are lazy above all else.
I've been a driverless car skeptic for a while, at least in the sense that we can get to cars driving around everywhere without needing human input. I took some heat from it, and to be honest I was made to feel like quite a Luddite at times. I was just going by my experience living in Michigan though, with shitty roads and shitty winters.
True. But the repercussions of an error in this arena are....suboptimal traction. Also the goal is efficiency. A driver has to monitor multiple items both nearby and far away, and occasionally make value judgments.
Where's my damn flying car?
