Talking Cars Tuesday: How autonomous do you want to go?

Submitted by MaizeAndBlueWahoo on

Bringing back a popular offseason feature even if it's not mine to bring back.  Today's question: In a world where you could choose between totally autonomous and zero autonomy, and everything in between, and there are no restrictions on the road that might limit certain roads to autonomous cars only, how autonomous is your vehicle?  Do you have a Google egg with no pedals or steering wheel?  Or are cruise control and automatic transmissions for babies?  When do you let the car take over, and when do you want to do the driving, and what features do you like and what can you happily ignore?

Trebor

February 14th, 2017 at 1:22 PM ^

For me? I would prefer zero autonomy, though I can see the appeal for long road trips. I'm all for other cars on the road being autonomous, as long as the software keeps them in the goddamn right lane on the highway. I yearn for the day Oregon's highway patrol starts enforcing that.

UMAmaizinBlue

February 14th, 2017 at 1:26 PM ^

Full autonomy with options for going manual. I look at it this way - one idiot can cause a traffic jam. Removes the idiots from the equation and use computers to keep flow going. Long way off, but potential is too big not to try, IMO. Safety issues notwithstanding, cuz that's a whole other problem to sort out.

Oregon Wolverine

February 14th, 2017 at 2:18 PM ^

Rubber neckers in large cities destroy the flow.  I used to go crazy during my 2-3 year stay in So. Cal., the "fake" traffic jams caused by a car on the side of the road, not impeding a lane at all, but one little brake causes an accordian ripple which eventually results in a 10 MPH stretch.

Traffic is getting bad in Pdx too, which is why I opt out as much as I can for my velocipide.  

 

ST3

February 14th, 2017 at 2:47 PM ^

I see a lot of users on here complaining about living in Southern California. I haven't complained about traffic since I started a job 5 miles from home that doesn't require me to take the freeway. Finding the right combination of job and home location is key to making it work.

When my mom visits and I have to spend 2 hours to go 30 miles to bring her to her sister's house, I'm reminded of how awful LA traffic can be.

bluebyyou

February 14th, 2017 at 3:42 PM ^

Once you have autonomous cars, you will find ever growing populations of people with very few driving skills which will create a dangerous situation when these people decide to drive.  My guess is that within 50 years there will be very few if any drivers except for specialty equipment and then it is a maybe.  This AI/robotics thing isn't going away.

Anybody following this topic knows that car manufacturers are looking at very different purchasing models as the need for ownership will change.  If you could have a clean car of whatever class you chose show up at your door upon demand, it would be compelling to not own a car, particularly in cities where car ownership is expensive, due to parking, insurance, etc. i.e., NYC.  In rural areas, things would be different, but for how long?

Two Hearted Ale

February 14th, 2017 at 2:22 PM ^

Right now there are 30,000+ traffic deaths in the United States every year. It is estimated that autonomous vehicles could prevent 90%+ of those deaths. That alone is reason enough to justify a fully autonomous future but the benefits are far greater than that.

Injuries and property damage would be massively reduced to a point that car insurance would only be necessary for acts of God like when a branch falls in a wind storm. Auto manufactures/transportation companies could self insure, the cost would be baked into the price.

Right now cars sit for something like 95% of their lives. In an autonomous car world the justification for owning a car becomes purely emotional for all but the most rural people. Why have a car wasting space in your garage/driveway/street when you can dial up Uber on demand. Autonomous Uber becomes much more desirable when the cost of drivers and insurance is practically eliminated. As a bonus, autonomous cars never get tired or burned out so they'd be available any time day or night. I'd love to take a car service to work and not have to worry about parking. Imagine how easy it would be to get around a big city if there weren't cars parked on every street. That space could be used for more auto/cycle/pedestrian traffic.

The case for autonomous cars is too good to be slowed down by fear of robots or the belief that humans should drive. Humans have only been driving for about 120 years and we've never really gotten very good at it. Cars were a placeholder between horses and computers. For those who still want to drive tracks will be available as long as there is a market for them.

Bigku22

February 14th, 2017 at 2:31 PM ^

Great analysis here as the highest upside to autonomous cars is the life saving possibilities. 

However, the ugly downside is autonomous cars and semi-trucks will eliminate over 1 million middle class jobs in this country. Trucking is one of the last highly available middle class job that does not require much if any education. Also, the jobs from uber, lyft, cabs, delivery (UPS, etc..), will all be eliminated. 

I get this is part of the deal with automation, but at some point society reaches a breaking point (much larger conversation). 

The benefits are amazing, but it will put even more of a strain on the lower to middle class job market. 

Cosmic Blue

February 21st, 2017 at 9:49 AM ^

I really dont like this argument at all. if your job is obsolete it's time to learn a new profession. It may be tough for those affected in the short run, but that is sometimes the cost of societal progress.

think if we decided not to embrace automobiles because it woul put all the people who took care of horses out of work (shoeing, stablekeeping, etc)?

Two Hearted Ale

February 14th, 2017 at 4:04 PM ^

Agreed on jobs. I don't know what the answer is though. There will be a market for autonomous vehicles so they are coming.

I fly airplanes for a living. Autonomous airplanes are coming too. I'm hoping they arrive the day after I (voluntarily) retire. In the mean time I'm saving my pennies.

Bigku22

February 14th, 2017 at 4:18 PM ^

For sure, no easy answers but absolutely this is coming and probably faster than most realize. 

I would guess with airlines, if for nothing else the optics, they will always keep at least one pilot in the cockpit. 

However, that alone reduces the workforce needs by half. 

If you factor in all the other upcoming automation job elimination (manufacturing, service jobs, etc.), it paints a really grim picture for the labor force. 

TrueBlue2003

February 14th, 2017 at 7:42 PM ^

horse carriage drivers 100 years ago.

In 1920, 30 percent of the US population were farmers, now only 2 percent of Americans farm thanks to advances in farm tech.

There is nothing better for society than getting people out of repetitive, time-consuming, often dangerous work, because it allows more people to work on bigger problems like health, energy, productivity, education (which further fuels productivity), etc. Until our constraints are lifted so much that all we have left is to destroy ourselves, but let's not get dark here!

This is a "problem" that gets highly overstated:

The change will be fairly gradual which will allow a natural wind-down in which people voluntarily age out of the profession and fewer people replace them to keep the balance.  I work in trucking and the average age of long-haul truckers is 55.  There is a major shortage, currently, and it was just named one of the top 10 hardest to fill jobs in the US.  Young people don't want to go into trucking and most truckers hate their jobs (some love the road, though) because it's boring and lonely and they're away from their families. 

I think we're actually relatively close to putting autonomous on highways right now.  Most freight carriers operate with service centers and hubs where loads come in from local pickups and get consolidated for long-haul.  These are the shipments, service center to service center, that autonomous will work really well for.  Then all the local "last mile" stuff will still get manually delivered...for a long time in my opinion. This keeps drivers closer to home, and the cost savings on shipping should cause a commerce boom such that the demand for local shipments has the potential to keep the few young people going into trucking busy for a long time.  I do agree that retraining those who are involuntarily out of work will be important.

This technology should be a major economic stimulus along the lines of the steam engine.  It's going to create a lot of jobs as well.  We've gone through so much automation of jobs and created so many new jobs throughout human history (and we keep saying, but what about the jobs!?), that I'm not worried about this one. 

 

Bigku22

February 14th, 2017 at 8:21 PM ^

I agree with your statements on quality of life, psychological, family benefits etc..

But you're ignoring the fact their is not enough decent paying jobs RIGHT NOW to support the current population. The numbers don't add up, same as they don't in manufacturing. The jobs created from automation are a fraction of the jobs that are lost. 

Retraining is also a falacy. Good luck teaching a career truck driver with a high school education how to code. 

Elon Musk has recently made comments about the liklihood of the government having to provide basic income in the future as the labor work will be very minimal. 

The past is not always indicative of the future, the optimistic jobs picture you're painting is just simply not accurate.  

TrueBlue2003

February 14th, 2017 at 9:12 PM ^

too many alternative facts recently.  We are at MORE than full employment in the United States right now, which is why we have massive SHORTAGES of truckers and just about every other job you can name.  The "natural" unemployment rate that provides the right amount of labor market movement (people available to fill open jobs, but not too many available such that employment wait times are excessive) is about 5 percent.  We're lower than that.  Labor shortage is a huge reason for stagnant growth. Are there some people that are too lazy/stubborn to get retrained or move for work? Yes, but that doesn't mean work isn't out there for anyone remotely willing to get it.  On topic, Uber can't keep enough drivers on the road.  They're always recruiting and they spend a lot money on it.

I already addressed the fact that the vast majority of "career" truckers, i.e. anyone in the workforce today that wants to finish their trucking career will almost certainly be able to.  And people aren't entering the profession.  I deal with this every day.

You're right, the past isn't always indicative of the future, but it's a better predictor than random people trying to predict the future by throwing darts.

And I'm talking specifically about near term (30 years) concerns over trucking jobs - i.e the span for which anyone currently doing the job needs to be worried.  Elon is talking about 50+ years when AI has the potential to literally perform even complex cognitive tasks. By that time, trucking jobs will be a relic in the way horse carriage drivers are now.  That won't be a replacement of physical labor, that would be a replacement of work as we know it and you have much bigger issues/opportunities at that point.  We already have basic income for some, we might need it for more people then, sure. But there's no telling what new and exciting challenges we'll be working on then.  Who predicted 100 years ago that most jobs in the developed world would involve a computer in 2017 and didn't exist then, yet unemployment is as low as it's ever been?

TrueBlue2003

February 15th, 2017 at 3:21 PM ^

market will have its ups and downs in the future.

I'm responding to people that said we WILL lose 4.4 million trucking jobs and that my picutre of the future of jobs is simply not accurate.  That's an incredibly bold statement to make since this person doesn't know what is an is not accurate about the future.

My points about about the current job market are fact.

And my response about losing a ton of trucking jobs is simply to say that it's almost certainly going to be more gradual than the worst case scenario (by definition a wosrt case scenario is almost never realized) that the media is riling everyone up about, such that many of the current truckers who are an average age of 55 aren't going to be negatively impacted.  Positivity!  I can haz it!  

I'm optimistic that the continued automation of jobs (which has been happening since the dawn of mankind) will continue to provide improvements in quality of life, resource utilization, wealth, etc.  If this means that we are so productive and wealthy that we're able to pay people a basic income and reduce constraints, professionally, I say we should be so lucky.  If history is any guide, humanity will continue to make progress. And maybe we're due for something totally different, but for people on here to be certain of that, and say anything else is not accurate, is ridiculous.

MaizeAndBlueWahoo

February 14th, 2017 at 3:19 PM ^

Au contraire - humans are actually very good at driving.  We can process complex rules and situations and don't need millions of miles of testing over and over and over to get it just right.  We can understand that even though the light is red, we can go because the man in blue says we can.  We instinctively know that it's our turn to go at a four-way stop even though the other three cars haven't come to a complete stop.  Computers need hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of programming and testing to realize that.

Humans drive 3.1 trillion miles a year.  Roughly one death per one hundred million miles traveled is not bad.  It could be improved, yes.  Computers don't get complacent, or distracted, and they never forget their programming, and that programming can be instantly transferred to any new vehicle (as opposed to having to teach new human drivers.)

A moral case against being allowed to drive is a bridge too far.  You could make the same moral case for a police state in the inner city.  You would absolutely save lives.  But we don't do that because freedom matters.  "Oh, you can just go drive on a track" misses the point.

And lastly, the benefits you propose are overblown.  For example, if 90% of deaths could be avoided, there still would be accidents and deaths, and therefore still the need for insurance beyond a tree falling on the car.

Two Hearted Ale

February 14th, 2017 at 3:59 PM ^

Your police state comparison is a non sequitur. You have no inherent right to pilot a vehicle on a public road. You do have an inherent right to liberty and due process.

In a future with driverless Uber you don't need to own a car so you don't need insurance. Autonomous cars would cause such a small amount of injury and property damage that Uber could self-insure and certainly would choose to do so because it would be in their financial interest.

Traffic deaths increased 8% year over year in 2015 which was the largest percentage increase in 50 years and though full data isn't in for 2016 the trend is expected to continue. Drivers aren't getting less distracted.

MaizeAndBlueWahoo

February 14th, 2017 at 5:06 PM ^

I hate to go here because obviously, but there's no inherent right to an abortion, either, but they found one in the Constitution anyway so there you go.  The point is not to start that debate, but that freedoms not explicitly found in the Constitution can still be implied from it.  And mobility, I would think, is a tremendously important one, the limits of which have never been litigated but probably would be if mandatory autonomous cars became a thing.

If you say "there will be driverless Uber so you don't need a car" then you're making the very large mistake of thinking in terms of average usage.  Can I go camping in a driverless Uber car?  (Do you think people will just want to be left in the wilderness without the ability to leave?)  Can I haul a boat across state lines?  Can driverless Uber double as a daily work vehicle?  If the wife is having a baby, do you think she'll wait patiently while you order up a driverless Uber to take you on a nice slow and sedate ride to the hospital?  People will own vehicles.  I'm sorry, but the idea that everything will be replaced with some company's driverless car is pie-in-the-sky hyper-futurism - and only one of a whole bunch of possible outcomes.

Yes, traffic deaths did increase in 2015.  So did miles traveled.  Fatalities per one hundred million miles traveled zoomed upwards from 1.08 to 1.12.  That would be the third such year-over-year increase in the last 29 years.  Every other year that number has gone down.  Down 27% since 2000.  Population has risen, miles traveled has risen, fatalities have decreased.  Humans are much better drivers than you give them credit for, and safety improvements in cars have helped too.

Wolverine 73

February 14th, 2017 at 9:19 PM ^

The S Ct long ago recognized that the privileges and immunities clause of the constitution protected the right of interstate travel. It isn't too much of a leap from that to the idea that people can choose to travel interstate via auto instead of bus or train or mule if they so choose, just as the earlier recognition of a constitutional right of privacy was not too great a leap for the court to get to a right to an abortion. Again, not to get into that can of worms.

Westside Wolverine

February 15th, 2017 at 10:20 AM ^

You do not have a right to drive farm equipment or low power vehicles on the interstate because of safety. I could very well see a defined "right to mobility" but that doesn't mean a right to humanly driven vehicles. It also doesn’t mean that you must subscribe to a private service as you could purchase your own vehicle.

TrueBlue2003

February 14th, 2017 at 8:07 PM ^

but they're relatively bad at paying attention or staying sober or any number of things that cause accidents.  There will be no reason to see and understand a red light or for a police officer to direct traffic in a world with autonomous vehicles guided by sensors. There will still be a need for insurance but if there are 90 percent fewer accidents, it'll be 90 percent less expensive, and that's if you own your autonomous vehicle which probably won't be common in suburban/urban areas.

Is the hundreds of thousands of testing hours required to program the systems and software a reason not to do it?  Should we stop researching a cure for cancer?  You even made the point that it takes hundreds of thousands of hours to train each new driver to job - a massive waste of human time.

I agree we're a long way from prohibiting manually driven automobiles from driving on roads, if ever: they'll just naturally phase out in urban areas because the alternative will be so much better.  This transition will be very much like the transition from horses to automobiles: slow, messy, complicated, with plenty of people who "like" driving/riding fighting to keep their "freedom" to do so.  But once it's fully integrated, you just won't have many manually driven vehicles out there by choice.

MaizeAndBlueWahoo

February 14th, 2017 at 8:26 PM ^

You even made the point that it takes hundreds of thousands of hours to train each new driver to job - a massive waste of human time.

I assume you mean here that I said that it takes hundreds of thousands of hours to train a human driver, in which case, no I didn't.  I made the point that it takes thousands of hours to teach a computer to do things that humans can figure out almost instinctively.

Neither was the point that "it takes too long, so we shouldn't do it."  The whole time I was pointing out advantages human drivers have over computers.  As in, a teenaged driver can be taught how to drive in a few weeks of instruction.  OK, so in a fully autonomous world, there'll be no need for traffic cops - but in the meantime, autonomous cars will have to operate in a human-driving world, so they'll need to figure that out.  And certain things will never go away no matter how autonomous the car.  Like snow.  Human drivers often have either terrible discipline or way too much discipline in the snow, but human brains are still amazingly good at adapting to snowy conditions.

 

TrueBlue2003

February 15th, 2017 at 12:24 AM ^

of teenagers time is a lot of wasted human time.  Millions of hours (I undersold it as hundreds of thousands).  Software writing takes of a lot of R&D, yes, but it is nearly infinitely scalable, hence the time argument really goes the other way.  Why waste the time to train people to do something that will just waste a lot more of their time if you can help it?

I fully get your argument that some people will choose to learn to drive like some people like riding horses.  I don't think that freedom should be taken away.  I just think most people will see it as a waste of time rather than something fun.

I also agree that humans are better drivers...right now. And that's why we don't put autonomous cars on the road.  But I'm operating under the assumption that with the pace of AI progress, robots will be significantly better drivers than humans at some point in the future.  That is a near certainty.  With censors and machine learning AI systems, navigating snow and odd objects and making decisions will be done quicker by robots.  It might be 20, 30, 40 years but it will happen.  So any arguments about safety won't hold at that time.

BlueMan80

February 14th, 2017 at 1:26 PM ^

so I'm fine with zero autonomy.  There are times I would appreciate a break for a few minutes at a time while doing the I-94 boogie between Chicago and Ann Arbor during football season, though.

Sports

February 14th, 2017 at 1:27 PM ^

Full autonomy, as long as I could maintain another fun vehicle that had zero autonomy for weekend fun. My commute is over an hour in each direction and it would be nice to use that time productively. Also would be good for roadtrips as it would eliminate the issue of driver fatigue. Finally, autonomy allows much greater independence for all of us as we age, which makes a huge difference in quality of life, particularly given national demographic shifts with the aging baby boomers. 

MaizeAndBlueWahoo

February 14th, 2017 at 1:28 PM ^

Personally I plan on driving my own self far more often than not, even on the daily commute.  I worry about eroding our driving skills by letting the machine do the work (and we will need those skills for a long time to come).  I was almost run off the road by some idiot outsourcing his lane change decision to the blind spot monitor - which didn't see me because I wasn't there yet, but was in the process of passing.  I've hated all my experiences with adaptive cruise control - I want to pass the stupid slowpoke hogging the left lane, not cruise serenely along at a safe and reasonable distance behind.

For me, the most likely scenario I can think of where I would turn on the autonomy is in areas like construction zones where the freeway is narrowed to a single lane for miles.  That's unenjoyable, stressful driving where a computer is well-suited.

bringthewood

February 14th, 2017 at 2:39 PM ^

My kids can't read maps due to GPS - can't might be s strong word, but they have never needed to use maps. I'm so dependent on my phone GPS that I don't even write down my hotel address or look at a map. I often have no real sense where I am relative to the airport once I hit the hotel when traveling. I just use the GPS crutch to get around based upon what's in my calendar.

I could see us being incapable of driving in a few years. If someone were to take out the autonomous system - we would all starve - hey what a great idea for a dystopian novel!

bluebyyou

February 14th, 2017 at 5:16 PM ^

Once people used an abacus to do numbers, eventually a slide rule showed up, then electronic calculators and now we have Matlab and a host of other tools.  

Ditto for handwriting...the word processor saved my lousy handwriting life and now we have voice recognition.  Some might not be happy, but I'd call that progress.

Sac Fly

February 14th, 2017 at 1:30 PM ^

Have everyone's driving graded. If you fall below a certain grade or you have a pattern of destructive habits like texing and driving, your car is fully autonomous. If you're above the threshold you can switch between the two.

pdgoblue25

February 14th, 2017 at 3:41 PM ^

Distracted driving from cell phone use is ridiculous, accident numbers have sky rocketed because of it. 

Just looking around while driving on the highway is enough to make my head explode.  I would say at least 5/10 people I look at are looking at their fucking phones.