Why federal government needs to invest in this? I mean, when people say "government support is necessary for fundamental research which can not be financed by private means", ok, there's an argument there. But companies like Google - not exactly short of money - already investing into this. Why feds need to intervene? Of course, every company would gladly take gifts from feds to advance their private research - but why do it? There are a lot of fields that could use $4B and are not a focus of attention of a half-trillion-dollar corporations.
Also, they claim simultaneously that self-riving cars are safer and that they would be exempt from safety rules. How that works? If they are already safer, they should be able to satisfy more safety rules, not less?
Did you read the article? Such a monumental change in behavours is going to bring in massive changes to the legal framework, safety standards, insurance practices and road markings and upgrades to name a few aspects.
Legal framework is what the Congress and the state lawmakers are supposed to do anyway, and they don't need $4B from federal budget to do this. As for insurance practices, etc. - that's the business of insurance companies, and I'm sure once Google contacts them offering the opportunity to insure world's first self-driving car, insurance industry would be more than happy to jump on that, and they are not the poorest industry either.
It sounds to me like the funding is being allocated as a response to private investment. Companies are going to create self-driving cars - the feds want to be ready for them instead of a roadblock.
Ready in what way (that needs $4B investment)? I understand that you may need to create some laws about who's responsible if there's an accident, etc. but that doesn't look like $4B project.
You are assuming perfection. Have you considered that these cars may cause more deaths? What if a solar flare affected GPS and caused all of the navigation systems to injure or kill almost everyone driving at the same time? While that may be only a remote possibility, there are a myriad of other problems navigation systems may run into that they are unprepared for.
Certainly the people working on this are clowns that know nothing about safety countermeasures, and don't care about their whole industry going belly up if major accidents happened.
The same clowns that run software industry and regularly allow major security incidents costing millions of dollars to happen. It's not like nobody knows making a backdoor in a major networking software is not the best practice. It's just that people are people, and they are imperfect. I'm sure people that make those cars are as imperfect as the rest of us, no more, no less.
It's acknowledging the imperfection of people what makes software an engineering field instead of a hard science. It's not news to anybody.
Continuous testing, code reviews, defense in depth, etc. are practiced to deal with that. The engineers that design cars (the "hardware") are as imperfect as anybody else. So are the engineers that design planes' autopilots. Nobody relies on an engineer being perfect, and there's no need to.
About 2000 elderly die of starvation every year, and about 30-40,000 people die in traffic. There are many cases in which the government doesn't have its priorities straight, this is not one of them.
It was government funding via DARPA that led private companies to work on self-driving cars. Google simply hired to two winning DARPA Grand Challenge teams. The Internet is another example showing that the government is quite capable, and often necessary in driving technology forward.
I'm sure when the self-driven cars are finally made, everybody would know the government created them, just as everybody now knows the government created the internet.
Not a silly argument at all. Every time we say, "lets spend $x on y", it is fair to question whether that money can be used to feed and clothe... or defend.. or fix the infrastructure, etc.
Of course it can, there's no reason it couldn't. That doesn't make it a proper challenge. One would be "instead of $4B, $X should be invested on this, because of such and such". X == 0 without details is a big red flag.
Do you know how much it costs to buy a bus? It is not unusual to pay 400k+ for a city bus. Let's say driverless cars will cost $20k each (I have no idea), that's 20 cars per bus.
I suggest the only reason taxi trips are so much more expensive than bus rides is the cost of medallions and driver wages.
Once driverless cars arrive, public buses will not make sense anymore.
> Once driverless cars arrive, public buses will not make sense anymore.
How is that exactly? Buses have routes and schedules. How could you plan a schedule with cars if you don't know where everyone is going? You would have to have excess capacity, that's how. And those extra cars will be more expensive than the bus.
This is only an issue during peak times. Most of the time during the day, buses are fairly empty.
If driverless car companies use something like uber's surge pricing, so that it is more expensive to travel 1/2hr before/after peak, people will respond, flattening out peak demand.
Intelligent routing software will assist, allowing people to car pool to reduce the required number of cars.
Finally, let's say if automated cars remove half the riders from buses, the costs of providing buses will need to be spread across half the number of riders, making the economics of running a bus system twice as expensive per passenger. At that point, it makes sense even more sense to replace the buses with cars.
The only question will be how long it takes for people to adapt due to existing habits having momentum.
If the bus is full, I'm sure you're correct. I think there will always be place for mass transit along popular routes.
In the UK there are a lot of buses that drive around with only a handful of passengers. It's a subsidised service that's important to lots of people, but ultimately very inefficient. I'd imagine at least 60% of bus movements (not passenger miles) could be replaced with self-driving cars.
It's cheaper and easier to get food, clothes, and care to people over a fleet of self-driving, shared cars than it is over a hodge-podge network of human-driven, privately-owned cars.
If there are any problems with getting food, clothes, and care to people, it's ignorance, apathy, and greed. Not whether cars can drive themselves or not.
It doesn't read at all like the US Govt is investing in developing self-driving car technology, of course plenty of private automakers are already doing that, it looks like US Govt is investing in self-driving car public infrastructure and guidelines.
"U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said the president's 2017 budget proposal includes $4 billion over 10 years for pilot projects, including a program to test self-driving cars by investing in technologically connected roads. He provided few other details on how the money would be spent if it comes to fruition."
That sounds to me like they are try to pick technologies to invest in. If that's the use of funds, I think it's a waste. Let the market choose the best tech.
"...including...investing in technologically connected roads"
The private sector can't install a network of communication technology to wirelessly link roads and self-driving cars on public property (plus you probably need to coordinate with the FCC). From my reading, it seems like they're investing in things that only the government has control over and at the request of private sector companies like Google who want clear national guidelines formed and are probably pushing for a new "connected road" infrastructure.
But if you still can't see that reading of it, then let's just agree that there aren't enough details released yet so let's just wait for more.
The government is incapable of spending money wisely. The best we can hope for is that the chosen contractor who receives the funds doesn't find it offensive to actually perform the duties contracted.
Generally I agree with the sentiments you express here, but I just remembered the murderdeathwar on which many in the federal government would prefer to spend $4B. Compared to that, even if this is a total waste, it's not that bad.
And wait! Government officials will be glad to take credit for the driving revolution that is about to happen :-) For some reason, people in power think that it was by their hand that the world turns.
When you hear stories about dudes building self-driving cars in their garages, you might think the "market" will solve it. But we're no way near having self driving cars.
Because cars by themselves are NOT GOING TO WORK anytime soon. Rain, fog, sleet, snow, road work, garbage on the pavement, etc — all those things can't be handled by today's self driving car tech. One way to get around some of those things is make the roads assist the cars with things like machine readable guidance markers in the pavement, rfid, and so on. Those things will need to be developed and deployed on federal roads for there to actually be viable autonomous cars. That costs money and takes time. I'm just as pissed about the government throwing away taxpayer money on all kinds of shit, but let's face it, this is less than four days of our military budget.
> all those things can't be handled by today's self driving car tech
Some "can't be handled".
Just because Google or Honda's implementation (based on a camera) is geared toward a specific implementation, doesn't make it the best. Cruise Automation has the right idea with sensor arrays that make fog and rain a non-issue. There are lots of options.
No, it's an issue. Heavy rain and fog are even problematic for humans. Current systems use image of the pavement for precise vehicle localization. Pavement not visible? You're fucked. Pavement markings unclear? You're fucked. Road crew painted on temporary markings alongside existing? You're fucked. And so on and so forth.
But you can at least try. You can make slow progress. You can get out, have a look around and continue slowly if needed. An automatic car will just go "no sensor reading, not moving amigo". Bird shat on your lidar sensor? Sorry, have to call assistance to get it professionally cleaned, otherwise the car is not moving. One of the lighbulbs burnt out? Sorry, the car is legally not fit for driving so you are not going anywhere, or alternatively the only destination you can enter is an approved garage.
I personally think this is going to be a huge problem with self-driving cars. They can't go anywhere if any of their sensors are faulty. And they need to have hundreds of them to work in all conditions. Ideally, you would want to have sensors in every wheel to tell you the pressure, sensors that tell you if there is ice on the road, sensors in literally every part of the suspension to monitor if you haven't suffered a broken coil or damaged bearing that could cause an accident - and those things break. Even such a simple thing as pressure monitors in modern cars are notorious for breaking down. Anyone who has driven a 5-10 year old car will know that there always is something broken. In cause of automatic cars pretty much every problem is a breaking problem that immobilizes the vehicle completely, and I think people will get tired of that pretty quickly.
My thoughts are - all self driving cars at the moment operate knowing that there is a human at the wheel, so they are likely to notice a broken suspension coil, rattling clutch, or deflated tyres(even if the sensor reports they are fine, which happens). For "true" autonomous cars the car has to know it itself - especially if it is to allow passangers to literally go to sleep, or even drive without them - so you can summon it from the other side of the city for example. The computer just has to know 100% of its own state, and that requires a huge number of sensors.
Notice how all those miles are in California where it almost never rains. It's still a hard problem, but it's much easier than driving in Alaska or Seattle. When I see millions of accident-free miles from those places, that's whe I'll be truly impressed, even if it's done with adapted infrastructure.
"Roughly 3,000 Americans have lost their lives to terrorist attacks in the last decade. This averages out to a loss of 300 people a year...[compared to average annual deaths by] vehicular accidents at 40,000."
I don't agree. It all depends on the press and other opinion makers/influencers.
If you had every day reports of people that died in car accidents. If you had their stories told, if you heard about their orphaned children, each and every day. You can create as much panic as with anything else.
I can even bet on that if the day that big car companies wants driverless cars comes, you will see that panic created by the press. People will vote for the banning of the old cars and they will not even understand how people of our time are not completely paralyzed by terror each time we go to the road.
There is people that panics about vaccination and vaccination is something positive.
The sensationalist reporting of terrorist attacks is what makes them so successful.
and I think that is key to understand: Terrorism by definition causes an disproportionate amount of irrational fear but smart people and government officials should have a measured response rather than knee-jerk over-the-top spending
Among the many things the federal could fund, one would be an organization that would develop a uniform legal code governing self-driving cars for adoption across federal/state/local levels. This would harmonize definitions, requirements, liability, insurance, penalties, etc. across all legal jurisdictions.
Yeah -- as I understand it, the legal framework in most places is "The road code says you can't be drunk and so on, but it doesn't say you have to be in control."
> SELF-DRIVING CARS ARE legal in the United States. They’ve always been legal, because they’ve never been outlawed
...
> New York has a law requiring a driver to keep one hand on the wheel at all times, but that doesn’t mean the car can’t drive itself.
I agree that room for experimentation is needed, though I absolutely believe there should be some testing and registration involved eventually. (Though mandatory third party insurance might solve most of the problem -- insurers would charge an arm and a leg for unknown, unproven or untested software.)
Which, I would think, would be mandatory to make them a worthwhile investment–particularly for startups. I've heard enough horror stories about multi-state compliance on HN to realize that different regulations in every state only serves to protect incumbents.
If the point of this money was to develop a unified approach to self-driving cars, then it could be a very good thing. Assuming the choice of unified approach makes sense.
Variably-autonomous cars operating in swarms (and thus requiring standard communication and sensor packages) seem to be superior than having dozens of car and tech companies each striving for full autonomy. In swarms, the degree of autonomy would be directly proportional to the size of the swarm a vehicle belongs to. Those on the edge of the swarm would contribute sensor input while the interior vehicles would contribute processing power. Thus achieving greater ability than a solitary vehicle, whether autonomous or not.
The advantage of variable-autonomy is that there's much less need to specially-modify roads, change the way we view liability, or have to get all the way to full autonomy.
If the $4 billion was spent on developing the standard communication and sensor packages, and promoting them amongst manufacturers, and promoting the development of compact-form-factor vehicles, it might have significant impact.
Is there any talk of installing some kind of guideline along existing roads that would help navigation or vision? Something like a bright line or a buried magnetic (or radio?) 'rail' for the cars to follow? I've read that vision is still a big challenge in poor conditions.
The modern version is that Volvo has proposed putting magnets, in the form of nails, into pavements. This is to provide a hint of where the lanes are under snow. It also provides guidance for snowplows. These would probably be driven in by the same machines that stripe lanes. This is an old idea from the early days of automatic driving, but today they'd just be viewed as a hint, not something to be followed blindly.
There are areas where high visibility snow stakes are placed alongside highways for driver and snowplow guidance. Hokkaido puts large downward pointing arrows over snowy highways to mark the shoulder.[1]
Wire guidance systems have been around for years, for industrial robot vehicles. GM put them on their test track for Firebird III in the 1960s. But it's no longer necessary to have even that much infrastructure.
It's a big challenge for non-self driving cars too. If road maintenance programs aren't willing to repaint on occasion or provide lane keeping alternatives for more fallible humans, what hope do we have of them doing it for machines.
It isn't fair to dismissively refer to their concern as the "same old complaint" and then link to a new story that is four days old for backing. Further, your link doesn't even sufficiently address their concern. In fact, it specifically mentions that poor weather is a challenge.
>This doesn’t mean all the problems with autonomous driving in bad weather are solved. Falling rain and snow can interfere with LIDAR and cameras, and safely driving requires more than knowing where you are on a map—you also need to be able to see those temporary obstacles.
At the point when the system is unable to analyze the static environment (e.g. lane markers) due to poor visibility, it's probably unable to analyze and deal with dynamic situations safely.
There is an industry standard suite of Vehicle communications protocols called V2X [1]. These can be used for SDC automation but no one is planning on relying on them, because there will always be places that do not have them. They can add value in some situations thought.
This is great news. Over 30,000 people die annually due to motor vehicles in the United States alone [0] and the number would be far greater without the steady improvements to vehicular safety over the years.
To reduce that number to as close to 0 as is possible absolutely should be a top priority for our nation as a whole.
The technology is there, much of the infrastructure is there, and the rest is on the way.
Autonomous cars promise to revolutionize the way humans use cities in a positive way. Here in NYC where automobile traffic is quite a bit more abundant than anyone could particularly desire I yearn for the day when we can reclaim all that parking space for green and pedestrian use.
I anticipate the lack of diesel fumes, the reduction in engine and siren noise, and the ready availability of autonomous vehicles to take me to my destination, probably with a quick action to my smart watch, phone, etc.
Autonomous electric vehicles can stay in use for extremely long durations of time thus reducing the overall numbers of cars on the roads at any given time. To reduce emissions will reduce incidences of asthmatic and respiratory illnesses in urban centers.
To park themselves outside of major urban areas during non peak hours allows for repairs, and the reclamation of space I mentioned.
To run with electric engines means far fewer maintenance costs in general due to much fewer moving parts than traditional combustion engines.
To coordinate flows of traffic ensures traffic moves more efficiently, and the loud sirens and flashing lights of emergency vehicles can be a thing of the past.
And of course there are the wonderful cartoons from thw New Yorker in which a police man is at the window of a civilians car
"Does your car know why my car pulled it over?"
If this is done right it will be one of the greatest achievements of our modern era and will truly usher us into a new world of clean air, reclaimed public spaces, silenter cities, and tremendous mobility.
To reduce that number to as close to 0 as is possible absolutely should be a top priority for our nation as a whole.
Of course it should be a goal, but you a cost vs. benefit analysis is required. If you can save 30K lives per year for $4B, could you save even more lives if you spent it another way?
20x more people die of heart disease in the US every year as compared to vehicular accidents. In fact, car crashes isn't even in the top 10.
If cars ever got sufficiently good at driving, one could make them much less crash-proof, thereby saving much more than $4B/yr in energy costs by making them lighter. They're much heavier than they were 30 years ago.
Also, keep in mind that car crash victims on average have many more expected years of life ahead of them than the average heart attack victim.
Also, we have a fairly clear path ahead of us for doing this, afaik the same can't be said about curing heart disease.
This is discounting all of the other positives mentioned in my post which will probably make this $4B investment an investment which pays off in droves in reduced material use by the nation on cars and repairs, in reduced health care spending for respiratory illnesses, in reduced spending on funerals, reduced
dependence on oil, and potentially even side effects such as reduced psychiatric visits (green spaces have very positive benefits, and if reclaimed parking and lane space is used effectively, it could make our cities much more healthy places to live).
So at the start of the Obama administration, tax payers paid for a multi-billion dollar bailout of the American auto industry, which paid off for taxpayers but was not without significant risk. Now at the end of the Obama administration, tax payers are putting $4B towards self-driving cars that, depending on who the winners are, could potentially destroy the same industry that was bailed out just a few years ago?
This is unnecessarily dangerous. Investing in "pilot programs" might artificially push self-driving technology through quicker than it's ready for and might result, not only in death and accidents, but damaging the image of self driving cars and pushing the technology back even further. Just because you want something doesn't mean you should artificially push it faster than it can be produced. That's like injecting your children with steroids because you "want them to grow fast so they can be happy quicker and get a head start".
Government is great at creating incentives and opportunities through laws and letting the business, creators, investors compete for the top stop. But choosing winners, artificially jump-starting pilot projects that would under normal market conditions not be created, is not what governments are meant for. We've talked about this on HN before during the Solyndra bankruptcy.
If they really want to help, give a tax cut for companies doing research, and sit down with all the parties interested in self-driving cars and ask them what laws or regulations are holding them back.
Bullshit. If one car running with "CarOs 1.0" has a collision you can be sure that engineers will ensure that this specific case will never happen again in the future. Autonomous cars have already clocked up over 100k miles from multiple vendors. The government is needed to step in now because this tech is going to hit the roads in the next five years anyway, whether they get out of the way or not.
We need to consider that the potential for abuse on the part of the government is also great. When the car communicates with roadside electronics, you can easily be tracked, your car can be told where you can and cannot go, and (if you do not comply with state) your vehicle may not be driveable at all.
And if the next big thing in technology never occurs like countless other next-big-things before it? This is part of why command economies fail so miserably.
I really hope companies like Lockheed Martin do not get into the autonomous infrastructure or self-driving vehicle business. LM already has their tentacles into federal/state governments with traffic monitoring programs, 911 operations, etc.
Since silicon valley got into the SDV game much early on, I hope they, rather than defense companies, also provide solutions for the infrastructure.
They seem a little late coming to the game. 4B is not much compared to how much money and effort are already going into autonomous cars. Seems pointless.
But it seems there's also willngness to discuss future rules and ethics for self-driving cars, which is good.
Too much federal money goes to subsidizing the automobile/roads as a means of transportation. Drivers should bare more of the cost of driving, then a real market could emerge in mass transit. This would also eliminate an immense amount of energy usage
I take their meaning to be this: right now, the government subsidizes a form of transportation because there's no effective way for the costs of allowing it to be internalized. (Having a toll plaza on every intersection is obviously impossible.)
With driving cars, it will become much cheaper to engage in trade centered around automobile transit. Sensors, tracking, mutuality agreements between road owners and car makers. It's plausible that all existing transit subsidies could accumulate to the road owners through market pricing, not government handouts that we have difficulty establishing the true value of.
Spending vast amounts of money on interstates is a waste. Railroads are a much better solution than a fleet of 18 wheelers. If you had to pay the actual cost of driving accross the country, high speed rail becomes a viable option.
You sound snarky about this, but it's actually probably good - the government desperately needs tech talent and knowledge. With how these networks are formed, it seems pretty logical that Google/Microsoft/Apple employees would end up in gov't more than those from other companies.
Investment banking <-> public service is the classical revolving door. What's wrong with tech getting in the same game?
What's really interesting about this is that being a truck driver is one of the most common jobs in America. Most of these drivers have limited ability to do many other decently paying jobs. By getting self-driving countries, we would be dramatically changing the economic + social landscape of the country.
We have already gotten rid of the factory worker and that has led to withering away of Middle America. Removing the truck driver would be a huge nail in the coffin of Middle America. (If lab grown meat + vertical farming takes off, we can potentially drastically reduce the number of farmers in this country.)
I am all for these technical innovations, but we must be aware that this can dramatically change the economic/political/social landscape. Radical regressive ideologies spring out of such environments.
exactly, the governments responsibility also lies in supporting those who will lose their jobs, not just the drivers but the service station workers (clerks, cooks, cleaners etc. etc.), motels and so forth. Many point at Basic income as the answer, technology should release us from the shackles of work, not simply further enrich the 1%.
Maybe they can monitor the trucks with video feeds. Get a union together and demand only one monitor per worker and have laws passed that all trucks must be monitored with video feeds.
I think dock workers used to unload ships and my understanding is, that while not as extreme, they have done something similar. (Not that I see this as the best approach....).
Kind of like freight elevator operators. Utterly pointless trade I discovered while living in New York the last year. You can't bring boxes in through the lobby, only use the union operated freight elevator between designated hours.
Could you elaborate on why you think so? I could imagine significant cost savings from the energy that would be saved by removing all of the QoL things that go into a car for humans to be able to use them.
Replying again, as I cannot edit my comment: It looks like I should have been paying attention last year! [1]
As Ucho says briefly, and I say below, the biggest economic difference between human operated and self driving semis are:
* Tonnage / Time - the Auto Semi can drive all the time, no rest breaks.
* Fuel usage - Auto Semi can drive to an algorithm, not just what "feels best", and the Auto Semi can drive slower, because you aren't paying a driver for their time. Auto Semis can "platoon" for fuel savings from drafting, among other ways to achieve savings.
* Auto Semis will probably always have a human minder, at first in the cab, for experimental trucks, and later in a remote operator center (think drones)
* Insurance - at some point in the future insurance for Auto Semis will be much less human driven trucks.
* As soon as the break even point for the investment of sensors is about 1 year (Earnings from hauling, Fuel costs, and wages), the big logistics companies will BEGIN to replace their fleets. I expect this in 5-7 years, based on no hard facts what-so-ever.
Human drivers have obligatory rest time - without them the goods can be transported faster and allows to keep smaller fleet. Also lets say that total cost of self driving equipment is now around $20k-$30k - that is huge % of car price but acceptable compared to truck price.
Sure, I expect to see news about Auto-Semi testing sometime this year.
Energy use from Human QoL stuff would be very very low in a semi compare to the energy use for pulling.
For instance, the tractor and trailer, unladen weighs 25,000 to 40,000 lbs, with a total road weight of 50-100k lbs. [1] A whole passenger car with amenities can weigh less than 3000 pounds. Call 1/5th of that QoL stuff, for 600lbs. Changes in automobile weight matter much more because automobiles stop and go much more often.
So the human QoL stuff probably doesn't weigh more 1% of the road weight. But the kicker is, it doesn't even matter too much if the QoL stuff weighs 10%, because energy use scales mostly by air resistance, not weight. [2]
Most of the QoL energy waste is found in idling semis at truck stops or in traffic, so this could definitely be reduced by Auto-Semis [3]
The eventual savings from Auto-Semis will be in reduced wages, and possibly in reduced fuel usage - but the reduced fuel consumption would come from driving slower, as you don't have to pay a driver for their time, and an Auto Semi can drive all night.
I'm sure logistic companies would love to save this much money, but the capital expenditure required will be huge. Some research from passenger self driving cars would be pertinent, and probably most sensor devices, but they would be put to slightly different uses - you want a longer range view in a truck for braking distance and crash avoidance.
The reason I put the estimate so far out is liability and regulation and the cap ex mentioned above. Some classes of load will probably never be pulled by auto-semi: dangerous, time Sensitive, some luxury goods.
Auto Semis could also do some interesting things like draft (tailgate) safely and form a "train" of trucks. You could have drone drivers set up who monitor 3 or 4 trucks and take over if needed.
Just give the money to the NSF instead. Why spend $4 billion on this (pointless, worthless) technology that Silicon Valley is already running headlong to create?
Saying this is pointless and worthless is insane to me. More than thirty thousand people die in motor vehicle deaths in the US every year. The amount of pain and suffering this technology will eliminate is incalculable.
Those problems can be solved without the ridiculous effort of creating self driving cars. People die mostly because of drunk driving accidents. More bus passes and free taxis can save people much cheaper. Plus, how many more die of cancer and heart disease? Are you really arguing that driving deaths are a major problem that requires intensive effort to solve?
You think it will be cheaper to pay for more taxis than it will be to have cars drive themselves? Let alone many drunk drivers would still drive themselves even if a free taxi were available.
> Are you really arguing that driving deaths are a major problem that requires intensive effort to solve?
It's obvious to any observer that driving deaths are a major problem, and that an intensive effort to solve this problem is appropriate. We've made tremendous progress over that last 50 years. Let's continue that path.
Yes, of course it will be cheaper to pay for taxis (not more taxis) for drunk people than it will be to have cars drive themselves. You're talking about converting the entire US car fleet, developing a non-existent technology, and refining it to the extreme (less than 2 deaths per 100 million miles traveled on average, which is the human driving record right now). It is MUCH, MUCH cheaper to implement a program where you make sure that drunk people leaving bars get into taxis.
>It's obvious to any observer that driving deaths are a major problem, and that an intensive effort to solve this problem is appropriate. We've made tremendous progress over that last 50 years. Let's continue that path.
This is disingenuous. Driverless cars are not part of an effort to reduce driving deaths, that's just how they're being sold. It's just as likely that driverless cars will increase driving deaths, until their safety record is refined over a period of many years and lots of testing (the same way it happened with humans).
Driverless cars are being pursued because tech companies see an opportunity to use their machine learning expertise to turn driving into a commodity service that they control and can make billions off. It has nothing to do with driving safety, and if that were the goal (which, again, it is not, the goal is to make money by turning driving into a service and eliminate the cost of labor for drivers), there are a hundred cheaper ways to do it. If increasing driving safety were a goal that society actually cared about, Tracy Morgan would not have been hit by a truck.
IX: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The authoritarians just hate that one! Some might say it doesn't apply, since the state owns the roads, so it can declare them off-limits to human drivers. That might have worked if we didn't already have billions of dollars worth of extant rolling stock in constant use. Suddenly taking all that would require the state to compensate vehicle owners, which will not happen. Thus, drivers have a right to drive, subject to reasonable regulation.
Again, the implicit assumption that machines will automatically be better drivers than humans, because, magic. As we all know, all of the technology and computer systems we make work flawlessly and never miscommunicate, crash, or fail for any reason, unlike those damn meat puppets that operate them.
There are certain things that computers are better at. The fastest reflexes in the world can't compete with a computer. A computer can't be distracted. A computer can be programmed to always drive safe distances, something almost no human does. A computer will never fail to check if a lane change is safe but you better believe humans do every day.
Humans are quite capable and will always be able to handle things that computers can't in situations they're not designed for. At least until an AI is invented that is indistinguishable from a human mind. There will be mistakes and bugs (just as there are now in software made for cars). But believing that humans who drive while tired, eating cheeseburgers, playing with their phone, texting, not accounting for blind spots and tailgating others are going to be safer in the long run is bordering on religious faith in some kind of fantasy that humans are more than they are.
No one is talking about replacing F1 drivers, we're talking about a sea of idiots that anyone who commutes every day with any awareness would recognize as being a major hazard. I'll take the patchable bugs over the psychos I see every day that put lives at risk with their self-centered hyper aggressive driving that relies on the attentiveness of everyone around them to prevent an accident. There is no software update for people like this–you either wait years for them to grow up or for them to kill someone.
Sure there will be problems. Regardless, the suggestion that "they're going to take your car away" is FUD. No one wants to do that. If a robocar can't handle a human driver in the next lane then it can't handle any number of other common and unpreventable factors.
Driverless car technology will be an economic development like cars and factories. In the long run, the economic opportunity it will create is far bigger than the cost.
Buses are crap and should just be eliminated. If you want good public transit, you need to build SkyTran. $4B could do a lot of good in developing SkyTran and getting it so that cities spend money on deploying it instead of wasting that money on roads.
Just to add to this: buses are so bad that you actually will have less pollution if all the bus riders just get cars and drive themselves. This isn't true if the bus is a nice coach and all its seats are full, and it's driving all these people from one place to another fairly distant place, but for city buses it absolutely is because of their low-speed, herky-jerky operation and the fact that they're rarely full and frequently mostly empty.
No, they're not. They might be better if they're electric (but we have those here in the US too in some places, like NYC), but they'll never be efficient. The only efficient system is an automated personal rapid transit system which can move people between arbitrary points without any stops in between. Only something like SkyTran can do that. As long as you have to stop and pick up other riders in-between, or have to stop for traffic lights, you'll never get an efficient trip.
Don't you mean that Silicon Valley is improving DARPA-funded autonomous driving technology? Lets not rewrite history. Government funding drives most technological development.
What problem will it remove? Commuting boredom? It might have no effect on congestion or pollution; it might make them worse. Maybe in the future it will reduce accidents, but its likely it will cause more on the interim. This is a solution without a problem.
Spend a few months here in Los Angeles -- heck, just try driving anywhere on any given Thursday -- and you'll appreciate what a productivity-sapping, infuriating, stress-inducing, risky, ever-worsening nightmare the daily commute can be. My drive home tonight was a pleasant, breezy, 45-minute cruise covering 2 freaking miles of road, in which I was nearly hit at least twice -- once by a crazed/enraged driver who flipped an erratic u-turn from one busy lane into my lane going the opposite direction; and once by a driver who decided that a red light was just a suggestion. These are not uncommon occurrences. And they are happening a lot more frequently. At times I feel like Han Solo navigating an asteroid field.
As for me? I'll trust the future to swarms of interconnected, cross-communicating AI cars over a random, haphazard swarm of humans any day of the week. The cars can think and operate together. We just think about ourselves. We can't possibly take all of the data on the road into account as well as connected cars will eventually be able to. I don't know what they can do right this second, but I am very optimistic about what they'll be able to do in the not-too-distant future.
I am weary of this argument, which is rather as fruitless as trying to argue against creationism in a Christian fundamentalist forum. I think the optimism behind driverless cars is very millenarian and places irrational hope in a strange place.
LA is a hell for cars made by urban planners who deliberately made it that way. What problems do you think will be solved by robot cars that shouldn't already be solved by Lyft or Uber (which are functionally identical except for the presence of a human driver)? Cars will never be able to zoom through a downtown metropolis at 60 mph, unless the city is entirely stripped of pedestrians. The problems you highlight are NOT caused by human drivers, they are caused by cars, and autonomous or not, those issues will remain.
I don't have these issues because I live in a dense very walkable city and ride my bike everywhere. This is how we should be thinking: cars simply don't belong in cities, and a robot fleet won't change that.
"LA is a hell for cars made by urban planners who deliberately made it that way."
I agree completely. There is no question——in fact, it's a matter of historical record——that mass transportation, urban layout, etc., were intentionally subverted in Los Angeles by the automobile industry, resulting in the crazy mess we now deal with.
"What problems do you think will be solved by robot cars that shouldn't already be solved by Lyft or Uber (which are functionally identical except for the presence of a human driver)?"
First, there are 9.8 million people living in Los Angeles County. So we'd need to be speaking of an Uber and Lyft ecosystem scaled up sufficiently to service a meaningful fraction of that population, economically, on a daily basis. It seems infeasible.
Second, Los Angeles has some challenging quirks to which human drivers, en masse, are particularly susceptible. For instance, we have very few left-hand turn signals; navigating a left-hand turn at a busy intersection is essentially an ad hoc game of chicken between all participants at that space and time. Some informal "rules" have emerged to navigate such situations, but the social contract breaks down under heavy traffic and its resultant, emotionally compromised drivers. There are also too many traffic lights, which studies have shown to create more congestion than they ostensibly solve for. Very few of these lights are sequenced. As a result, LA drivers are consistently flummoxed by an erratic tempo of starts, stops, and false restarts, forcing the entire "herd" to stumble into each other from the front to the back. And don't even get me started on our downright batshit approach to freeway onramps and offramps. Most important, there simply aren't enough roads, or wide enough roads, to handle the load that LA now brings to bear at every hour of every day -- and building more would involve an exercise of eminent-domain residential and commercial reclamation on a scale unseen in human history.
"Cars will never be able to zoom through a downtown metropolis at 60 mph, unless the city is entirely stripped of pedestrians"
This is a strawman. I don't recall saying that I expected robotic cars to magically make all traffic problems disappear. Rather, I said that they'd do better than we currently do.
"The problems you highlight are NOT caused by human drivers, they are caused by cars, and autonomous or not, those issues will remain."
No, the problems I've highlighted are caused by poor (and in many cases, as we've discussed, deliberately poor) urban planning, made worse by an infrastructure completely inadequate for the scale of the city and its population in 2016. These things impose a cognitive load on LA drivers that is simply too great at the scale LA traffic now brings to bear. The original cause is the layout, and the proximate cause is the humans' individualist navigation of that layout while enmeshed in a giant, uncoordinated swarm.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions I expect a fleet of interconnected, intercommunicative AI cars to do a better job of navigating.
"I don't have these issues because I live in a dense very walkable city and ride my bike everywhere. This is how we should be thinking: cars simply don't belong in cities, and a robot fleet won't change that."
This is handwaving. We can't wipe cities like LA off the map and start over. So we have to make do with the cities we have now. "Cars don't belong in cities" is a nice sentiment, but it's entirely impractical in several of the biggest and most economically important cities in this country.
For whatever it's worth, I'm in wild agreement with you about the unfortunate situation LA is in, and why it's in that situation. And I agree that a car-centric approach is the wrong approach to urban planning. But LA isn't losing the automobile anytime in my lifetime. We have to be realistic about that. So in my mind, the exercise is about making the least of the evil we have to live with.
>We can't wipe cities like LA off the map and start over.
We can, and must. Human life is going to change dramatically in he next few centuries; we can't allow ourselves to be mired by the errors a few shortsighted planners made in an unfortunate decade. Rebuilding cities to be livable is a clear imperative; we need to seek good long term solutions and not small temporary ones (that, incidentally, come with many other prices attached).
Want to help? Forget subsidies and test programs. Just pass sweeping national legislation (eg. tie state programs to federal incentives) that makes roads autonomous car friendly and that don't pander to "jobs, jobs, jobs." Otherwise, states (like California) are going to make unfriendly laws, like the recent DMV draft proposal:
> At issue is the requirement that DMV-certified “autonomous vehicle operators” are “required to be present inside the vehicle and be capable of taking control in the event of a technology failure or other emergency.” In other words, driverless cars will not be allowed on California roads for the foreseeable future.
The Executive can't pass laws, that's the job of Congress. Good luck with today's type of legislative bodies, too much political posturing and not enough common sense laws. Getting Congress to agree on anything is like herding cats. Actually herding cats is more doable with practice :/
But how do you reconcile that with the public fear of losing jobs due to the increase in automation? I think driverless cars represent in a big way due to the prevalence of truck driving as a profession in the US; not saying they can't be reconciled, just flagging it as an issue.
The easiest / obvious automation candidate is long haul/overnight interstate trucking. That's a shitty, hard job with high turnover that pays well. It absolutely trends that way.
I grew up in farm country and saw it firsthand... all of the farm families and blue collar folks with marginal educations got into construction or drove trucks. Some do construction in the summer and driving in the winter. The alternative is a much lower paying job & poverty.
The executive branch can move money around, but it can't pass laws without the legislative branch, and 2016 is going to be a really bad year to try and pass a law.
Also, they claim simultaneously that self-riving cars are safer and that they would be exempt from safety rules. How that works? If they are already safer, they should be able to satisfy more safety rules, not less?