AI Controlled Cars, or Your Right to Drive

[bhsup]

All you had to say was "I cannot find any examples." You don't have to dodge it and try to spin my question into a different area that I wasn't asking about.

 

[azzaman333]

Sorry, no. They are taking unnecessary risks with their own lives for no reason other than "enjoyment." If you want to ban driving manually because it will save lives, you have to ban -everything- that is not absolutely necessary that is a risk to life and limb. People don't need to ski. People don't need to bunjee jump. People don't need to jump out of airplanes unless they are military paratroopers (or perhaps other professions requiring access to remote areas...), and so forth and so on.

Now go sit on your lazyboy and have robots tend to your every need because to do otherwise is unnecessarily risking injury or possibly death.

The difference between driving and skydiving/skiing/bungee jumping is that with the latter, you're choosing to put yourself in a risky situation that only increases your own chance of injury. With driving, you're increasing the risk of harming yourself, but much more importantly you're increasing the risk of other vehicles and pedestrians being injured.

It's not about your right to drive, it's about everyone else having the right to go about their business without you significantly increasing their risk of injury.

 

[Masada]

All you had to say was "I cannot find any examples." You don't have to dodge it and try to spin my question into a different area that I wasn't asking about.

No, I can't find any examples of where an AI car has hit a deer or jack-knifing big-rig. So it's fair to say that those either (A) aren't issues or (B) haven't been encountered yet. Personally, I'd be willing to wager that the car would hit the brakes in both situations quicker than I could ever hope too.

 

[Formaldehyde]

I would absolutely relish the chance to get to travel through 405 or 101 with no stop-and-go traffic.

Why do you think automating cars is going to make most of them disappear?

The difference between driving and skydiving/skiing/bungee jumping is that with the latter, you're choosing to put yourself in a risky situation that only increases your own chance of injury. With driving, you're increasing the risk of harming yourself, but much more importantly you're increasing the risk of other vehicles and pedestrians being injured.

I take it you haven't actually skied. It is quite similar to operating a car. And in some ski resorts near NYC it is like operating your car on the Long Island expressway during rush hour.

It's not about your right to drive, it's about everyone else having the right to go about their business without you significantly increasing their risk of injury.

There is a simple solution to not facing the extremely remote possibility that you will be killed while driving. Just don't do it anymore.

 

[Farm Boy]

We've had GPS driving assist for a while now on tractors. There is no ''near future'' where computer controlled driving is going to near adequate for any sort of road conditions that are not incredibly clean and predictable. In fact, as Formy implies, removing the human check on control even in the most predictable driving possible by lulling them onto inattentiveness is dangerous. You have a fair bit of processing power that is well adjusted to spatial thinking in control of every vehicle now. Laws and punishment for distractions like using hands free devices are much better fruits here than wishful thinking that an automated highway is going to give one everything they want: to have the flexibility of individual rather than mass transit, to watch a movie, to yammer idiotically on the phone, and to save time my removing all those pesky peer citizens from the equation while possibly being programmed for a little in transit fellatio.

 

[bhsup]

It is about both. You all who keep saying it is person A endangering endangering person B is being disingenuous. You're purposely ignoring person A endangering themselves because you don't want to address how your position has to translate into behavior being banned across all aspects of society.

 

[Borachio]

Why do you think automating cars is going to make most of them disappear?

Simply because automated interchanges would be much more efficient. As would computer controlled convoys of vehicles: all moving at the same speed, braking at the same time, and moving in synchronization. None of that pesky individual specific quirky reaction times and poor judgement, leading to bunching and pile-ups.

Mind you, I'm not familiar with the roads referred to, here. So, I'm really only guessing.

 

[azzaman333]

I take it you haven't actually skied. It is quite similar to operating a car. And in some ski resorts near NYC it is like operating your car on the Long Island expressway during rush hour.

Yes, it's quite similar in that you have a great hunk of metal around you and everyone else on the mountain. Right?

There is a simple solution to not facing the extremely remote possibility that you will be killed while driving. Just don't do it anymore.

Did you even read what you replied to? It's not about removing the possibility that you're killed while driving. It's about reducing the risks of anyone else being injured by your driving.

 

[Masada]

@Farmboy.

Most of us already have considerable computational power in our cars managing our breaks, ensuring we don't lose traction, etc. Sure, we still drive. But we drive considerably better than we would otherwise drive.

 

[Silurian]

Could you please post some examples of safer AI drivers? I'd like to see how they control a jack-knifing tractor trailer on an icy highway. Maybe one that has a deer jump in front of it unexpectedly from the side where it was not observable and it also has oncoming traffic in the other lane. Can they handle those (and other) situations better than humans? You sure they deserve lower rates?

These are scenarios where an AI controlled vehicles may well be better than fully human.

If the deer cannot be avoided the AI could deploy airbags before impact.
It would also be less likely to swerve and roll the vehicle.

If the deer can be avoided the car would talk to the oncoming vehicles to get out of the way break etc.

The jack-knifing arctic could talk to other vehicles in the same way so that they would automatically break, drive to avoid it or deploy airbags.

 

[Formaldehyde]

Simply because automated interchanges would be much more efficient. As would computer controlled convoys of vehicles: all moving at the same speed, braking at the same time, and moving in synchronization. None of that pesky individual specific quirky reaction times and poor judgement, leading to bunching and pile-ups.

Ah. So in your vision of the future some mega-computer actually controls everything which is occurring. That it wouldn't even allow you to drive if there wasn't a vacancy in its traffic control algorithms.

Yes, it's quite similar in that you have a great hunk of metal around you and everyone else on the mountain. Right?

Only you don't need a "great hunk of metal around you" to be killed by another skier doing 30 mph. "Right"?

Skiing accidents are probably more common that auto accidents, but someone is typically hurt.

 

[Farm Boy]

Well, if I had to hazard a guess, this will have huge capitalist support before it becomes truly ready. Think of all the profit to be made with sensitive electronics, maintenance, and most especially, data marketing. This concern will trump all others in final analysis.

 

[schlaufuchs]

Why do you think automating cars is going to make most of them disappear?

It won't make cars disappear, but most traffic comes from: accidents, weaving, people speeding up and then breaking, changing lanes inefficiently, and just generally people being enormous dicks. Notably automation would take all of this out of the equation.

 

[azzaman333]

It is about both. You all who keep saying it is person A endangering endangering person B is being disingenuous. You're purposely ignoring person A endangering themselves because you don't want to address how your position has to translate into behavior being banned across all aspects of society.

Person A endangering themselves is their own responsibility and their own problem. It is not society's role to save people from themselves.

But when Person A's needless risky behaviour results in a significant increase in risk to 3rd parties, it is society's obligation to legislate against that behaviour.

 

[Masada]

Centralized control would have issues due to lag and the sheer complexity of the road network and user demands. So that's rather unlikely to ever happen.

Well, if I had to hazard a guess, this will have huge capitalist support before it becomes truly ready. Think of all the profit to be made with sensitive electronics, maintenance, and most especially, data marketing. This concern will trump all others in final analysis.

It'll just be built into the cars at production. It might add a little to the sticker price. But the big story in cars like most consumer durables is falling real prices.

 

[Borachio]

Person A endangering themselves is their own responsibility and their own problem. It is not society's role to save people from themselves.

So... that's no legislation on seat-belts or motor-cycle helmets, then?

 

[Formaldehyde]

It won't make cars disappear, but most traffic comes from: accidents, weaving, people speeding up and then breaking, changing lanes inefficiently, and just generally people being enormous dicks. Notably automation would take all of this out of the equation.

It predominately comes from so many vehicles being in the same area. It is basic queuing theory.

 

[Borachio]

I don't see how that logically follows at all.

I mean, it's true that higher traffic densities are associated with more accidents. But why computer control couldn't eliminate them, especially under these conditions, is beyond me.

 

[schlaufuchs]

Um, no. It predominately comes from so many vehicles being in the same area. It is basic queuing theory.

About half of it, sure, although that stuff usually just cars moving slower, rather than the stop-and-go type traffic I'm talking about:

About half of U.S. traffic congestion is recurring, and is attributed to sheer weight of traffic; most of the rest is attributed to traffic incidents, road work and weather events.[2]
Traffic research still cannot fully predict under which conditions a "traffic jam" (as opposed to heavy, but smoothly flowing traffic) may suddenly occur. It has been found that individual incidents (such as accidents or even a single car braking heavily in a previously smooth flow) may cause ripple effects (a cascading failure) which then spread out and create a sustained traffic jam when, otherwise, normal flow might have continued for some time longer.[3]

Some traffic engineers have attempted to apply the rules of fluid dynamics to traffic flow, likening it to the flow of a fluid in a pipe. Congestion simulations and real-time observations have shown that in heavy but free flowing traffic, jams can arise spontaneously, triggered by minor events ("butterfly effects"), such as an abrupt steering maneuver by a single motorist. Traffic scientists liken such a situation to the sudden freezing of supercooled fluid.[4]

A team of MIT mathematicians has developed a model that describes the formation of "phantom jams," in which small disturbances (a driver hitting the brake too hard, or getting too close to another car) in heavy traffic can become amplified into a full-blown, self-sustaining traffic jam. Key to the study is the realization that the mathematics of such jams, which the researchers call "jamitons," are strikingly similar to the equations that describe detonation waves produced by explosions, says Aslan Kasimov, lecturer in MIT's Department of Mathematics. That discovery enabled the team to solve traffic-jam equations that were first theorized in the 1950s.[5]

 

[azzaman333]

Only you don't need a "great hunk of metal around you" to be killed by another skier doing 30 mph. "Right"?

Skiing accidents are probably more common that auto accidents, but someone is typically hurt.

The great hunk of metal means there's a hell of a lot more momentum at the point of impact. This increases the force impacted upon the body of the person being crashed into. A skier doing 30mph is going to do a lot less damage than a car doing 30mph. As a result, I'd strongly suspect that while skiing accidents might be more common, the severity of an auto accident is generally much higher.