You don’t have control in a taxi either, right, so what difference would it make.

We are already starting to see vehicles with driverless features to protect drivers from themselves – collision avoidance, snooze detection, lane departure warnings, emergency braking systems, and the like.

One huge problem that driverless vehicles would solve is DUI. If the vehicle detects the driver is impaired, it can take over (good) or call the cops (maybe not so good).

Yes, of course. But right now we have freedom and autonomy in our cars, and some of us don’t want to give it up.

And of course we don’t have total freedom and autonomy in our cars either—those of us who obey the laws, that is.

Your point? That we don’t have complete freedom in every aspect of our lives?

If MY car is not programmed to save MY ass in ALL situations I say it’s spinach and I say to hell with it.

I’m with our hostess on this one. I see the attraction of self-driving cars, (doesn’t hold any attraction to me), but consider them to be more of a threat to freedom and autonomy for most while being a boon to a very few.

Remember, one of the first things the Soviets did when the Poles decided to give their Russian “friends” the boot was shut down public transit. Self-driving cars will depend on public wi-fi infrastructure….

Scenario:
Autonomous car is driving someone down a 2 lane road. 500ft ahead, it “spots” (or detects, or whatever) a fallen tree limb that is obstructing your side of the road, but not the other side of the road. The limb is too big to go over/through. What happens?

Doe the autonomous car wait until it’s “safe” to go into the other lane, going across the double yellow lines, in clear violation of traffic laws? Or does it drive up to the tree limb, and just stop? If it stops, does it just sit there until something happens to remove the obstruction? What if there are other autonomous cars coming up behind you?

Simply stopping in the middle of the road is another violation of the law, so either way, we start programming computers to violate the law.

There’s no place to turn around, so recalculating a route is a pointless exercise.

There are hundreds of interactions on the road that require what is in effect human interaction, and sans actual intelligence, simply cannot realistically be broken down into math.

The point about red light cameras is a very valid one in this. It’s nice to say “if people would just follow the laws”, shrug, and continue to support them. But the problem is that when broken down to computer terms, there’s no “2”. Everything is binary. You were either in the intersection when the light turned red, or you weren’t.

So what happens when the light turns yellow, and you’re at that point of no return? If you go, you risk getting ticketed by something fully automated that functions under a set of rules outside of yours. If you decide not to go, you may have to slam on your brakes to avoid going into the intersection before the light turns red. If you decide to slam on your brakes, maybe the person behind you was following too closely, and rear ends you, pushing you into the intersection, at which point, everything is a whole lot worse than had you just run the red light as it changed at the last second.

Anyone who has driven a car has had to make that split second decision at a yellow light to go or not. It’s a conscious decision that is largely determined by 1000 variables that you have to process nearly instantaneously. Some of these variables have various weights to them, and some of them have been learned through trial and error. One of the things my dad always taught me when I was learning to drive… “Don’t make sudden movements that might take someone by surprise”, he said (incidentally, I hate people who don’t use their signals because outside of your horn, it’s your only means of communicating with others around you who are driving 1.5+ tons of machine… why not use them?). As such, I tend to be of the mind that slamming on your brakes falls under that unexpected category, and is a great way to effectively cause an accident. Ever driven in a city like Chicago where it’s largely bumper to bumper, even going 45+ mph? I’d invite you to drive up Lakeshore Drive when the Cubs are playing, and see how easy you think it would be to program the best way through that mess without improv. Or how to best deal with the red light camera at the end of it. That intersection of Sheridan and Lakeshore is quite busy, and the interactions there are not always binary.

Swerving to avoid an animal is similar. It’s unexpected. If you see headlights coming on, the best bet is to just kill the animal (or small child who just ran into the road). If not, your best bet may very well be to swerve into the oncoming lane to avoid the obstacle that appeared. The point is that we need to figure out how to program in concrete terms, every single possible variation, and determine what the “best” outcome is. That’s an impossibility. Thing are further compounded when we allow both autonomous and human controlled automobiles on the road at the same time, since humans are by nature largely unpredictable.

If our computer models aren’t even capable of determining weather or climate outside of general trends, how on earth could we be vain enough to think we could program them to determine how to act in traffic?

Chaos theory effectively tells us that this sort of automation is impossible, unless every single possible scenario is mapped, weighted, and accounted for. We might be able to make it work like 95-99% of the time, but should we just dismiss the outliers? My instinct says “no”.

Unless we create ACTUAL artificial intelligence, and then completely trust it with this job, the autonomous car is a rich man’s pipe dream. This is also very, VERY different from airplane autopilot which assumes that you’re in the air, and have largely limitless ability to just swerve in a direction without impacting structure (or even the ground). You have near free reign of x, y, and Z. Applying that sort of AI to a city street, which is largely a series of enclosures that respect only x and y is something else entirely.

To quote a terrible movie called, “The Core”… “Space is easy, it’s empty!”