Doesn't help that the "babysitter" was in the car when it happened. Wondering how this little hiccup will slow down automated driving, or automation in general.
Somewhere in the background I can hear Ronnie Cox saying "I'm sure it's just a glitch, sir."
It was inevitable that this would happen, drive enough cars on enough roads with enough people, someone's gonna die, that's just statistics.
We'll see what happened. I doubt it slows anything down in the long term unless there was a massive unforgivable systems failure, it may drag the regulatory fight out a bit longer, but this was going to happen at some point anyway. I'd imagine if nothing else it will help drive development in a macabre fashion, being a first data point and all.
Remember that pedestrians and other drivers do stupid stuff all the time that gets them killed by regular automobile drivers.
Automated cars will NEVER get to zero traffic fatalities. The idea is to get to fewer fatalities than 'normal' traffic.
That said, they're testing in real world traffic waaaaaay too early and should be doing testing in closed environments with simulated people and a huge variety of simulated events, not on the open road.
John Prins wrote: Automated cars will NEVER get to zero traffic fatalities. The idea is to get to fewer fatalities than 'normal' traffic.
Exactly. This will likely slow development far more than it should, but if we were consistent and applied the same standards to human drivers we'd have a total ban on them. But no, every time a human driver runs over someone and kills them we just write it off as the cost of doing business.
Just Tony wrote: Somewhere in the background I can hear Ronnie Cox saying "I'm sure it's just a glitch, sir."
It sounds like it wasn't a glitch, it was a pedestrian doing something stupid:
"Elaine Herzberg, 49, was walking her bicycle outside the crosswalk on a four-lane road in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe about 10 p.m. MST Sunday (0400 GMT Monday) when she was struck by the Uber vehicle traveling at about 40 miles per hour (65 km per hour), police said."
The point is that the machine couldn't make a judgment call in that situation, and the babysitter inside the car failed to, more than likely out of complacency. Will this drive the AI field to try to make reactionary software? Probably, but it's still a black eye that the tech doesn't need right now.
Automated cars will NEVER get to zero traffic fatalities. The idea is to get to fewer fatalities than 'normal' traffic.
That said, they're testing in real world traffic waaaaaay too early and should be doing testing in closed environments with simulated people and a huge variety of simulated events, not on the open road.
Never say never. . . I can envision a situation where, if 100% of vehicles on the road are automated, and pedestrian access areas are severely limited, you could see a point where 0 traffic deaths becomes a thing.
A group in one of my classes is doing a project on analyzing automatic vehicles, and apparently some places in Europe, notably Germany, are waaaaay ahead of the US in terms of automated cars.
Just Tony wrote: Somewhere in the background I can hear Ronnie Cox saying "I'm sure it's just a glitch, sir."
It sounds like it wasn't a glitch, it was a pedestrian doing something stupid:
"Elaine Herzberg, 49, was walking her bicycle outside the crosswalk on a four-lane road in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe about 10 p.m. MST Sunday (0400 GMT Monday) when she was struck by the Uber vehicle traveling at about 40 miles per hour (65 km per hour), police said."
If that is all there is to it, then it is absolutely the fault of the car. This is exactly the kind of situation that self driving cars have to deal with in the real world and have to deal with safely. It's not clear from any of the reports if she was walking down the road or crossing, but both of these are things that people do every day. It may be that she ran out in front of the car giving it no time to stop, and a human would not have reacted, or it could be that the car failed to see her, as identifying cyclists and pedestrians is something engineers have been struggling with. Cyclists seem to be something that automated cars really struggle with. They are slow moving, move very little left/right and are small so present a tiny cross section. Close passes have been a particular issue.
Just Tony wrote: The point is that the machine couldn't make a judgment call in that situation, and the babysitter inside the car failed to, more than likely out of complacency. Will this drive the AI field to try to make reactionary software? Probably, but it's still a black eye that the tech doesn't need right now.
And humans can't make judgement calls. Issue is issue only if 1000 AI cars will cause more accidents than 1000 human drivers. Whether AI car causes 0 accidents or not is not really relevant. Issue is which is more dangerous. Having AI cars or having human controlled cars. And humans sure haven't proven themselves to be accident free drivers.
Automated cars will NEVER get to zero traffic fatalities. The idea is to get to fewer fatalities than 'normal' traffic.
That said, they're testing in real world traffic waaaaaay too early and should be doing testing in closed environments with simulated people and a huge variety of simulated events, not on the open road.
Never say never. . . I can envision a situation where, if 100% of vehicles on the road are automated, and pedestrian access areas are severely limited, you could see a point where 0 traffic deaths becomes a thing.
A group in one of my classes is doing a project on analyzing automatic vehicles, and apparently some places in Europe, notably Germany, are waaaaay ahead of the US in terms of automated cars.
Pedestrian access limited still doesn't remove some idiot from going there anyway.
Not to mention of course the eternal threat of hacking.
tneva82 wrote: Pedestrian access limited still doesn't remove some idiot from going there anyway.
Exactly. In my country, trespassing on the railway is a criminal offence that can get you fined or even jailed. Yet an average of 17 people a year still manage to get themselves killed doing it.
Anyway, the robots are going to have to try much harder if they want to be killing as many people on the roads as human drivers do.
As tneva82 said, the important thing is that autonomous vehicles need to cause fewer accidents than human drivers, not zero (which is never going to be achieved.)
However, this needs to be done without serious restrictions on the behaviour of human pedestrians and cyclists.
In other words, the cars need to be able to anticipate that sometimes people do stupid things, and avoid them anyway. Machines should be the servant of humans, not the other way round.
We don't know the full circumstances of this accident in Austin yet.
My feelings go out to that ladies family and that does suck but in all honesty it was going to happen eventually. Now I havnt seen footage of what went events happened to cause that outcome but Im not going to blame either party as of yet. Maybe she crossed when the cross walk said no crossing. Maybe the cars programming missed her. Maybe she just came out from behind another car. Maybe Volvos hate cougars on bicycles. I dunno, but I wouldnt call for an immediate cancellation on auto driving cars.
The other aspect is that fallen items, snow drifts, wild animals, domestic animals, horse riders, removal men stacking stuff by the roadside, fallen tree trunk/branches etc.... These are all things that can and will appear on the roads (and is by no means an exhaustive list) and many of them at random with a potential to react in a random/negative manner toward an approaching car.
This is doubled if the car is electric and thus very silent when running. I've been working roadside and its honestly scary how well an electric car can sneak up on you without you noticing. Esp on country lanes with lots of corners.
I do agree that I think the cars should be still tested in a controlled environment where there are safety checks in place and all manner of ways to test things without putting lives at risk. Real world testing is valuable, but there are a lot of ways to simulate and test real world driving in a controlled situation; to say nothing of the fact that direct observation and testing would prove far more valuable in data gathering.
The way I see it self driven cars must reach a point where they can drive safer than a skilled drive (not just an average/competent one) and be able to react to all manner of issues without drive input.
People get distracted and lazy and if we go giving them cars that drive themselves then the driver is going to get very lazy very fast. Look at the film I Robot* (with Will Smith); in the film the self driving cars do most of the urban driving without driver input to the point where driver input is actually seen as abnormal and a far greater risk.
The driver cannot be the back-up for the machine because if the machine is doing all the driving the driver will steadily stop interacting with the driving component of the car.
Imagine getting a self driving car that really works well in the summer time. Easy roads, easy to see and the car does it all without any problems. Even the most alert of drivers is steadily going to get complacent. They'll allow themselves to chat (and turn to face the person they are speaking too); to listen to the radio; to get a quick nap because its the end of the week after a long day at work; to eat a sandwich; to fiddle with their cufflinks because they left late and are still partly getting dressed for the event they are heading too.
The only way I can see a self-driving car retain the driver as a backup is if the driver is required to interact the whole time in the driving process. However that somewhat defeats the point of the self driving car if you still have to drive it.
*honestly the way that film depicts self driving cars is probably what we will end up with. Self driving in the built up urban areas where the road system is far more controlled and regulated and then self driving for the countryside.
Overread wrote: The way I see it self driven cars must reach a point where they can drive safer than a skilled drive (not just an average/competent one) and be able to react to all manner of issues without drive input.
Why? Being safer than even a skilled driver is absurdly conservative. An automated car that is safer than an average driver replacing that average driver is a net increase in safety, even if a tiny minority of drivers are safer than the automated car. Hell, even an automated car that is more dangerous than the average driver is probably still a net increase in safety if it replaces all the idiots driving around while texting, while drunk, etc. You just have to get past the double standard where every fatal accident caused by an automated car is reason for skepticism and regulation, while fatal accidents by human drivers are dismissed as the price of having cars.
The driver cannot be the back-up for the machine because if the machine is doing all the driving the driver will steadily stop interacting with the driving component of the car.
You don't need a backup, that's an over-conservative regulation for the initial testing process. In normal operation the humans will be passengers, only driving the car if the automated system fails (and probably with very strict speed restrictions, and only to get the vehicle home). There is no situation where the passenger would be expected to take over immediately to avoid a hazard.
Accidents aren't so much caused by 'bad' drivers, but momentary lapses in concentration, and other distractions.
Think about it. I learned to drive knocking on for 20 years ago. And over such a long time, it all becomes automatic. Being British I of course drive a manual - and changing gears just isn't something I have to consciously think about. Being able to cruise along at the speed limit is likewise a near automatic response (only real checking is when I enter a new one, and have to change my pace).
But, give me someone prattling on and on and on whilst I'm driving? That can cause a slip of my concentration. Even something as daft as them sitting 'manspreading' in the passenger seat, meaning I need a different grip on the gearstick. That can cause me to enter the wrong gear. Get that particularly wrong, and you can lose control of your car.
Then there's poor weather. A normally conscientious but newly qualified driver may not have encountered these conditions, and fail to take them properly into account. Brake too sharply on a wet road, and you can aquaplane. Take a corner slightly too fast, and your rear end can slide out from under you.
Even good old fashioned impatience and frustration at other road users can lead to foolhardy decisions on normally level headed drivers (the worst I find is when you're stuck behind someone driving dangerously. You want to overtake, and may end up taking a silly risk. Silly I know)
Automated Vehicles will at the very least remove the emotional content of many causes of accidents. No red mist. No 'get off the road you daft old biddy'. No distraction by passengers fiddling about with the controls (my brother is NOT allowed to touch my stereo anymore. In fact, he has to sit in the back where he can't fiddle with anything). If your car is self driving, and like me you're enjoying a nice tab whilst pootling along, get a bit of the hot ash on your lap is less likely to cause an accident.
What this incident does is simply point out it's still a new technology - it doesn't mean it's fundamentally flawed or ultimately unworkable.
Automatically Appended Next Post: In fact, I'd like all drivers in this thread to list three things that most irk them when behind the wheel. This is to demonstrate and highlight areas where an automated vehicle would be superior.
Here's mine.
1. People just sitting at junctions. You pull out when it's safe. Not when there's no traffic for a three mile radius.
2. People mucking about at lights. Typically the first car. Who wants to wait whilst they put their seatbelt back on, start their engine, find the right gear, just in time for them to creep over the line before the lights change again (genuinely witnessed as above. More than once)
3. People who don't understand how filter lanes work. Zipper folks, Zipper. One passes, nip in behind, one passes, nip in behind. Fault on both the filterers and the established vehicles here. AND STOP USING THE HARD SHOULDER TO TRY TO JUMP THE QUEUE. Particularly, when on the motorway, if you're coming up to a slip road joining the carriage way, do try to leave that lane clear. The number of accidents I've almost been in, or seen narrowly missed because someone just pootles along on the motorway with no regard to anyone else....grrrr.
Aye in theory driver-less cars should be superior than a regular driver. No emotion; no "omg must hurry I'm late"; no fatigue; no hunger; no need to use the toilet; no annoyance at backseat drivers; no annoyance at someone changing the radio station or nagging or annoying or even just talking. And a big one is no bad habits developed over years of driving* That in itself ranks it superior to the majority of drivers
And another big potential advantage is that driverless cars should be able to talk to each other. Right now you've no idea what is going through the mind of the drive in front. You might not even be able to see the full road ahead of them that they can see (esp if they are a larger or wider vehicle).
A driverless car system could link up with other cars in range. More complex to setup to ensure all the cars link up correctly; but if done it could mean if the car at front detects issues ahead the slowdown process can already begin through the whole line of traffic. Increasing spacing based on road awareness; and if there is a sudden stop then all the cars should be applying brakes almost within the same instant, instead of with lag.
Take that further and cars coming the other way could provide road information for oncoming cars. A simple thing like a very deep puddle on one side of the road after a corner. A car coming the other way could provide information on that risk to cars approaching; thus meaning they could slow down and be ready for that issue before any of the approaching cars have had a chance to detect it themselves.
This to say nothing of how such a system could control major bodies of traffic; indeed one might expect that a major road network might well have its own computer system that cars entering in tune into. Allowing roads like the M25 to manage themselves in terms of avoiding traffic build up; managing peek hours; diverting (keeping all diversions on the same line or breaking them up as required instead of each car doing it on its own via a satnav system)
Of course such a system would only work if all the cars are communicating on the same network with the same network protocols and if they are all driverless. It also increase the complexity of information by a significant margin, which puts more load on each individual cars internal computer. Of course being as a driverless system is likely many years if not decades away from a reality, the time lag would be a benefit provided that computers continue to advance as they are.
The potential is huge, but I still think its a very long way off. What I think we will see, even if the driverless car tech was fully ready today, is a steady drift of driver aid features over time; with those features trickling down even into the more economy class of vehicles. Once drivers and the public are much more aware off and trusting in things like an auto stop; lane advice; speed monitoring etc... then chances are the idea of the car taking over more and more will become more appealing and thus much more accepted.
The hardest period will be in the change-over when you've got driverless and driven vehicles sharing the same road. It will also be when accidents do happen and who is at fault. How the insurance companies react to driverless cars and deal with cases where they are involved in accidents is going to be interesting. Right now driverless cars are all owned by research/development groups and if there are accidents where the driveless car is at fault then the research/development group has to pay out from their insurance.
Now what happens in the future when its private owners and their driverless car hits something. Or what if two driverless cars hit each other. Are private owners going to want to fork out for a mistake which, honestly, wasn't their fault as they were not in control of the car at the time. Many might argue that if the car fails then the manufacturer/software designer has failed.
Similarly if two cars crash and they are both driverless and neither system is at "fault" then who pays?
Right now if you have an accident its on the drivers involved as they are in control of their cars; there is clear direct accountability.
*In nearly any industry where you use tools or machines; even things like strimmers, there are recommended periods of retraining. Some insurance won't even work if you don't keep your training tickets up to date even if you're using the tools all the time (eg chainsaws). However whilst we require cars to take an MOT, we don't require any retraining of drivers. Pass at 18 and you can drive for decades before the old-age-check comes up and even that is mostly just checking that your eyes/body are fit to drive.
I suspect a lot of accidents could be prevented if every 5 years or so you had to do a retest and had to spend X amount of hours with a qualified driving instructor.
Yup. And if they can talk to each other, it could, potentially, banish Phantom Traffic Jams.
See, these are when you're driving on the motorway, autobahn or freeway - any road where high speeds are the norm. Yet suddenly, traffic slows to a crawl - and when it clears, there's no sign of an actual cause. No bumps, no roadworks, no sirens - nada.
What actually causes these is overly sharp braking by one driver. They slow from say (numbers out my bottom for demonstration purposes only) a steady 60, to a piddling 20 in no time at all. Quite possibly overreacting to someone cutting in front of them when it was in fact safe to do so. That sharp braking has a knock-on effect down the line of traffic, until it eventually develops into vehicles at a standstill. Of course, with no actual hazard, it all clears eventually - but still created a temporary jam.
If automated cars are programmed to brake safely in harmony with one another, that's gone right there - as will be idiots in Audis and BMWs lane hopping because their manhood is just that big.
Of course, it will mean an end to me sitting in the inside lane doing 70, precisely to wind up the Audi and BMW drivers of the world Oh, it's lovely to see them flashing, honking and gesticulating at me daring to stick to the speed limit!*
*and if you think that's childish, wait until I retire, buy a large car and a caravan, then muck about with it by driving very, very slowly. Every morning. During rush hour.
In Japan last year I rented a Prius which had cruise control which let you set a speed for the motorway and it automatically maintained this while braking or accelerating to keep a safe distance from the car in front. It also had lane drift warning sensors.
You can see how this technology, fitted to all cars and actually being used, would turn most motorway driving into the equivalent of sitting in a train.
*and if you think that's childish, wait until I retire, buy a large car and a caravan, then muck about with it by driving very, very slowly. Every morning. During rush hour.
You really want to have some fun, grab on of those and try going up a narrow, windy mountain road to a ski resort. Hilarity will ensue.
Kilkrazy wrote: In Japan last year I rented a Prius which had cruise control which let you set a speed for the motorway and it automatically maintained this while braking or accelerating to keep a safe distance from the car in front. It also had lane drift warning sensors.
You can see how this technology, fitted to all cars and actually being used, would turn most motorway driving into the equivalent of sitting in a train.
As someone who commutes by coach five days a week, I can very much confirm that driving home is exceptionally relaxing when you're not doing the driving. Sure, delays will see me grumble, but I don't get hot under the collar. I just have a doze, or read me book.
Mad Doc - aye and there's also the issue of roundabouts and such on main roads; another area where people have to suddenly slow down and can cause a choke in the speed and flow of traffic even if there is no actual blockage. Being able to smoothly integrate the different types of traffic perfectly; balancing so that busier lanes move through quicker whist not leaving those in less used lanes left for an age waiting for a gap (and at rush hours getting more impatient and more stressed - esp if someone comes up behind and spies what they think is a gap and start beeping their horn to get the car in front to leap forward).
Roundabouts I prefer to traffic lights overall. The only issue there is when an idiot tries to squeak through when there's traffic coming from the right (to which you should yield, if you drive on the left, fact fans!). And of course people who just sit there, even when there's nothing coming.
Then there's also poor positioning.
If you look here, this is a local trouble spot for slowing down traffic.
See, the main road continues straight on - and this is just after some lights. All it takes is someone wanting to turn right (there's a large school down there, and residential. Also a shortcut to the far end of town, if you know what you're doing), but straddling both lanes. Traffic looking to go straight on can't get past, creating a log jam which stretches quite far beyond the lights, without fail.
In theory, automated cars shouldn't have that problem. And again, slow off the mark? These lights don't give you very long to get through, as they're phased in with the previous set...
Maybe I've been consuming too much dystopian grimdark. But I can see a future where different manufacturers communicate false information to their competitors to cause accidents and sully their brand.
How does one assign blame in a car accident, when there's not only AI to consider, but the inevitable 'he was driving it himself' arguments?
With AI, we can open it up and literally read it's 'thought process' leading up to the crash. That could be invaluable in mitigating accidents going forwards.
At what point does the AI mean the driver is simply a passenger? If your vehicle is determined to be the cause of an accident - is the manufacturer responsible, or the programmer? Where does the true liability lie? Where does the causal break kick in?
Obviously these questions will have to be settled.
I think the combination of fewer accidents thanks to automation, coupled with fewer and safer cars, will mean that the need for insurance will be much less.
Perhaps car manufacturers will accept liability as standard, and form a mututal fund to compensate victims. Criminal interference with the safety programming will invalidate this of course, but we have people driving without insurance or valid licences right now.
I'll chime in with regards to one concern with self-driving cars someone brought up: cyclists.
I am one(when I'm not being a lazy bus user), I don't drive, I don't even have a valid license. I also think most car drivers act like inconsiderate c***s around cyclists on the road, using the tiny, fractional minority of bad cyclists as an excuse to treat all cyclists like gak because car drivers often think they own the roads(sitting right on your back wheel revving at lights, purposefully passing as close as possible, blaring their horn when passing for no actual reason to try and make you jump - I've been screamed at, had lit cigarettes thrown at me, and had drivers slow down to spit on me, all this happens at a far higher rate than anybody I know experiences gakky behaviour from other drivers when they're in cars themselves, and I'm a careful cyclist).
All that said, I'd rather we spent less money trying to teach AI drivers to recognise cyclists(thought it's nice to see they're at least thinking about that kind of thing, I guess corporations worrying about liability end up being more considerate than normal people in some circumstances), and more developing parallel infrastructure. Right now I'm firmly of the view that the car vs bikes issue is mostly down to the subset of people driving the cars who hold cycling and public transport in active contempt(the Top Gear, Clarksonite sect), but if the cars start being driven by AI's the fact of the matter is it would be the cyclists puttering along under flawed human control who would become the primary danger to road safety.
Yet we're still designing or reworking roads without even considering putting dedicated cycle lanes in(and by dedicated, I mean not just some lines half-arsedly painted on next to the kerb that most drivers just ignore, I mean an actual distinct lane physically separated from the main roadway with a kerb of its own). Frankly AI cars need more than just cleverer coding, they should be prompting a fundamental review of how we construct, maintain, and renovate our transport infrastructure, but the political side of things doesn't seem remotely interested in that aspect.
Here's another one - livestock and horses.
In the countryside many a farmer still crosses the road with cattle and sheep; horse rider still use the roads and there's always potential of an escape. The riding community is actually getting rather hot on drivers at present as even the country lanes are getting more and more filled with traffic and often fast moving traffic (its not just all those Amazon and other delivery companies running around all hours of the day - its regular public too).
Sure the machine will be able to detect a horse and rider (or horse and walker and should be able to tell it from other animals; however can it detect if the horse is getting agitated or worried about the car. A driver would be expected to back off; to even keep moving until a hand signal allows them to safely pass; would the machine keep trying to push through - or even miss the hand signal and end up stalking the horse and rider until they entered a road that allowed the car to move past with a full cars width
Yet we're still designing or reworking roads without even considering putting dedicated cycle lanes in(and by dedicated, I mean not just some lines half-arsedly painted on next to the kerb that most drivers just ignore, I mean an actual distinct lane physically separated from the main roadway with a kerb of its own). Frankly AI cars need more than just cleverer coding, they should be prompting a fundamental review of how we construct, maintain, and renovate our transport infrastructure, but the political side of things doesn't seem remotely interested in that aspect.
The problem is space and too many drivers.
Ignoring the issues with widening roads in the countryside where they might wind and wriggle around a lot; even in urban areas there's only so much space on the roads; and they are already full of cars. Many of the infrastructure issues we see are mostly because the roads are simply bloated with too many vehicles.
In the UK especially we stripped out our rail networks so now all freight has to go via lorries; and it makes everyone rely on cars to get to a large number of places*. Honestly self driving cars are a nice idea; but they'd only make the problem even worse as they'd encourage everyone to be on the roads. Even if we all downsized to smart-cars there'd still be a huge amount of traffic on road networks.
Personally I'd rather see them address that issue much more so to the point where instead of building MORE infrastructure we could consider taking some down.
*to say nothing of the fact that ticket prices for train travel are rather nuts. Discounts can be found if you book months in advance; trawl through multiple websites and accept that you'll have a rather odd route and have to carry a dozen tickets.
It will have to be an absolutely fundamental flaw, because all the different models of cars will be running different software on different processors.
Just Tony wrote:The point is that the machine couldn't make a judgment call in that situation, and the babysitter inside the car failed to, more than likely out of complacency. Will this drive the AI field to try to make reactionary software? Probably, but it's still a black eye that the tech doesn't need right now.
I don't think it'll be a big problem for the industry in general. Self-driving cars are still a bit away and that's Uber we're talking about here. They were sued by a Google subsidiary for stealing AI tech for their cars and they were already caught illegally testing self-driving cars (I think in California). As a company they seem to live in perpetual panic mode. They got big VC funding that they used to subsidise their drivers and undercut regular taxi services (so they could show "customer adoption" and "growth" to the next batch of investors) while in parallel developing their self-driving car tech (swiping stuff from Google and partnering with Carnegie Mellon University before hiring the whole department away). They are aggressively trying to get it working because they need to make their own drivers obsolete if they ever want to see profitability. And before that they need to be able to show some sort of progress to their potential future investors or the company will just crash and burn. Nobody's going to invest in a company that's burning through billions a year without seeing some possibility of profit in the future.
At what point does the AI mean the driver is simply a passenger? If your vehicle is determined to be the cause of an accident - is the manufacturer responsible, or the programmer? Where does the true liability lie? Where does the causal break kick in?
I think it will prompt a shift away from blame focused settlements. Afterall, if drivers are now just passengers there's no moral hazard argument that we would be failing to punish reckless driving. At the same time, I doubt large car manufacturers would be happy selling a car, taking a nice profit now but being liable for that car for the next 20 or 30 years. So they would also prefer a model where a state road fund compensates victims, and it is paid in to by some combination of a tax on the sale of each car, and fees paid along with registration.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Kilkrazy wrote: Perhaps car manufacturers will accept liability as standard, and form a mututal fund to compensate victims. Criminal interference with the safety programming will invalidate this of course, but we have people driving without insurance or valid licences right now.
This opens up issues on right to repair. If I have the manufacturer or their approved dealer service my car, I'll pay five times what I should. If I go to Dave on the corner, and then the car has an accident, I understand the manufacturer wanting nothing to do with the accident.
sebster wrote: This opens up issues on right to repair. If I have the manufacturer or their approved dealer service my car, I'll pay five times what I should. If I go to Dave on the corner, and then the car has an accident, I understand the manufacturer wanting nothing to do with the accident.
Bit of a mess, potentially.
I literally just got an email from my company (a large manufacturer) stating they were officially supporting Right to Repair, and then stating specific bullet points they opposed, which was pretty much everything Right to Repair encompasses. So, they support Right to Repair by coming out against any legislation that would give that any useful meaning. Heh.
The specific exceptions they stated were safety, as well as conforming to emissions standards and so on.
Bit of a sticky widget, as I believe the British say.
Ouze wrote: I literally just got an email from my company (a large manufacturer) stating they were officially supporting Right to Repair, and then stating specific bullet points they opposed, which was pretty much everything Right to Repair encompasses.
Heh. Sounds about right
So, they support Right to Repair by coming out against any legislation that would give that any useful meaning. Heh.
The specific exceptions they stated were safety, as well as conforming to emissions standards and so on.
There's a level of sympathy I have for companies on the issue. You build something incredibly complex, then just letting any random person tinker away at it opens a whole can of worms. And as I understand it if the company has a policy of allowing anyone to repair the product, but those repairs regularly create safety failures, the company is liable.
However, obviously we can't have a world where every product I buy can only be fixed by the stupidly expensive manufacturer's own service. I owned a Honda and got angry enough paying extra because the only available parts were manufacturer built, I can't imagine being a farmer having to fly out a John Deere serviceman at a cost of tens of thousands, with a three day wait while the crop goes unplanted.
So there needs to be some other kind of solution, somehow.
Bit of a sticky widget, as I believe the British say.
Sticky wicket. Its a cricket reference, the wicket is a term for the 22 yards of turf that form the main playing area, with the batsman at one end and the bowler at the other. The bowler will bowl the ball in to the wicket, and in normal conditions the batsman can expect a somewhat consistent bounce off the wicket as he tries to hit the ball. But sometimes rain will affect the pitch - a wet pitch can be quite inconsistent, often the ball will hit a spot and bounce normally, then hit seemingly the same spot and hardly bounce at all, making it very hard to play. So a sticky wicket is a situation that is very difficult, with all sorts of traps and surprises lurking in there.
I get the concerns around liability, but surely it is the same as other industries and comes down to public liability insurance?
For example, I need some electrical work done to my house. You would never go back to the original builders (unless it was a brand new house in a warranty period), but you employ a trained and registered electrician.
If something goes wrong with the electrics and burns my house down, it’s the responsibility of the electrician and I sue their ass off. If they are a responsible company, they have public liability insurance that covers such incidents or, if they were negligent, they go to jail.
I think the key bit is around mechanics having to be trained and registered, which, at the moment (and as far as I can see), isn’t as rigorous as other safety critical trades. (For example, in the UK we have a “gas safe” register of technicians qualified to work on domestic gas appliances.). Of course, self-driving cars are a tad more complex, which makes the qualification more difficult.
To be honest, the easiest way out maybe to change the whole way we think about car ownership; rather than literally buying a self-driving car, some form of lease arrangement may be more practical. The manufacturer/supplier retains responsibility for correct maintenance as part of the package.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Counter argument there is that a flaw in programming is unlikely to cause just a single accident...
Indeed. This is why automated cars are a bad idea. Manufacturing defects with a driverless car will result in far worse levels of damage than defects can currently cause with regular cars. Frankly, I would think that car companies wouldn't want to touch self-driving cars for this reason. All the liability would be on their shoulders as the manufacturer for both general construction as well as day to day actions that the car takes, as opposed to regular cars where you can pass the buck to the driver or on failed maintenance.
And even if you force driverless cars to always have a human be able to take control of the vehicle, in situations like this one it won't do any good. The human would never realize the car is making an error till it is too late.
Furthermore, you will have issues while trying to transition to a purely driverless car society. Driverless cars reducing accidents as an idea is entirely dependent on ALL cars being driverless. When there is a mix of driverless and regular, then things will likely become more dangerous due to ripple effects like a driverless car misinterpreting a human driver's actions causing a sudden braking, which results in another human driver plowing into the driverless car. Or a driverless car failing to detect an obstacle which is approaching out of its sensor detection.
Basically, the idea of all cars being driverless is good in a vacuum. But it is impossible to actually implement in practice without somehow magically transforming all cars at the same time. Otherwise, you're just going to have a massive amount of carnage on the journey there, which will sour everybody on the idea.
I think automation is the future. Of course it is. Never mind the industrial revolution. Go back further than the agricultural revolution. Since records began, man has been finding ways to make things just that little bit easier. Slightly more efficient.
Early industrial stuff is shockingly unsafe - but modern equivalents, not so much when used properly (obviously anyone sticking their diddler in an active toaster is going to have a very bad day).
All this demonstrates is that the technology is still in its teething phase. That so few accidents have occurred is really quite remarkable when you think about it.
And the very risks involved to the programming company is going to mean they do a good job. Lets, for a moment, assume that Google become the dominant force in vehicular AI, yeah? If there's a fatal flaw, and their software is in 90% of self-driving vehicles....that's a helluva class action lawsuit, and not one they could ever successfully defend.
So it's in the interests of those developing this technology to be exceptionally thorough.
To be fair one reason a lot of early industrial stuff was shockingly unsafe was because many of those in power didn't actually care "too much" about their workers.
In farming it was also made worse because many farm labourers were paid in cider, so they'd be operating machines whilst intoxicated.
Despite this accident, automation won´t stop. Mankind will make itself superfluous in the end just to save a few bucks.
Depends. There will also be more jobs, and many jobs are not going anywhere for a very long time. Many process driven jobs will be going, but more problem solving jobs will say. People talk about low paid jobs, but I can see more high level jobs going. For example, I can see the industry I work in accountancy, being gutted. Most of accounting is fixing errors by other people. Once we start to automate a lot more of the input it will have a big impact. Like printing, graphic design and technical drawing 50 years ago with the advent of the computer, many jobs will go and only the most demanding (ad best paid) will stay. Equally however I cannot see jobs like plumbers and electricians going anywhere anytime soon.
However this may mean we see mass unemployment, or it may be that we see a shift in employment, with different jobs being done, or possibly reduction in working hours. 200 years ago many people worked 10-12 hours a day 7 days a week. 100 years ago people were more likely to work a 6 day week and 8 hours a day, with no holidays. Now in the developed world 5 day weeks and paid holidays are the norm. I can see us going to 6 hour days with more holidays, or a 4 day working week.
Overread wrote: In farming it was also made worse because many farm labourers were paid in cider, so they'd be operating machines whilst intoxicated.
To be fair most people were half cut from drinking up to 10 pints of small beer a day.
Another angle is that machine built production lines work great; until you want to change the production design. Right now this requires an almost full rebuild of the factory, which make any serious redesign of a product a major investment and undertaking for any company.
Now if you've got human operators and builders you can instead just give them the new schematics; train them up and in a fraction of the time and cost the design can be altered significantly.
So automation isn't always a cost saving venture, esp when viewed in the very long term. OF course part of this is the complexity of the machines involved and one can envision that production machines in the future will be more easily adapted to new designs and even new functions. So its a wobbly line of advance rather than a single clear cut path.
Work is indeed an issue and it wouldn't surprise me if we might even reach a point in the west where we consider paying most people a standard fixed living wage; enough to support rent rates and bills. Ergo that work would be on-top of that payment. Thus making a lot more low end low pay work viable for people to undertake so that people remain in employment; that the system keeps working whilst being paid for by the larger income generated from efficient factories, production and high end business that generates vast incomes but has fewer job opportunities. Esp in the light of rising world populations (even if western nations are actually decreasing in many native populations the overall world trend is for more migration and greater population increase)
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Early industrial stuff is shockingly unsafe - but modern equivalents, not so much when used properly (obviously anyone sticking their diddler in an active toaster is going to have a very bad day).
You specify active. So as long as I make sure the power is off it's pretty good?
All this demonstrates is that the technology is still in its teething phase. That so few accidents have occurred is really quite remarkable when you think about it.
Definitely. It's rare for brand new kinds of tech to be this much of an improvement even at the first roll out, and we're still years away.
I would have thought normally tech like this would spend a long period grinding its way up from simple applications. They have self driving rigs out on the mines now, but I'd have thought it'd be years before lessons learned there were applied to more complex environments, only reaching passenger cars after many years. But at the same time this stuff is being rolled out commerically on mines, we already have prototypes working as well or better than human drivers in real world tests.
Maybe this tech is coming fast because humans are so crap at driving, it was a very low bad for cars to beat?
And the very risks involved to the programming company is going to mean they do a good job. Lets, for a moment, assume that Google become the dominant force in vehicular AI, yeah? If there's a fatal flaw, and their software is in 90% of self-driving vehicles....that's a helluva class action lawsuit, and not one they could ever successfully defend.
I guess there's two sides to this. Looking at the air bag company that went bust when the recalls for a massive number of their products started rolling in, we can see the risk of a massive, company wide product failure. Put across a whole car industry, and with lives lost it could bankrupt even Google. So the fact that all these huge companies are piling in implies they must be very confident their cars will not fail to those risks.
But the flipside is that airbag manufacturer was probably very confident as well
Sticky wicket. Its a cricket reference, the wicket is a term for the 22 yards of turf that form the main playing area, with the batsman at one end and the bowler at the other. The bowler will bowl the ball in to the wicket, and in normal conditions the batsman can expect a somewhat consistent bounce off the wicket as he tries to hit the ball. But sometimes rain will affect the pitch - a wet pitch can be quite inconsistent, often the ball will hit a spot and bounce normally, then hit seemingly the same spot and hardly bounce at all, making it very hard to play. So a sticky wicket is a situation that is very difficult, with all sorts of traps and surprises lurking in there.
Cricket! I always thought it was a Croquet reference!
Foiled again!
....as for self-driving cars. I beleive Self-Driving Trucks have all ready been deployed int he Atlanta area as well.
I think the bigger threat from automation is that our society/culture is not ready for all the job losses for blue collar works that are coming. That will lead to political and economic uncertainity which will lead to violence like we saw at the dawn of the labor movement.
I for one am ready for Anarchist Bombers to make a comeback..... maybe they all ready have?
I think the main issue is that it's hard to really blame someone, there's no catharsis in "Bloody robot killed my grandma".
is not ready for all the job losses for blue collar works that are coming
There'll be new ones. If mankind is good at anything it's inventing bs jobs so that technical advances never actually reduce the amount of time that people spend at work. We all know that ideally Mr. Robot would do everything so we had leisure time all day, but that's never going to happen. So, taxi drivers, prepare to become Managers of Phone Desinfection (although, as the HHGTTG told us: those guys are really important).
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Early industrial stuff is shockingly unsafe - but modern equivalents, not so much when used properly (obviously anyone sticking their diddler in an active toaster is going to have a very bad day).
You specify active. So as long as I make sure the power is off it's pretty good?
Frankly, I would think that car companies wouldn't want to touch self-driving cars for this reason.
And yet, Ford, GM, BMW, VW, Mercedes, Volvo and other companies besides are ALL developing driverless cars right now.
I think the key difference between what manufacturers are doing, and what Uber was doing, is that manufacturers have a better idea of their liabilities (I mean hell, Uber's entire business model is predicated on breaking the law) and are approaching driverless cars with an air of caution and the idea of preventing things like the OP from happening in the first place.
XuQishi wrote: I think the main issue is that it's hard to really blame someone, there's no catharsis in "Bloody robot killed my grandma".
is not ready for all the job losses for blue collar works that are coming
There'll be new ones. If mankind is good at anything it's inventing bs jobs so that technical advances never actually reduce the amount of time that people spend at work. We all know that ideally Mr. Robot would do everything so we had leisure time all day, but that's never going to happen. So, taxi drivers, prepare to become Managers of Phone Desinfection (although, as the HHGTTG told us: those guys are really important).
Not sure if they are applicable. Those aren't lost jobs (as in "nobody does this anymore"), there's just somebody else who does it for a lot less in a different place. You can mine coal anywhere where there is some, a taxi driver is not something you can outsource, though. You need him here, not in China. So if the cabbie is obsolete, he's going to be obsolete everywhere very quickly, and he will have to look for a different job.
That is painful. The Ruhr area could sing you a nice song about it - but it only sucks there now because the politicians that governed it stubbornly refused to incite a change 30 years ago, when the death of the mining industry was clear; they were scared of the miner's unions and rode that dying horse way too long while making establishing new and different businesses so expensive to prop up the mining subsidies with tax money that businesses went elsewhere. The state I used to live in got a major influx of industry because the Ruhr people apparently didn't want it. Now half of it is basically a slum. Great job, guys. And that includes the unions, too. They should have fought for better education, different vocational training. Instead they fought for digging in the dirt until the money ran out. A waste of 20 years.
That said, there have never been as many people working in Germany at the same time as now, so substitution is a thing even with all the ex coal people, the failed electronics industry, the waste of the leadership in nuclear power technology (we used to be about 18 months in front of other countries science- and developmentwise there, which doesn't sound like a lot, but the guy who has it first gets to sell it first) etc. There have been lots of industries that went belly up over the last few decades here because we became to expensive to do it (just check out what a Loewe TV set costs, Loewe is the last surviving German TV maker and they do the only thing that is sustainable for them: super-luxury). Siemens screwed up mobile phone development (who wants one of those, right?), that cost thousands of jobs. In the end, however, most of the workers found something else to do or retired early. And there are tons of jobs that people wouldn't have believed to exist 20 years ago.
Grey Templar wrote: Otherwise, you're just going to have a massive amount of carnage on the journey there, which will sour everybody on the idea.
As opposed to the even more massive carnage of cars with human drivers that we take for granted?
Stick a bunch of driverless cars on the road now and fatalities will likely increase. At least perceptionwise.
It’s going to sort of be a prisoners dilemma situation. If we bear with the teething phase we will probably be safer, but we likely won’t. So we will end up worse off than we logically should have been.
XuQishi wrote: I think the main issue is that it's hard to really blame someone, there's no catharsis in "Bloody robot killed my grandma".
is not ready for all the job losses for blue collar works that are coming
There'll be new ones. If mankind is good at anything it's inventing bs jobs so that technical advances never actually reduce the amount of time that people spend at work. We all know that ideally Mr. Robot would do everything so we had leisure time all day, but that's never going to happen. So, taxi drivers, prepare to become Managers of Phone Desinfection (although, as the HHGTTG told us: those guys are really important).
People keep saying this kind of thing, but it keeps not happening. The Great Job Replacement Wave is always just over the horizon of the next financial year, but what actually happens is another wave of redundancies. A lot of developed economies are hiding the extent of the issue by fudging unemployment numbers(people not claiming an actual unemployment benefit don't get counted, more & more people being classed as "self-employed" for doing work that in no way compensates for a proper full-time job, people counting as employed while on "zero-hours" contracts and not actually being given any hours to work, etc etc) - and for the record, I don't think it's a grand conspiracy or anything, they've always fudged the numbers like that because they're politicians who want to look like they're managing the economy well, but it's now breeding dangerous complacency about automation's effect on the labour market. EDIT: And in reply to the "but Germany..." comment above - uhuh, because there's no other factors affecting the German economy at all. None. Nada. Zippo. Wind up the Eurozone so normal currency factors begin impacting the German economy and then we can talk.
A *lot* of people have been getting hard, menial, fairly low-paid work but still part- or full-time in places like Amazon Warehouses as other areas of the economy have declined, so what's going to happen when Amazon's currently-being-trialled automated warehouses roll out globally? Hundreds of thousands of people made unemployed at a stroke, and at best a few hundred management, programming, and physical repair jobs to replace them. Supermarkets are pushing self-service checkouts *hard*, allowing them to replace a whole line of cashiers with a single "helper" for people getting stuck. Retail is centralising more and more using online distribution. And it's not just "blue collar" stuff - small businesses that used to hire accountants now just use software that will auto-generate their tax returns for them, more & more sophisticated development tools reduce the need for any given type of programmer on a specific project more every year, even legal research jobs are being eroded by basic automation that allows one person to do the job of several.
Right now every job gained through technological advancement is coming at the expense of multiple other jobs, the promised glut of tech jobs that will supposedly replace them(a plan that will leave a ton of people behind anyway, because not everyone can just retrain on a dime as a sodding programmer) are nowhere to be seen, and nevermind adequately addressing the issue we're not even acknowledging its existence.
All the benefits of automation are accruing to rentier capital, ie the people who own the machines and the people who own the software the machines run. That situation can only continue for so long until it undermines the basic structure of the economy - you can use machines to make things as cheaply as you like, doesn't matter if nobody can earn any money to buy them. The only two practicable solutions are either the institution of substantial, specific, and purposefully unavoidable new taxes on the beneficiaries of automation to fund a universal basic income, or a conscious(and potentially legally-enforced) decision to split up the well-paid high-tech jobs created by automation into multiple reasonably-paid part time jobs so that there's no net loss of employment or earning power, but corporations and politicians and media won't even admit there's a problem let along begin discussing solutions, it's maddening.
XuQishi wrote: Not sure if they are applicable. Those aren't lost jobs (as in "nobody does this anymore"), there's just somebody else who does it for a lot less in a different place. You can mine coal anywhere where there is some, a taxi driver is not something you can outsource, though. You need him here, not in China. So if the cabbie is obsolete, he's going to be obsolete everywhere very quickly, and he will have to look for a different job.
That is painful. The Ruhr area could sing you a nice song about it - but it only sucks there now because the politicians that governed it stubbornly refused to incite a change 30 years ago, when the death of the mining industry was clear; they were scared of the miner's unions and rode that dying horse way too long while making establishing new and different businesses so expensive to prop up the mining subsidies with tax money that businesses went elsewhere. The state I used to live in got a major influx of industry because the Ruhr people apparently didn't want it. Now half of it is basically a slum. Great job, guys. And that includes the unions, too. They should have fought for better education, different vocational training. Instead they fought for digging in the dirt until the money ran out. A waste of 20 years.
That said, there have never been as many people working in Germany at the same time as now, so substitution is a thing even with all the ex coal people, the failed electronics industry, the waste of the leadership in nuclear power technology (we used to be about 18 months in front of other countries science- and developmentwise there, which doesn't sound like a lot, but the guy who has it first gets to sell it first) etc. There have been lots of industries that went belly up over the last few decades here because we became to expensive to do it (just check out what a Loewe TV set costs, Loewe is the last surviving German TV maker and they do the only thing that is sustainable for them: super-luxury). Siemens screwed up mobile phone development (who wants one of those, right?), that cost thousands of jobs. In the end, however, most of the workers found something else to do or retired early. And there are tons of jobs that people wouldn't have believed to exist 20 years ago.
Slightly off topic, but wow, that sounds exactly like a lot of the gripes here in the UK! Nice to know misery has company, I guess?
Wind up the Eurozone so normal currency factors begin impacting the German economy and then we can talk.
The main reason why I think that is not happening is because in that case we'd have to ask for theTarget II money and that would murder the other EU countries who owe us roughly a trillion Euros for the stuff we sold them (not including "normal" national debt).
All the benefits of automation are accruing to rentier capital, ie the people who own the machines and the people who own the software the machines run.
Yeah, in any case there will have to be a giant robot tax if there are no proper substitutions or there will be torches and forks at some point.
edited. tired, headache, not sure what I was arguing for or against.
Wind up the Eurozone so normal currency factors begin impacting the German economy and then we can talk.
The main reason why I think that is not happening is because in that case we'd have to ask for theTarget II money and that would murder the other EU countries who owe us roughly a trillion Euros for the stuff we sold them (not including "normal" national debt).
All I meant by that was you can't really use the German economy as a basis for analysing loss of employment due to automation, because the specific effects of the Eurozone on that economy - essentially allowing it to run with a focus on advanced manufacturing with almost none of the accompanying downsides - have massively insulated it from a lot of the secondary effects automation is having on other advanced economies.
All the benefits of automation are accruing to rentier capital, ie the people who own the machines and the people who own the software the machines run.
Yeah, in any case there will have to be a giant robot tax if there are no proper substitutions or there will be torches and forks at some point.
edited. tired, headache, not sure what I was arguing for or against.
Sadly, like with everything else it seems, people always seem to forget the reasons why things happened. The whole "postwar consensus"/social democratic compact in Europe wasn't a triumph of the socialists, it was capitalism acting in self-defence, doing *just* enough to avoid the torches & pitchforkes stage that they could clearly see happening in other countries at the time. Between the rightwing mythmaking of the Thatcher & Blair eras and the lack these days of a clear, actually-communist "other" to look upon in horror though I don't think enough of the corporate-political class are capable of looking far enough beyond the next financial report/election to realise that failing to adequately address the fallout of automation immediately could well bring on a nasty case of the Robespierres in the general working populace.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Yup. And if they can talk to each other, it could, potentially, banish Phantom Traffic Jams.
It wont, slowing down for any reason causes slowdowns elsewhere.
Here it is explained better than I could:
Now in order to have defacto safety the visual inputting for a car will need to break first the ascertain visual anomaly later. Humans do, but humans can proccess visual data better than a robot because they can adapt to unusual situations with human rationality, everything a robot does is processed through programming, and this has the habit of getting things VERY wrong when it goes wrong.
However this isnt the main problem, the problem is that networking car AI means thet they become corruptable or hackable. You dont never need to hack the car and cause an accident, you only need to have the signal between cars and convince a car that another car a hundred metres ahead has had to stop due to a spillage and cautions all cars to move at 1kph. Traffic jammers will become a viable reality.
Interesting question of ethics, actually. Should an autonomous car always stop for people? If yes, what keeps idiots from causing massive jams by keeping vehicles from moving at all just by dancing around between them?
If people can always just bumble into the streets without looking, city traffic will be ridiculously slow.
Interesting question of ethics, actually. Should an autonomous car always stop for people? If yes, what keeps idiots from causing massive jams by keeping vehicles from moving at all just by dancing around between them? .
In theory you can do that now with cars driven by real people. In fact people have done just that - normally when they do the police get involved. The only difference is that self driven cars might well react faster so there's less potential risk there; however chances are the self driven car will have all round video recording so if you do do that you will likely get caught even if you flee the scene before the police arrive.
Well, at least the robot doesn't get out of the car and tells you forcefully what he thinks of you .
Driver (ergo passenger since the car is doing the driving) gets out to forcefully put across their point of view and thoughts on the matter.
Obstructing person runs off
Driver gives chase for a little bit
Car detects there's no obstruction - drives itself away!
(ok so any sane person getting out in such a situation would turn the car off; but still its a humorous thought! Right up there with if the car has sensors to detect a passenger before driving off; but since those are just pressure its easy to throw a bag* or box and suddenly - off goes the car on its own!)
*Which is really annoying when the car is convinced that your backpack is a passenger without its seatbelt on and keeps bleeping at you!
Interesting question of ethics, actually. Should an autonomous car always stop for people? If yes, what keeps idiots from causing massive jams by keeping vehicles from moving at all just by dancing around between them?
If people can always just bumble into the streets without looking, city traffic will be ridiculously slow.
Yes an automated car will be easy to deter this way, but I am also talking about abusing networked data from traffic, so thats cars are hacked to drive slower by falsified network information.
Its one of many problems automated vehicles will face and a lot of out of work cabbies and truckers will be happy to help make them a reality.
Sort of. Peak coal mining is the 1970s, unemployment in that era tipped 9%. Right now unemployment is at 4%, and that's after absorbing a lot of women also entering the workforce. So the coal jobs are lost, but other work took its place.
That's been the general pattern, its the basic driver of economic growth - automation and efficiencies mean less people are employed doing task a, the freed up labour goes and works in new task z, and we add the products from task z to overall production and slowly total production grows.
The question is whether the taxi drivers and truck drivers will have a task z to move in to. We've been unsure at every stage before now, but there's always been those new industries. But these days, with the new growth on-line companies employing so few people, maybe it won't happen. Dunno.
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Yodhrin wrote: All I meant by that was you can't really use the German economy as a basis for analysing loss of employment due to automation, because the specific effects of the Eurozone on that economy - essentially allowing it to run with a focus on advanced manufacturing with almost none of the accompanying downsides - have massively insulated it from a lot of the secondary effects automation is having on other advanced economies.
In addition to the EU putting Germany in a pretty unique place, it's also a reality that you just can't have more than a couple of countries doing what Germany is doing at any one time. Manufacturing benefits from network effects like any economic sector, the best place for a new factory is frequently right next to the last. Most manufacturing industries just aren't viable as purely domestic production.
Automation in Germany hasn't cost jobs because Germany has instead increased total production and exported more of its production. You can't have other countries copy that, we can't all be net exporters of manufacturing goods.
*The US has some purely domestic industries because there's 330m consumers in a 20 trillion economy, but they're basically it.
China could probably manage it too. The reason they don't now is because they're making more money exporting stuff, primarily to America, than they could make servicing their domestic market.
Yodhrin wrote:All the benefits of automation are accruing to rentier capital, ie the people who own the machines and the people who own the software the machines run. That situation can only continue for so long until it undermines the basic structure of the economy - you can use machines to make things as cheaply as you like, doesn't matter if nobody can earn any money to buy them. The only two practicable solutions are either the institution of substantial, specific, and purposefully unavoidable new taxes on the beneficiaries of automation to fund a universal basic income, or a conscious(and potentially legally-enforced) decision to split up the well-paid high-tech jobs created by automation into multiple reasonably-paid part time jobs so that there's no net loss of employment or earning power, but corporations and politicians and media won't even admit there's a problem let along begin discussing solutions, it's maddening.
When I started this thread, I made a bet with one of my coworkers on how long it would take someone to bring up the whole automation progression into basically "humanity sitting on it's ass while robots do all the labor, forcing us to take rich people's money and give it to us while we do nothing to work" and what country/region that viewpoint would come from.
Interesting question of ethics, actually. Should an autonomous car always stop for people? If yes, what keeps idiots from causing massive jams by keeping vehicles from moving at all just by dancing around between them?
If people can always just bumble into the streets without looking, city traffic will be ridiculously slow.
Yes an automated car will be easy to deter this way, but I am also talking about abusing networked data from traffic, so that cars are hacked to drive slower by falsified network information.
Its one of many problems automated vehicles will face and a lot of out of work cabbies and truckers will be happy to help make them a reality.
And THIS is the biggest problem with AI driven vehicles. People are evil enough now that high school kids have no qualms writing a program that slags peoples' devices just to entertain themselves, and we'll have potentially networked vehicles so that these psychos can rank a confirmed kill? Even looking at networked devices from a different angle, there's still issues. Updates slowing processor speed on a device that depends on its processor speed to make quick judgments in traffic. That can be mitigated with a wipe and reinstall, but that's just going to drive the costs of maintenance even higher.
Just Tony wrote: When I started this thread, I made a bet with one of my coworkers on how long it would take someone to bring up the whole automation progression into basically "humanity sitting on it's ass while robots do all the labor, forcing us to take rich people's money and give it to us while we do nothing to work" and what country/region that viewpoint would come from.
I won $50.
Are you seriously disputing that this is the inevitable outcome, given sufficient time?
Vulcan wrote: China could probably manage it too. The reason they don't now is because they're making more money exporting stuff, primarily to America, than they could make servicing their domestic market.
CHina is working on expanding its domestic market, but it wouldn't be done to replace exports, but rather to have export and domestic consumption support each other. China is big, but it will be some before China has as massive a car industry. Not in raw numbers, there China is about on par, 4m sales vs 6m in the US, but the average price in the US is $33,000, in China its about $6,000.
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Just Tony wrote: When I started this thread, I made a bet with one of my coworkers on how long it would take someone to bring up the whole automation progression into basically "humanity sitting on it's ass while robots do all the labor, forcing us to take rich people's money and give it to us while we do nothing to work" and what country/region that viewpoint would come from.
Just Tony wrote: When I started this thread, I made a bet with one of my coworkers on how long it would take someone to bring up the whole automation progression into basically "humanity sitting on it's ass while robots do all the labor, forcing us to take rich people's money and give it to us while we do nothing to work" and what country/region that viewpoint would come from.
I won $50.
Are you seriously disputing that this is the inevitable outcome, given sufficient time?
I think we'll see a global conflict that culls 1/3 or more of the world population before we see fan wielding robots feed us bon bons while we make the 1% run on hamster wheels.
sebster wrote:Automatically Appended Next Post:
Just Tony wrote: When I started this thread, I made a bet with one of my coworkers on how long it would take someone to bring up the whole automation progression into basically "humanity sitting on it's ass while robots do all the labor, forcing us to take rich people's money and give it to us while we do nothing to work" and what country/region that viewpoint would come from.
I won $50.
We are just monkeys to dance for your amusement.
I was thinking more along the lines of kinkajou, but the premise is sound...
Which is really annoying when the car is convinced that your backpack is a passenger without its seatbelt on and keeps bleeping at you!
Even more annoying is when it starts doing that without a backpack on the seat. I once had to drive 150 kilometers with the car bleeping at me always getting louder because there was something wrong with the sensor mat in the seat. Of course you can't "recognize" it so it shuts up. Guess how much that improved the safety of my driving that day. I wasn't enraged at all.
When I started this thread, I made a bet with one of my coworkers on how long it would take someone to bring up the whole automation progression into basically "humanity sitting on it's ass while robots do all the labor
I think that is the final goal of automation, though, and I'm not someone to be accused of being a socialist. That would need more of a Star-Trek-like tech level though.
Just Tony wrote: I think we'll see a global conflict that culls 1/3 or more of the world population before we see fan wielding robots feed us bon bons while we make the 1% run on hamster wheels.
That's not what I asked. Whether or not a massive war happens has nothing to do with my actual question: do you dispute the inevitability of automation rendering the vast majority of people unemployable in any meaningful fashion, resulting in a welfare state where people are paid for not working?
XuQishi wrote: Even more annoying is when it starts doing that without a backpack on the seat. I once had to drive 150 kilometers with the car bleeping at me always getting louder because there was something wrong with the sensor mat in the seat. Of course you can't "recognize" it so it shuts up. Guess how much that improved the safety of my driving that day. I wasn't enraged at all.
Why couldn't you just put the seatbelt in to make the car stop beeping?
XuQishi wrote: There'll be new ones. If mankind is good at anything it's inventing bs jobs so that technical advances never actually reduce the amount of time that people spend at work. We all know that ideally Mr. Robot would do everything so we had leisure time all day, but that's never going to happen. So, taxi drivers, prepare to become Managers of Phone Desinfection (although, as the HHGTTG told us: those guys are really important).
Funny. It already has. Or at least here standard isn't any more 7 days a week work.
Interesting question of ethics, actually. Should an autonomous car always stop for people? If yes, what keeps idiots from causing massive jams by keeping vehicles from moving at all just by dancing around between them?
If people can always just bumble into the streets without looking, city traffic will be ridiculously slow.
Yes an automated car will be easy to deter this way, but I am also talking about abusing networked data from traffic, so that cars are hacked to drive slower by falsified network information.
Its one of many problems automated vehicles will face and a lot of out of work cabbies and truckers will be happy to help make them a reality.
And THIS is the biggest problem with AI driven vehicles. People are evil enough now that high school kids have no qualms writing a program that slags peoples' devices just to entertain themselves, and we'll have potentially networked vehicles so that these psychos can rank a confirmed kill? Even looking at networked devices from a different angle, there's still issues. Updates slowing processor speed on a device that depends on its processor speed to make quick judgments in traffic. That can be mitigated with a wipe and reinstall, but that's just going to drive the costs of maintenance even higher.
I think you are getting it wrong here. Yes psychos would love to rack up road accidents for lulz, however I think we can safely assume that vehicle AI design will include safeguards and the safeguards will force the vehicles to be safe. In some ways this is a good thing, however networked data can be manipulated to force the vehicles to be ultra safe to the point of immobility either individually or more likely collectively through traffic.
There is no way around that for programmers as it takes the desired state to an extreme, though yes you could have cases where vehicle AI is hacked for opposite effect, but that will be more difficult.
Even so fatal accidents will occur, when AI feths up, and it does, it goes all the way, my main problem there is there is likely to be a lack of accountability of the operators, or at the very least I don't trust there to be any accountability. Amazon and Google are so big they already don't bother paying tax, once they start running transport they will be professionally disinterested in culpability.
I didn't want to watch it, because it seems macabre, but I thought it important to see the evidence of the circumstances of the collision for myself.
Having seen it, I think that part of the blame must lie with the victim. She was pushing her bike across a dark, 40 mph street, with no lights or hi-vis clothing.
I'm not surprised the car did not stop by itself if it relies on radar. A bike is a pretty thin, small object on radar, I imagine. I am a rather more surprised that the safety driver did not see the cyclist and stop the car. However, she seems not to have been paying attention to the road.
The road was dark, the headlights seemed to be in low beam, and the cyclist was wearing dark clothing.
Yup, judging from that video I don't think a human would have been able to stop if they'd been driving, either. The headlights should have been turned up on that road. You couldn't see the person or bike at all before they entered the illumination of the headlights and by that point, at 40mph, there was no time to stop.
So, the headlights should have been turned up and please, people, use lights on your bike and wear high visibility clothing.
Just Tony wrote: I think we'll see a global conflict that culls 1/3 or more of the world population before we see fan wielding robots feed us bon bons while we make the 1% run on hamster wheels.
That's not what I asked. Whether or not a massive war happens has nothing to do with my actual question: do you dispute the inevitability of automation rendering the vast majority of people unemployable in any meaningful fashion, resulting in a welfare state where people are paid for not working?
No, I do not. We don't have ANY reliable AIs in our simple machines that don't need babysat for its daily operations. If we can't get it right on a micro level, thinking it's going to succeed at the mega level is dreaming. I don't deal in dreams, unfortunately. I deal with AI all day at work. Five of the 13 operations I'm signed off on in the machine shop I work in are either robot assisted or a robot cell entirely. Even with the massive resources my corporation has, there are still issues with the robots where they do something absolutely baffling We still have to babysit them. Now, it might be possible that you could have one person babysit the last four operations on my currently assigned line leading up to audit, but none of the other operations can be spread out that thin. AI tech and automation would have to move LEAPS AND BOUNDS to come close to doing 50% of what happens in my shop, let alone 100%.
Why couldn't you just put the seatbelt in to make the car stop beeping?
I did, but it didn't take, there was something wrong with the innards of the seat, I got a new sensor mat and a new belt lock. The most annoying part about that was that nobody ever sits in that seat - it's a coupe, only a small child could even sit there - and I couldn't click the warning away. I wished hard for a "you're wrong, shut up, car"-button.
I'm not surprised the car did not stop by itself if it relies on radar. A bike is a pretty thin, small object on radar, I imagine.
I would think that a bike with a person would have quite the signature. The question is more why that car wasn't also equipped with infra-red as well. I mean, the big advantage of a robot compared to a human is that you can easily make it see in different spectrums at once.
I didn't want to watch it, because it seems macabre, but I thought it important to see the evidence of the circumstances of the collision for myself.
Having seen it, I think that part of the blame must lie with the victim. She was pushing her bike across a dark, 40 mph street, with no lights or hi-vis clothing.
I'm not surprised the car did not stop by itself if it relies on radar. A bike is a pretty thin, small object on radar, I imagine. I am a rather more surprised that the safety driver did not see the cyclist and stop the car. However, she seems not to have been paying attention to the road.
The road was dark, the headlights seemed to be in low beam, and the cyclist was wearing dark clothing.
Wow. She was outright crossing the road in the blind spot between street lamps.
Reminds me of a time I almost hit a deer. You'd think the bastard wouldn't have time to get halfway across the road in the time between the car in front of me passing him but there he was. Except this is obviously more tragic. Not sure I really approve of the safety driver being so inattentive. I don't think she could have prevented the accident cause that woman totally showed up *snaps finger* like that but is constantly looking down and not watching where the car is going really her job?
Driverless cars will always kill people no matter how good the technology become. The low hurdle it must overcome is killing less people than human drivers. That's not going to be difficult when you consider the number of glitches humans have such as drunk driving, txting while driving, falling asleep while driving, road rage, and street racing. Driving will easily be safer once our robotic overlords control our vehicles.
1. Could autonomic cars be equipped with appropriate sensors that would enable them to 'see' a cyclist in the circumstances, and thus avoid a collision?
This is important because we should make the cars as safe as possible. We also need to think about the limits of safety and what demands that may put on other road users, and indeed the limits of usefulness of self-driving cars.
2. What is the point of a "safety driver" if she fails to pay attention?
This is important because the case in favour of testing experimental self-driving cars is based partly on the point that the safety driver will help prevent accidents the cars may cause by their inadequate design.
Just Tony wrote: No, I do not. We don't have ANY reliable AIs in our simple machines that don't need babysat for its daily operations. If we can't get it right on a micro level, thinking it's going to succeed at the mega level is dreaming. I don't deal in dreams, unfortunately. I deal with AI all day at work. Five of the 13 operations I'm signed off on in the machine shop I work in are either robot assisted or a robot cell entirely. Even with the massive resources my corporation has, there are still issues with the robots where they do something absolutely baffling We still have to babysit them. Now, it might be possible that you could have one person babysit the last four operations on my currently assigned line leading up to audit, but none of the other operations can be spread out that thin. AI tech and automation would have to move LEAPS AND BOUNDS to come close to doing 50% of what happens in my shop, let alone 100%.
You're making the mistake of assuming that because something isn't great now it must be because of inherent limits, rather than engineering challenges that have not yet been overcome. There is nothing about machine shop work that is inherently impossible for an automated system to do, you're just building objects according to precisely defined specifications. That's exactly the sort of work that machines are great at, as demonstrated by your own admission that you are just babysitting the machines as they do all of the work. The only obstacle to full automation is improving reliability, and the moment the annual scrap losses due to robot mistakes drop below your annual salary you will find yourself without a job. Automated systems are only going to get better and cheaper, so it is only a question of when you become obsolete, not if.
For a counter-example to yours I'll describe the situation at my company (semiconductor manufacturing). I'm in R&D, but I see some of the production side and the majority of their employees are temps whose job consists of loading materials into one side of a machine and unloading them from the other side. For anything more complicated than pressing the "start" button they are under explicit orders to stop and call a tech to do the work for them. Do you honestly think those jobs would survive the introduction of a materials handling robot that costs less than paying a human worker? Of course not. The day that robot exists is the day my company shuts down most of its manufacturing jobs, leaving a handful of technicians supervising an automated factory and a handful of engineers and managers handling the design and organizational work.
So what happens when this kind of thing happens across the entire economy, and unskilled labor is replaced with machines? Most of these people aren't going to get the kind of engineering/management/etc jobs that will require humans (at least for the foreseeable future) because you're largely talking about people with a high school diploma at most, or maybe a university degree of the "well, you officially spent four years at a university" sort that doesn't provide any real job skills. I know plenty of people who have zero hope of handling the kind of math and science classes that I had to take to get my engineering degree, the kind of degree that you'll need to qualify for those surviving jobs. So what are they supposed to do, starve to death because they weren't good at calculus?
The thing that will distinguish future human work from automation is the ability to frame problems to discover the best solution from the human perspective.
For example, right now an architect will make a design to best meet his client's needs, then feed the specs into a spreadsheet to work out the cost of buying all the materials.
Also "creativity", and the ability to think flexibly, and deal with new situations on the fly.
Yes, but you still need a human who understands calculus to run the computer. Without that knowledge the computer is worthless, as you don't know why it is doing what it does and can't get meaningful engineering solutions from it. You aren't hiring people with science/engineering degrees to do math problems, you're hiring them for the skills they learned after taking 2-3 years of calculus classes to understand the real work of their field.
I think we'll see a global conflict that culls 1/3 or more of the world population before we see fan wielding robots feed us bon bons while we make the 1% run on hamster wheels.
The rich would indeed rather kill a third of the planet than share wealth.
Indeed. And unless you are dealing with quantum effects or other stuff like that (such as general relativity field equations etc.) most of the problems you face are unlikely to be more complex than a first or second order differential equation, which are pretty easy to solve (especially second order which are, funnily, easier than first order as the method for solving them is always the same), even for humans. For others it is often a case of manipulating them until they are in a solvable form, at which point ypu just look up the answer in a book/the internet.
That rearranging requires imagination, intuition and an understanding of the science/maths behind the problem.
schadenfreude wrote: Driverless cars will always kill people no matter how good the technology become. The low hurdle it must overcome is killing less people than human drivers. That's not going to be difficult when you consider the number of glitches humans have such as drunk driving, txting while driving, falling asleep while driving, road rage, and street racing. Driving will easily be safer once our robotic overlords control our vehicles.
There is a caveat to that. Only if the vast majority/all of the other cars on the road are also driverless cars and all of them communicate with each other.
A mixture of driverless cars and regular cars will likely result in massive glitches on the part of the driverless cars as they will not interact well with human drivers, while human drivers on the other hand are better at reacting to unexpected things. A driverless car can only act within the limits of its programming. So if something unexpected happens, like say a sudden lane change from another vehicle, a human might be able to compensate while a driverless car might not compensate enough. If its programming makes it brake too much or too little it could cause a chain reaction.
The transition period from where we are now to 100% automated cars is where the carnage will happen. And the problem will simply rest on upsetting the current status quo, IE: the blame will be on driverless cars.
In some ways, its like transitioning to Communism. The destination seems idyllic and in many ways it is a perfect society in theory. But the journey there is simply too full of pitfalls and carnage to make the journey worthwhile.
What's extra hilarious about driverless cars is that we have already invented public transportation. Cutting down on the amount of cars out there is good but we've already got a more efficient method of doing so than replacing them 1:1 with Google knock-off robots.
Grey Templar wrote: So if something unexpected happens, like say a sudden lane change from another vehicle, a human might be able to compensate while a driverless car might not compensate enough.
It's actually the exact opposite. This situation overwhelmingly favors the automated car, not the human. A sudden lane change is unpredictable, but it's still an event that falls well within the set of possible events known to occur on roads, and involves an object that is a clearly visible target whose motion can be very well observed and reacted to. The automated car can immediately recognize the car's motion, analyze exactly what separation distance exists as it changes lanes, and react with the minimum response required to keep separation distances at an appropriate level. The human driver, on the other hand, is likely to be slower to react as their attention can't be everywhere at once (and that's just about where your eyes can be looking, not even considering driving while distracted with passengers/phones/etc), is certainly less able to judge the exact position and velocity of the other car, and is likely to overreact when they are startled by sudden awareness of a car halfway into their lane.
The hard part for automated cars is not other cars, it's the environment. It's things like the situation in the OP, where the target is difficult for the car's vision system to process (a dark and relatively small figure on a dark background) and must be handled with very short separation distances that give virtually nonexistent margins for error. The problem is no longer reacting to another car's motion, it's having to predict what a pedestrian is going to do before they do it because by the time you see them start to move it's often too late to hit the brakes and avoid a collision.
Rosebuddy wrote: What's extra hilarious about driverless cars is that we have already invented public transportation. Cutting down on the amount of cars out there is good but we've already got a more efficient method of doing so than replacing them 1:1 with Google knock-off robots.
Rosebuddy wrote: What's extra hilarious about driverless cars is that we have already invented public transportation. Cutting down on the amount of cars out there is good but we've already got a more efficient method of doing so than replacing them 1:1 with Google knock-off robots.
Have you been to the US?
Just because public transit sucks now doesn't mean it has to suck in the future.
feeder wrote: Just because public transit sucks now doesn't mean it has to suck in the future.
It does when the reasons it sucks are largely things that can't be changed. Public transit in the US is difficult because we're so widely dispersed, the number of routes required to serve everyone would be massive and many of those routes would have very few users. Providing funding and respect for public transit doesn't make people magically consolidate into dense urban areas.
feeder wrote: Just because public transit sucks now doesn't mean it has to suck in the future.
It does when the reasons it sucks are largely things that can't be changed. Public transit in the US is difficult because we're so widely dispersed, the number of routes required to serve everyone would be massive and many of those routes would have very few users. Providing funding and respect for public transit doesn't make people magically consolidate into dense urban areas.
Sure, but 90% of traffic problems occur in those dense urban areas, which would be alleviated by well-funded quality public transport.
feeder wrote: Just because public transit sucks now doesn't mean it has to suck in the future.
It does when the reasons it sucks are largely things that can't be changed. Public transit in the US is difficult because we're so widely dispersed, the number of routes required to serve everyone would be massive and many of those routes would have very few users. Providing funding and respect for public transit doesn't make people magically consolidate into dense urban areas.
Sure, but 90% of traffic problems occur in those dense urban areas, which would be alleviated by well-funded quality public transport.
Exactly. An autonomous car will just be a very high-tech set of wheels in the same traffic jam as the other ones.
Autonomous ride-sharing vehicles make sense in low to medium density areas. Go a bit further and vehicle footprint is an issue and then you're talking buses and trams.
schadenfreude wrote: Driverless cars will always kill people no matter how good the technology become. The low hurdle it must overcome is killing less people than human drivers. That's not going to be difficult when you consider the number of glitches humans have such as drunk driving, txting while driving, falling asleep while driving, road rage, and street racing. Driving will easily be safer once our robotic overlords control our vehicles.
There is a caveat to that. Only if the vast majority/all of the other cars on the road are also driverless cars and all of them communicate with each other.
Actually the low bar I was talking about was the hybrid environment of driver and driverless cars that you just described. Even in that worse case scenario where humans are causing problems the AI isn't drunk driving, txting while driving, falling asleep while driving, road rage, and street racing. The AI will initially take a lot of blame but they are backed by powerful multinational corporations who also have the facts on their side. Overall traffic deaths wI'll go down in that worst case scenario you are imagining because human being are terrible drivers.
There is also some Orwellian angles we are not looking at. Once the AI start to talk to each other one of the first things they will be programed to do is detect patterns in human drivers that indicate that they are drunk, avoid the drunk driver giving them a wide distance, warn other AI of the drunk driver, and the AI is going to snitch. Pretty soon every self driving vehicle is going to be a highway patrol observation drone for drunk drivers, and nobody will care because drunk drivers are scum that endanger the lives of everyone we care about.
So about this case specifically, they released the dash-cam video, and I can say quite confidently that had I been driving, I would not have been able to stop in time from when she is first spotted. Now that doesn't mean the AI shouldn't have been able to, they should have been able to install some sort of sensor to allow the car to see what headlights don't illuminate, but she just appears so suddenly, no human driver would have been able to stop in time. my $0.02 anyway
BobtheInquisitor wrote: Would a human driver have slowed down or turned on high beams in anticipation of low light visibility issues? My experience says, "yes."
Out of interest, on a road without crossings how much slower than the speed limit do you drive at night? Espically when it was following behind another car at a safe distance. And there was a car in front, so putting high-beams on is pretty discouraged (generally it's assumed that the car in front will have high beams on and will stop/slow down in the case of an obsticle, an high beams from behind just blind drivers in front). You can sort of see her feet get illuminated at 18 seconds in the video, but wearing all black she doesn't really come into view until 19 and is hit on 20. The issue, more than anything, is that she shouldn't have tried to run in-between two cars, at night, while wearing all black. Now a (non-distracted) human driver would have slammed on the breaks earlier, but she would have still gotten hit.
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feeder wrote: Wait, does a robot need light to 'see'? I thought they used radar.
Apparently not anything good enough. Robots *should* be better than humans. If the AI had the same reflexes as a human but no issues with darkness this accident could have been easily avoided. And I have seen stuff showing their ability to stop in day that would have resulted in no deaths. But apparently they skimped on giving it proper night vision or something.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: Would a human driver have slowed down or turned on high beams in anticipation of low light visibility issues? My experience says, "yes."
Out of interest, on a road without crossings how much slower than the speed limit do you drive at night? Espically when it was following behind another car at a safe distance. And there was a car in front, so putting high-beams on is pretty discouraged (generally it's assumed that the car in front will have high beams on and will stop/slow down in the case of an obsticle, an high beams from behind just blind drivers in front). You can sort of see her feet get illuminated at 18 seconds in the video, but wearing all black she doesn't really come into view until 19 and is hit on 20. The issue, more than anything, is that she shouldn't have tried to run in-between two cars, at night, while wearing all black. Now a (non-distracted) human driver would have slammed on the breaks earlier, but she would have still gotten hit.
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feeder wrote: Wait, does a robot need light to 'see'? I thought they used radar.
Apparently not anything good enough. Robots *should* be better than humans. If the AI had the same reflexes as a human but no issues with darkness this accident could have been easily avoided. And I have seen stuff showing their ability to stop in day that would have resulted in no deaths. But apparently they skimped on giving it proper night vision or something.
I admit I haven't seen the video. I don't want to watch someone run down. If there was other traffic, and she was trying to run between cars, then that is new information for me. before, it sounded like she was trying to cross in a dark stretch of road, not dart across a busy stretch.
And for the record, I slow down quite a bit on dark country roads.
feeder wrote:Wait, does a robot need light to 'see'? I thought they used radar.
Cameras, lidar (and other types of lasers), any other sensor that their specific approach needs. There was recently a breakthrough for lidar that made better miniaturisation (and cost saving) possible so we'll get cars with better and better assisted driving features while not even seeing where the sensors are (not like test vehicles that have camera/sensor arrays on top). I think right now Tesla relies on a lot of regular cameras for their "self driving" feature which tends to have problems with snow. If I remember correctly the Tesla with the fatal crash happened because the car couldn't "see" the side of a big white truck trailer. The driver was too optimistic about the "assisted driving feature" and was watching a movie while his car saw the big trailer as "open road" and just drove on/into it.
feeder wrote: Wait, does a robot need light to 'see'? I thought they used radar.
My car is not autonomous, but it uses both radar and optical. There is a camera that detects cars in front of it for the purposes of keeping a set distance when cruise control is on, and it also will brake automatically if it detects a crash is imminent and the brakes are not already being applied. Radar mostly is used to monitor the blind spots on either side.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: Would a human driver have slowed down or turned on high beams in anticipation of low light visibility issues? My experience says, "yes."
Out of interest, on a road without crossings how much slower than the speed limit do you drive at night? Espically when it was following behind another car at a safe distance. And there was a car in front, so putting high-beams on is pretty discouraged (generally it's assumed that the car in front will have high beams on and will stop/slow down in the case of an obsticle, an high beams from behind just blind drivers in front). You can sort of see her feet get illuminated at 18 seconds in the video, but wearing all black she doesn't really come into view until 19 and is hit on 20. The issue, more than anything, is that she shouldn't have tried to run in-between two cars, at night, while wearing all black. Now a (non-distracted) human driver would have slammed on the breaks earlier, but she would have still gotten hit.
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feeder wrote: Wait, does a robot need light to 'see'? I thought they used radar.
Apparently not anything good enough. Robots *should* be better than humans. If the AI had the same reflexes as a human but no issues with darkness this accident could have been easily avoided. And I have seen stuff showing their ability to stop in day that would have resulted in no deaths. But apparently they skimped on giving it proper night vision or something.
I admit I haven't seen the video. I don't want to watch someone run down. If there was other traffic, and she was trying to run between cars, then that is new information for me. before, it sounded like she was trying to cross in a dark stretch of road, not dart across a busy stretch.
And for the record, I slow down quite a bit on dark country roads.
Not super busy, the other car was a bit ahead (not highway close but close enough that if you see one car you see the other, and it would be rude for the AI car to put highbeams on), but it was a very dumb time to run across. If she had waited she would still be alive
I just watched it. There is no chance a human driver could have prevented that. There are less than two seconds between the instant you can see that something is on the road (you see her feet first and then for some time basically nothing else) and the impact. Even if the safety driver had been totally alert, I don't see her reacting fast enough to even slow down the vehicle notably. And tbh, a human watching over a computer who has to interpret if the computer is doing everything right will have a crappy reaction time because he will have to first consciously understand that the vehicle is doing something wrong and then take over. That takes ages compared to a person driving themselves hitting the brakes because there is no "intuition", i.e. unconscious predictions etc. at work there, but actual thinking.
I think, however, that a vehicle with radar and/or infrared should have seen her. There's very deep shadow, but no physical obstruction on the road that would block the signal.
I think we'll see a global conflict that culls 1/3 or more of the world population before we see fan wielding robots feed us bon bons while we make the 1% run on hamster wheels.
The rich would indeed rather kill a third of the planet than share wealth.
I'm shocked they don't physically come into your house and take your stuff so they can be richer.
And when that stuff goes down, bombs don't discriminate between the evil rich people that are subjugating the populace (in your mind) and the general populace. Half the fun will be trying to rebuild the countries involved, and I'm fairly confident that some of the state actors in play right now are getting brave enough to attempt a larger scale attack on countries that it would have been unthinkable to attack decades ago.
I didn't want to watch it, because it seems macabre, but I thought it important to see the evidence of the circumstances of the collision for myself.
Having seen it, I think that part of the blame must lie with the victim. She was pushing her bike across a dark, 40 mph street, with no lights or hi-vis clothing.
I'm not surprised the car did not stop by itself if it relies on radar. A bike is a pretty thin, small object on radar, I imagine. I am a rather more surprised that the safety driver did not see the cyclist and stop the car. However, she seems not to have been paying attention to the road.
The road was dark, the headlights seemed to be in low beam, and the cyclist was wearing dark clothing.
I'm not sure I could have stopped even if I was driving car myself assuming I didn't know in advance there was going to be such a case(ie if I would now enter simulated test to see if I could stop I would have pre-knowledge I'll be needing to break quickly which is going to increase my chances dramatically. On real life this would be total surprise). Would be touch&go unless that video is sped up from real speed. Seems it was about 1 sec from where I got first hint and where the hit happened. Wasn't human reaction time about 1 sec?
Perhaps adding a FLIR to pick up body heat? The range isn't always the best on those, but any little bit would help. Either that, or we force people to add plating to bikes to widen the profile so radar can pick it up easier.
XuQishi wrote: I just watched it. There is no chance a human driver could have prevented that. There are less than two seconds between the instant you can see that something is on the road (you see her feet first and then for some time basically nothing else) and the impact. Even if the safety driver had been totally alert, I don't see her reacting fast enough to even slow down the vehicle notably. And tbh, a human watching over a computer who has to interpret if the computer is doing everything right will have a crappy reaction time because he will have to first consciously understand that the vehicle is doing something wrong and then take over. That takes ages compared to a person driving themselves hitting the brakes because there is no "intuition", i.e. unconscious predictions etc. at work there, but actual thinking.
Auto braking did help this Norwegian girl.
Uber cars have both radar and lidar (which don't care about light conditions), and the situation is an ideal test scenario for them, an object slowly crossing the road at right angles, right in the center, with no other interfering objects in a very simple environment.
Either the sensors or the software responsible for interpreting them failed big time.
I know it sounds harsh, but these are, ultimately, just teething troubles.
Now there's a strong argument something like this should've been identified and sorted prior to on-the-road testing/deployment. But there's no argument whatsoever that it's a sign the technology has an insurmountable, unavoidable flaw.
I really dislike the idea of self-driving cars, but I can't blame the AI here. I would have totally crashed into that woman as well. She appears way too suddenly to stop in time. And it seems to be a large, straight road where you'd not expect people to suddenly cross. No reason to limit your speed.
That auto-break system Jouso's video shows should be mandatory though. It just stops a heavy, speeding truck in like 2 seconds! That is amazing! It saved that kid (though he must have gotten the scare of his life...) and it could probably safe a lot more lives if it was implemented in all cars.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: I know it sounds harsh, but these are, ultimately, just teething troubles.
Now there's a strong argument something like this should've been identified and sorted prior to on-the-road testing/deployment. But there's no argument whatsoever that it's a sign the technology has an insurmountable, unavoidable flaw.
Or is it? That assumes human driver would succeed where ai failed. I still would bet in favour of ai succeeding more often than human
The key advantage of the AI is its ability to react faster than a person. When the detection equipment is on par or superior to a human then the machine can react far quicker than a human. Furthermore the machine won't in any way panic. As a result things like sudden deceleration should be done "properly".
A person will not only have potentially a greater lag time on reaction, but can also panic and might well do the wrong thing; or do the correct action but in the wrong way. This is especially true if the person has no prior experience of such an event happening to them before.
The key element with the machine is its ability to see and interpret the information it can see. Indeed its often in this interpretation area where the problems lay (eg the afore mentioned situation where the machine saw the white lorry and interpreted that information incorrectly and drove into it thinking it was clear and open roadway).
feeder wrote: Just because public transit sucks now doesn't mean it has to suck in the future.
It does when the reasons it sucks are largely things that can't be changed. Public transit in the US is difficult because we're so widely dispersed, the number of routes required to serve everyone would be massive and many of those routes would have very few users. Providing funding and respect for public transit doesn't make people magically consolidate into dense urban areas.
Suburban sprawl exists only because car companies bought up and dismantled as much public transportation as they could and made sure that city planning would be done mainly in a way that makes owning a car necessary. It would be a lot of work but it's perfectly possible to change this.
feeder wrote: Just because public transit sucks now doesn't mean it has to suck in the future.
It does when the reasons it sucks are largely things that can't be changed. Public transit in the US is difficult because we're so widely dispersed, the number of routes required to serve everyone would be massive and many of those routes would have very few users. Providing funding and respect for public transit doesn't make people magically consolidate into dense urban areas.
Suburban sprawl exists only because car companies bought up and dismantled as much public transportation as they could and made sure that city planning would be done mainly in a way that makes owning a car necessary. It would be a lot of work but it's perfectly possible to change this.
No it really isn't. The cities and roads are already built there isn't existing space to lay down tracks for light rails systems. To do a project like connect the cities of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill with a rail system it would be cost prohibitive to buy up all the land required (either from willing sellers or through forced eminent domain purchases) to clear lanes for a rail system. Working around our existing road system and centuries of development/growth without a rail system are massive challenges that are often insurmountable given the constraints of municipal and state budgets.
feeder wrote: Just because public transit sucks now doesn't mean it has to suck in the future.
It does when the reasons it sucks are largely things that can't be changed. Public transit in the US is difficult because we're so widely dispersed, the number of routes required to serve everyone would be massive and many of those routes would have very few users. Providing funding and respect for public transit doesn't make people magically consolidate into dense urban areas.
Suburban sprawl exists only because car companies bought up and dismantled as much public transportation as they could and made sure that city planning would be done mainly in a way that makes owning a car necessary. It would be a lot of work but it's perfectly possible to change this.
No it really isn't. The cities and roads are already built there isn't existing space to lay down tracks for light rails systems. To do a project like connect the cities of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill with a rail system it would be cost prohibitive to buy up all the land required (either from willing sellers or through forced eminent domain purchases) to clear lanes for a rail system. Working around our existing road system and centuries of development/growth without a rail system are massive challenges that are often insurmountable given the constraints of municipal and state budgets.
It 100% is absolutely possible. It's just not a priority.
America put a man on the moon and dominates the globe. Mass transit would be a piece of cake if you guys wanted it.
feeder wrote: Just because public transit sucks now doesn't mean it has to suck in the future.
It does when the reasons it sucks are largely things that can't be changed. Public transit in the US is difficult because we're so widely dispersed, the number of routes required to serve everyone would be massive and many of those routes would have very few users. Providing funding and respect for public transit doesn't make people magically consolidate into dense urban areas.
Suburban sprawl exists only because car companies bought up and dismantled as much public transportation as they could and made sure that city planning would be done mainly in a way that makes owning a car necessary. It would be a lot of work but it's perfectly possible to change this.
No it really isn't. The cities and roads are already built there isn't existing space to lay down tracks for light rails systems. To do a project like connect the cities of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill with a rail system it would be cost prohibitive to buy up all the land required (either from willing sellers or through forced eminent domain purchases) to clear lanes for a rail system. Working around our existing road system and centuries of development/growth without a rail system are massive challenges that are often insurmountable given the constraints of municipal and state budgets.
Buses exist. A light rail system doesn't have to be the only solution and it isn't something I've mentioned.
Kilkrazy wrote: A human driver who was paying attention would have had two seconds to spot the cyclist and react.
Key point: paying attention. This is a bad assumption to make.
Not really.
The 'car' in this case was paying attention 100%. But if a human had been driving and even remotely paying attention there would have been time to slow down and/or swerve to the left. Which would have significantly reduced or eliminated injury to the pedestrian.
Even the most distracted driver has to be paying some attention to the road to stay on it.
The key point here is that the human "safety" driver wasn't paying attention, and didn't get the 2 seconds reaction time she should have had, to stamp on the brake.
This wouldn't have saved the collision but it would have been less damaging.
The "safety" driver probably wasn't paying attention because she was relying on the car's self-driving function.
We are still left with the question of why the self-driving function failed. Apparently the Uber cars use non-visible light sensors and should have "seen" the cyclist even though she was invisible to a human driver more than 50 yards away (or whatever.)
The worry has to be that the car was not programmed to deal with the situation of someone rather stupidly pushing a bike across the road like that. A human driver who was paying attention would not have caused such a serious collision.
That is exactly the problem. Self-driving cars will continually have programming gaps which lead to tragic accidents like this one. Even more concerning is that at least on paper this scenario should have been easily within the detection range of the car, and yet it did nothing.
A slightly unrelated note is that the headlights on the car seemed to not be very strong. I know on my car the cyclist would have been lit up from a much farther distance.
Kilkrazy wrote: A human driver who was paying attention would have had two seconds to spot the cyclist and react.
Key point: paying attention. This is a bad assumption to make.
Not really.
The 'car' in this case was paying attention 100%. But if a human had been driving and even remotely paying attention there would have been time to slow down and/or swerve to the left. Which would have significantly reduced or eliminated injury to the pedestrian.
Even the most distracted driver has to be paying some attention to the road to stay on it.
Bit more than a second there to notice it. Human reaction time: Reaction times vary greatly with situation and from person to person between about 0.7 to 3 seconds (sec or s) or more. Some accident reconstruction specialists use 1.5 seconds
Not all that good odds. Maybe if he had been happening to looking at left bottom at the time human MIGHT have been able to but what if he/she had been looking right? Nope.
Still betting AI having better chance at stopping there than human.
Overread wrote: The key advantage of the AI is its ability to react faster than a person. When the detection equipment is on par or superior to a human then the machine can react far quicker than a human. Furthermore the machine won't in any way panic. As a result things like sudden deceleration should be done "properly".
A person will not only have potentially a greater lag time on reaction, but can also panic and might well do the wrong thing; or do the correct action but in the wrong way. This is especially true if the person has no prior experience of such an event happening to them before.
The key element with the machine is its ability to see and interpret the information it can see. Indeed its often in this interpretation area where the problems lay (eg the afore mentioned situation where the machine saw the white lorry and interpreted that information incorrectly and drove into it thinking it was clear and open roadway).
Humans also have the ability to interpret other humans. I've avoided a lot of trouble just by thinking, "Something's off about that guy. I'm going to slow down and be wary."
Automatically Appended Next Post: In fact, I'd like all drivers in this thread to list three things that most irk them when behind the wheel. This is to demonstrate and highlight areas where an automated vehicle would be superior.
Here's mine.
1. People just sitting at junctions. You pull out when it's safe. Not when there's no traffic for a three mile radius.
2. People mucking about at lights. Typically the first car. Who wants to wait whilst they put their seatbelt back on, start their engine, find the right gear, just in time for them to creep over the line before the lights change again (genuinely witnessed as above. More than once)
3. People who don't understand how filter lanes work. Zipper folks, Zipper. One passes, nip in behind, one passes, nip in behind. Fault on both the filterers and the established vehicles here. AND STOP USING THE HARD SHOULDER TO TRY TO JUMP THE QUEUE. Particularly, when on the motorway, if you're coming up to a slip road joining the carriage way, do try to leave that lane clear. The number of accidents I've almost been in, or seen narrowly missed because someone just pootles along on the motorway with no regard to anyone else....grrrr.
Talking. I absolutely can not drive properly while talking to someone. It's even difficult to drive while just listening to someone else talk if I'm doing anything other then driving on a straight road.
I've yet to get into an accident because of this, and I've been driving for about 8 years, but I tail-gate like a melon-fether when distracted, and also miss turns/exits constantly. It drives my parents mad.
At what point does the AI mean the driver is simply a passenger? If your vehicle is determined to be the cause of an accident - is the manufacturer responsible, or the programmer? Where does the true liability lie? Where does the causal break kick in?
Insurance companies will accept the financial liabilities, with the manufacturer accepting criminal liability in the event of a hardware malfunction/loophole (much like today).
People intuitively think that with the driver taken out of the occasion liability will be a bigger issue, but it won't really. At the end of the day it's all about risk management, meaning that as long as profit overtakes expenditures from payouts, everyone will be happy. If Ford sells 10 million automated cars a year, and 1 million end up in catastrophic accidents that Ford is liable for (big number for the sake of argument, in reality it'd be like 50,000 for every 10 million or even less) that's still 90 million in sales. If Geico insures 10 million automated cars and they have to pay out for 1 million accidents that's still 9 million people who are paying every month for insurance while not costing Geico any money.
Insurance will work the same way insurance has always worked.
Rosebuddy wrote: Suburban sprawl exists only because car companies bought up and dismantled as much public transportation as they could and made sure that city planning would be done mainly in a way that makes owning a car necessary. It would be a lot of work but it's perfectly possible to change this.
Lolwut? No, that has nothing at all to do with it.
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Rosebuddy wrote: Buses exist. A light rail system doesn't have to be the only solution and it isn't something I've mentioned.
Buses don't solve the problem because they don't work with low population density. Giving sufficient bus coverage requires running bus routes that serve a handful of people and often run empty just to keep to the schedule. And when there are that few people on the bus it becomes a really expensive and fuel-inefficient private car.
The 'car' in this case was paying attention 100%. But if a human had been driving and even remotely paying attention there would have been time to slow down and/or swerve to the left. Which would have significantly reduced or eliminated injury to the pedestrian.
Even the most distracted driver has to be paying some attention to the road to stay on it.
You have a much more optimistic view of bad drivers than me. There are plenty of accidents by human drivers where you think WTF, how could they possibly be paying that little attention to driving. Being able to stay on the road does not at all mean that you're paying enough attention to see obstructions in the road.
For inner-city mass transit the best option is Gondolas (the hanging basket on a cable thing, not the Venisian boat).
A gondola moving constantly at 4 mph will actually get you to an area faster than a bus or subway that starts and stops.
They are also cheaper to operate than buses (few man-hours).
Compared to subways they are something like 1/250th the cost per foot of travel to construct. Also, you can more easily adapt them to new routes if your city dynamics change. You also are less likely to run into construction problems (digging under existing structures will do that).
feeder wrote: Just because public transit sucks now doesn't mean it has to suck in the future.
It does when the reasons it sucks are largely things that can't be changed. Public transit in the US is difficult because we're so widely dispersed, the number of routes required to serve everyone would be massive and many of those routes would have very few users. Providing funding and respect for public transit doesn't make people magically consolidate into dense urban areas.
Suburban sprawl exists only because car companies bought up and dismantled as much public transportation as they could and made sure that city planning would be done mainly in a way that makes owning a car necessary. It would be a lot of work but it's perfectly possible to change this.
No it really isn't. The cities and roads are already built there isn't existing space to lay down tracks for light rails systems. To do a project like connect the cities of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill with a rail system it would be cost prohibitive to buy up all the land required (either from willing sellers or through forced eminent domain purchases) to clear lanes for a rail system. Working around our existing road system and centuries of development/growth without a rail system are massive challenges that are often insurmountable given the constraints of municipal and state budgets.
Buses exist. A light rail system doesn't have to be the only solution and it isn't something I've mentioned.
Our cities hav buses they sit in the same traffic as the cars. Lack of buses isnt the reason we have terrible traffic in cities like LA. Cities have commerce and jobs but they also have the least room for housing and therefore the highest cost of living. The vast majority of the millions of people that work in a city don’t live in the city. The further out suburbs and other communities are from the city the more dispersed the commuters get and the less practical buses become. The more dispersed housing requires a larger area to get a bus load of people which places more people further away from bus stops that are farther away from the city so there are longer intervals between buses and harder it is to synchronize bus schedules and working hours. This leads to inefficiencies as more people opt to drive themselves which leads to greater inefficiencies of buses with few passengers sitting in traffic with commuters driving themselves.
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cuda1179 wrote: For inner-city mass transit the best option is Gondolas (the hanging basket on a cable thing, not the Venisian boat).
A gondola moving constantly at 4 mph will actually get you to an area faster than a bus or subway that starts and stops.
They are also cheaper to operate than buses (few man-hours).
Compared to subways they are something like 1/250th the cost per foot of travel to construct. Also, you can more easily adapt them to new routes if your city dynamics change. You also are less likely to run into construction problems (digging under existing structures will do that).
Gondolas could work as they could be built over existing roadways and be cheaper and quieter than elevated trains. I think their construction would have to coincide or be prefaced by modernization of the power grid and telecom since so much of it is already above ground alon the roadways presenting an obstacle and safety hazard to gondola construction.
Gondolas could work as they could be built over existing roadways and be cheaper and quieter than elevated trains. I think their construction would have to coincide or be prefaced by modernization of the power grid and telecom since so much of it is already above ground alon the roadways presenting an obstacle and safety hazard to gondola construction.
That's kind of the point. I'll see if I can find the in-depth article from a few years ago, but it laid out a lot of stats about gondolas for mass transit. Gondola pole construction would require significantly less obstruction to roadways during their construction than elevated trains, and in many cases even less than subways (they have to make sure of no collapse of surface streets). It would also require only a fraction of the power of an electric train system, so upgrading the power grid is less of an issue. They also cause fewer injuries and deaths than trains, subways, or buses. In addition suspended gondolas that are constantly in motion are less likely to be vandalized by graffiti, thus need less maintenance time.
They also keep regular traffic flowing faster as opposed to busses. Stopped busses, or even those in motion, cause choke points in traffic in addition to using up valuable road space.
The overall cost reductions, ease of maintenance, few needed man hours, and adaptability of the system also makes it readily available to smaller communities that would otherwise not be able to accommodate other mass transit.
Something else of note, assaults per person-mile on gondola systems is lower, thus making mass transit safer from attackers. Why this happens is a bit of a mystery, but it may have something to do with the ratio of seats to standing people.
Buses don't solve the problem because they don't work with low population density. Giving sufficient bus coverage requires running bus routes that serve a handful of people and often run empty just to keep to the schedule. And when there are that few people on the bus it becomes a really expensive and fuel-inefficient private car.
Rosebuddy wrote: Buses exist. A light rail system doesn't have to be the only solution and it isn't something I've mentioned.
Buses don't solve the problem because they don't work with low population density. Giving sufficient bus coverage requires running bus routes that serve a handful of people and often run empty just to keep to the schedule. And when there are that few people on the bus it becomes a really expensive and fuel-inefficient private car.
But 'the problem' only exists in high population density areas, so that point is moot. Low-density areas don't tend to have a lot of problem with traffic, because you know, low density. You don't need to improve bus coverage in areas where it is not needed, just in the areas where it is.
Public transport is one of the areas in which I feel European cities (and maybe American cities too) can learn from Russian cities. Most Russian cities have a very extensive network of buses, trolleybuses and marshrutkas (a marshrutka is sort of a cross between a bus and a taxi, it travels on a set route but without set timetable and is privately owned) on top of a metro network in larger cities, that cover virtually every place in the city. You are rarely more than one or two streets away from the nearest stop, and the transport fee is very low (like only a few eurocents low) meaning you can travel anywhere in the city and neighbouring cities/suburbs in a short time for virtually nothing. Of course, this gives rise to new problems, particularly the problem that metro and buses are totally overcrowded on the hours that everyone travels to work/school. Ultimately, I think the problem of crowded roads/transport can never really be solved by improving roads/transport, but only by changing the fact that the entire country needs to travel to their work/school at the same time.
Buses don't solve the problem because they don't work with low population density. Giving sufficient bus coverage requires running bus routes that serve a handful of people and often run empty just to keep to the schedule. And when there are that few people on the bus it becomes a really expensive and fuel-inefficient private car.
Then increase population density.
How? Mandatory relocation of the spread-out rural population? Round up people at gunpoint, confiscate their existing houses, and force them to move into a more convenient city location?
How can it be that there are excuses for bad public transportation in the US in high and low population dense areas? European cities with higher and lower population density than major US cities can manage to get this stuff working:
http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-density-125.html
The key statistic: prior to last Sunday's fatal crash in Tempe, Arizona, Uber's self-driving cars in Arizona were "struggling" to go 13 miles between interventions by a safety driver—known as a disengagement.
The Times points out that, in 2017, Waymo's self-driving cars in California traveled 5,600 miles between incidents in which a driver had to take over for safety reasons. Cruise, GM's self-driving car subsidiary, had a safety-related disengagement once every 1,250 miles in the state. We don't know either company's statistics in Arizona because Arizona law doesn't require them to be disclosed.
Buses don't solve the problem because they don't work with low population density. Giving sufficient bus coverage requires running bus routes that serve a handful of people and often run empty just to keep to the schedule. And when there are that few people on the bus it becomes a really expensive and fuel-inefficient private car.
Then increase population density.
How? Mandatory relocation of the spread-out rural population? Round up people at gunpoint, confiscate their existing houses, and force them to move into a more convenient city location?
Honestly? Somewhere someone thinks that's a viable solution...
Buses don't solve the problem because they don't work with low population density. Giving sufficient bus coverage requires running bus routes that serve a handful of people and often run empty just to keep to the schedule. And when there are that few people on the bus it becomes a really expensive and fuel-inefficient private car.
Then increase population density.
How? Mandatory relocation of the spread-out rural population? Round up people at gunpoint, confiscate their existing houses, and force them to move into a more convenient city location?
Honestly? Somewhere someone thinks that's a viable solution...
Rosebuddy wrote: Suburban sprawl exists only because car companies bought up and dismantled as much public transportation as they could and made sure that city planning would be done mainly in a way that makes owning a car necessary. It would be a lot of work but it's perfectly possible to change this.
Lolwut? No, that has nothing at all to do with it.
Actually that was exactly the cause of the problem, at least in my hometown (Los Angeles). You can even find old pictures of the light rails and other transit stuff before it was ripped up.
Buses don't solve the problem because they don't work with low population density. Giving sufficient bus coverage requires running bus routes that serve a handful of people and often run empty just to keep to the schedule. And when there are that few people on the bus it becomes a really expensive and fuel-inefficient private car.
Then increase population density.
How? Mandatory relocation of the spread-out rural population? Round up people at gunpoint, confiscate their existing houses, and force them to move into a more convenient city location?
Honestly? Somewhere someone thinks that's a viable solution...
In many countries the widely spread out rural population are relocating themselves into cities as fast as they can, because that is where the jobs are. Japan, Spain and Italy, for example, have various government sponsored programmes, designed to lure people back to rural areas.
However, it isn't rural areas that cause the commuting problem, it is suburbs, actually.
Buses don't solve the problem because they don't work with low population density. Giving sufficient bus coverage requires running bus routes that serve a handful of people and often run empty just to keep to the schedule. And when there are that few people on the bus it becomes a really expensive and fuel-inefficient private car.
Then increase population density.
How? Mandatory relocation of the spread-out rural population? Round up people at gunpoint, confiscate their existing houses, and force them to move into a more convenient city location?
Honestly? Somewhere someone thinks that's a viable solution...
In many countries the widely spread out rural population are relocating themselves into cities as fast as they can, because that is where the jobs are. Japan, Spain and Italy, for example, have various government sponsored programmes, designed to lure people back to rural areas.
However, it isn't rural areas that cause the commuting problem, it is suburbs, actually.
And the suburbs aren’t going away. There isn’t enough housing in the cities for all of the people who commute to jobs there consequently driving up the price of what housing is in the cities so when housing is available it’s far too expensive for the majority of commuters anyway. Hence the problem that suburbs don’t have the proximity or population density to make mass transit viable compounded by decades of urban sprawl without adequate transit planning. Fixing this problem will not be easy, fast or cheap which is why there is never a lot of political will to do it and the projects that are done to address it like The Big Dig are epic boondoggles because the easiest way to get political support for them is to turn the projects into corruptive cash cows that don’t do enough to help the actual commuters.
Buses don't solve the problem because they don't work with low population density. Giving sufficient bus coverage requires running bus routes that serve a handful of people and often run empty just to keep to the schedule. And when there are that few people on the bus it becomes a really expensive and fuel-inefficient private car.
Then increase population density.
How? Mandatory relocation of the spread-out rural population? Round up people at gunpoint, confiscate their existing houses, and force them to move into a more convenient city location?
Honestly? Somewhere someone thinks that's a viable solution...
Having watched that crash, I think crappy street lighting killed that person. Any human is going to hit that person, and it appears that an automated car will hit them as well. But if that road was actually lit up then both human and AI drivers are going to be able to react in time.
It says a fair bit about how weird our society is. We spend billions on robot cars that will help some unknown amount at some point years from now. But we don't build streetlights that will save lives right now.
Just Tony wrote: No, I do not. We don't have ANY reliable AIs in our simple machines that don't need babysat for its daily operations.
"AI will never replace all humans" may or may not be true, I don't know AI well enough to guess either way. "Developing AI will replace more humans" is a basic reality, though. An improvement in AI might reduce the number of babysitting humans from 5 to 2. If these improvements weren't happening, there would be no profit to be had from developing AI and companies wouldn't be doing it.
Which is nothing different in itself. It's just how productivity improvements work, we improve processes so less labour is needed to produce the same amount, allowing us to either make more stuff or use less labour (mostly some combination of the two).
Historically freed up labour has shifted to new industries. At the simplest level, the industrial revolution was labour freed up from collective farms moving in to cities to become part of the growing industrial base.
The problem is that unlike the past, it is hard to see where the freed up labour will shift to. It is very hard to point to some blue sky industry and confidently say that will employ tens of millions of people in the future. Carrying on expecting some new industry to absorb displaced workers isn't something we can just assume any more.
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Rosebuddy wrote: Suburban sprawl exists only because car companies bought up and dismantled as much public transportation as they could and made sure that city planning would be done mainly in a way that makes owning a car necessary. It would be a lot of work but it's perfectly possible to change this.
There have been some specific and very famous instances of car companies sabotaging public transport, but it really isn't the primary cause. Suburban sprawl happens because people want to live in suburbs. They want the house on land. They want the garden and space for the kid's swingset. When people do that then public transport becomes a much less desirable option.
Look at cities where public transport works and makes up a large share of total transport, you find a city where people have chosen medium and high density housing for a lot of historical reasons. Look at cities where public transport is small and marginally useful - you see low density housing that people chose for a range of historical reasons.
Sort of my point, in the end. Say that the 5 robots on the finish end of my line "replaced" 8 human work stations, which may or may not be accurate, we have 3 people still watching those work stations, the obligatory floater, and the other four were moved to either another line to run a different machine OR to a spot on the line that isn't automated yet.
Do I think specific jobs/activities will be replaced with robots? Absolutely, we're currently in the process of automating a couple cells right now that are hand run.
Will those people be displaced? Currently there is only one person running that cell per shift anyway, so no change to our staffing.
Will it take over ALL jobs like this mythical force of nature that some tout it as, where most of the human populace will sit around doing nothing while the government pays us free money? Not even close. I'd be willing to bet it'd be at least a century until we get to the point that self driven vehicles outnumber manned... sorry, personed vehicles.
Ah of course, because people with different political opinions than me are totally out to steal our frreedums guyz!
inb4 lock
Feel better? Did you feel like you actually contributed to the conversation here? And also tell me that you honestly think that there aren't people in power who are working to do EXACTLY that.
This is happening. People love to have a big block, but as cities grow then just having new big blocks further and further from the city becomes unappealing. Space to kick a ball is great, but if it means a 90 minute commute people are more likely to by something smaller closer to the city. Similarly big blocks close to the city start being more valuable as subdivisions. So you get in-fill, transforming low density to medium density.
But there is another solution - redirect traffic. A huge part of congestion comes from people all driving in to the city for work in the morning, then driving back out again in the evening. Just encouraging more commercial hubs can solve a lot of the congestion. Also encouraging firms to move their employees to staggered starting times can do a lot of good.
Where I work we can start any time between 8 and 10, and leave any time after 4, so long as we put in our 7 hours and are available from 10 to 4 for meetings and so on.
Of course it's a huge publishing office, so there isn't machinery that has to run on strict shifts.
Having watched that crash, I think crappy street lighting killed that person. Any human is going to hit that person, and it appears that an automated car will hit them as well.
Having watched it and read more about it, I've come to the decision that crappy software killed that woman. The car uses Lidar and did not need street lighting, it should have seen the woman entering the street much earlier. The video seems to have been taken by a weak camera or was edited to look darker, I've seen footage of that stretch at night that looks a lot less dark. Apparently Uber has relatively bad technology compared to some of its competitors.
Just Tony wrote: Sort of my point, in the end. Say that the 5 robots on the finish end of my line "replaced" 8 human work stations, which may or may not be accurate, we have 3 people still watching those work stations, the obligatory floater, and the other four were moved to either another line to run a different machine OR to a spot on the line that isn't automated yet.
Unless you have infinite demand for your product, you aren't going to keep using productivity improvements to increase production. At some point further increases in supply will be unprofitable. The return from productivity improvements will start to come, at least in part, from reducing your wages expense - from making people redundant.
In the past this has been absorbed by other industries that were still in growth and increasing their employment. But right now its really hard to see where those new industries are. If we are moving to a stage where many industries could leverage AI to increase productivity and reduce their employment, and we have no new industries to absorb displaced workers... hoo boy.
Will it take over ALL jobs like this mythical force of nature that some tout it as, where most of the human populace will sit around doing nothing while the government pays us free money? Not even close.
Sure, but just because there will need to be some human work doesn't mean there isn't a massive issue with displacing a very large portion of the population.
Look at the issues with coal mining, where productivity meant that from 1970 to today production of coal increased while the total workforce dropped by 2/3. Imagine that happening to a total economy.
I'd be willing to bet it'd be at least a century until we get to the point that self driven vehicles outnumber manned... sorry, personed vehicles.
I agree there's a lot of really awful futurism around automated cars right now. I listened to some supposed experts on the radio talking about how a pool of a million vehicles in a city could be cut down to 200,000 because people only use their cars for a small part of each day, so we could go to a fleet of automated cars that you book for the parts of the day you actually need them. This whole big theory, that completely ignored the reality that drivers only use their cars for a small part of the day, but about half of them need that car at the exact same two points in the day, to and from work.
We're certainly at the Trip to the Moon stage of the tech development, where imagination is running well ahead of practical reality.
And the suburbs aren’t going away. There isn’t enough housing in the cities for all of the people who commute to jobs there consequently driving up the price of what housing is in the cities so when housing is available it’s far too expensive for the majority of commuters anyway. Hence the problem that suburbs don’t have the proximity or population density to make mass transit viable compounded by decades of urban sprawl without adequate transit planning. Fixing this problem will not be easy, fast or cheap which is why there is never a lot of political will to do it and the projects that are done to address it like The Big Dig are epic boondoggles because the easiest way to get political support for them is to turn the projects into corruptive cash cows that don’t do enough to help the actual commuters.
So what would happen if goverment would launch aggressive campaign to help spread out jobs from cities toward suburbs? If succesfull that would mean there would be more even spread of jobs and houses so there wouldn't be all the jobs here, all the houses there, good luck navigating between them.
I'm starting to really like the concept of the hive city, and having layers of street so as to have traffic be slowed less. TONS of infrastructure needed to make that dream a reality, but if they can pull in off in some place like Manhattan, then we're looking at a viable alternative.
Interesting question: who came up with the idea of the hive city? Asimov used to concept in Caves of Steel, but I don't know where else it was used, or possibly before that.
Just Tony wrote: I'm starting to really like the concept of the hive city, and having layers of street so as to have traffic be slowed less. TONS of infrastructure needed to make that dream a reality, but if they can pull in off in some place like Manhattan, then we're looking at a viable alternative.
Interesting question: who came up with the idea of the hive city? Asimov used to concept in Caves of Steel, but I don't know where else it was used, or possibly before that.
Earliest example of the concept I could find through my google-fu is the 1912 novel 'The Night Land' by William Hope Hodgson, where the last remnants of humanity survive in two massive self-contained pyramids.
I suspect the concept has been around for ages, however building technology has likely held it back until more recent times as a practical potential project. The underground in London was likely the first step toward the concept of a layered city with potential movements of goods and people underneath the main superstructure of the city. And it wouldn't shock me if a few other civilizations had used large underground networks in the past as well to move people and goods around.
The issue has always been cost, technology and the fact that in most situations it was cheaper and easier just to build further out. Plus don't forget in the past we had far less transport going on; people lived much nearer their homes and settlements were setup so that many things needed for daily life were within walking distance.
Today we accept 30min to 1 hour commutes being part of life for many people and with the idea of living quite a long way from not only work, but also shops and basic services; with many choosing to travel further for lower prices.
Ontop of that is the vast explosion in population which heaps the pressure on those networks many times over. To the point where the concept of a city going up/down starts to become more attractive than just sprawling further and further outward. However cost is still a huge barrier and there are other factors too.
Underground passes and such require air, cleaning and investment in lighting and policing otherwise they can fast become a hotbed of crime and trouble. A breakdown in air filtration systems isn't just an inconvenience but a risk to health,
Personally I'd welcome cities going up and layering themselves in order to significantly reduce sprawl. It batters the countryside to bits and is heavily destructive; and once built its much harder to get rid of it and tear it down
And the suburbs aren’t going away. There isn’t enough housing in the cities for all of the people who commute to jobs there consequently driving up the price of what housing is in the cities so when housing is available it’s far too expensive for the majority of commuters anyway. Hence the problem that suburbs don’t have the proximity or population density to make mass transit viable compounded by decades of urban sprawl without adequate transit planning. Fixing this problem will not be easy, fast or cheap which is why there is never a lot of political will to do it and the projects that are done to address it like The Big Dig are epic boondoggles because the easiest way to get political support for them is to turn the projects into corruptive cash cows that don’t do enough to help the actual commuters.
So what would happen if goverment would launch aggressive campaign to help spread out jobs from cities toward suburbs? If succesfull that would mean there would be more even spread of jobs and houses so there wouldn't be all the jobs here, all the houses there, good luck navigating between them.
Some jobs might be able to be enticed to relocate with tax breaks or whatever benefits the government is offering to encourage relocation but some jobs can't be moved. My wife is a nurse, the hospital she works at isn't going to move, so all the jobs that are created directly by the hospital, plus all the support role jobs that exist in close proximity to the hospital plus the jobs that are created by businesses that feed off the hospital area jobs (restaurants, stores, hotels) can't relocate.
My employer has a pretty progressive telecommuting policy that allows for a good chunk of my coworkers to work from home at least part of the week but the ability to do that varies depending on the job.
Municipalities could do more to encourage business development in the suburbs in regards to zoning and taxes but they'd also have to contend with the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) backlash. People want convenience and jobs but they usually don't want stores and office parks in their neighborhoods.
I was reading an article about automation lowering the male-female wage gap. (the gap itself if vastly overstated, but hey). The jobs that are being automated are primarily in the male-dominated sector, and eating into jobs that pay above average.
It won't be that women are earning more, just that the average male wage will be less.
Just Tony wrote: I'm starting to really like the concept of the hive city, and having layers of street so as to have traffic be slowed less. TONS of infrastructure needed to make that dream a reality, but if they can pull in off in some place like Manhattan, then we're looking at a viable alternative.
Honestly, the idea that we'd spend trillions on enormous infrastructure upgrades rather than just shift large numbers of jobs out of the CBD and in to secondary hubs is kind of funny.
To clarify, I'm not saying it won't happen, I'm just saying its really crazy.
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Prestor Jon wrote: Some jobs might be able to be enticed to relocate with tax breaks or whatever benefits the government is offering to encourage relocation but some jobs can't be moved. My wife is a nurse, the hospital she works at isn't going to move, so all the jobs that are created directly by the hospital, plus all the support role jobs that exist in close proximity to the hospital plus the jobs that are created by businesses that feed off the hospital area jobs (restaurants, stores, hotels) can't relocate.
Weird example, hospitals are decentralized already. We don't have 5 out of 6 major hospitals in a city all within a stone's throw of each other in the CBD. Instead they're spread out among the population centers.
Whereas major corporate headquarters are almost all located right next to each other in the city. And even more ridiculously most government departments are right there next to them. There's no reason an insurance company or a bank must have its corporate hq in the city centre, other than prestige.
Municipalities could do more to encourage business development in the suburbs in regards to zoning and taxes but they'd also have to contend with the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) backlash. People want convenience and jobs but they usually don't want stores and office parks in their neighborhoods.
A lot of the problem is NIMBY. A lot of the rest is even more cynical, with local residents controlling zoning laws to create artificial scarcity. What is happening in places like the Bay area with zoning being used to almost completely shut down new housing development, so existing homeowners can see their house prices sky rocket is a disgrace.
Just Tony wrote: I'm starting to really like the concept of the hive city, and having layers of street so as to have traffic be slowed less. TONS of infrastructure needed to make that dream a reality, but if they can pull in off in some place like Manhattan, then we're looking at a viable alternative.
Honestly, the idea that we'd spend trillions on enormous infrastructure upgrades rather than just shift large numbers of jobs out of the CBD and in to secondary hubs is kind of funny.
To clarify, I'm not saying it won't happen, I'm just saying its really crazy.
Another facet to look at is the fact that the further we spread out, the less area we have for agriculture. If population isn't controlled, that'll provide a REAL nasty situation and lead to that massive conflict I mentioned before. So spreading out is not viable, euthanizing the populace isn't viable, currently colonization isn't viable, so we're looking at expanding up instead of out. THAT would also create thoroughfares for automated vehicles with less human traffic on them, plus the massive sanitation/maintenance staff needed for a hive city to give work to all those displaced by automation. It hits pretty much EVERYONE'S prediction buttons.
Just Tony wrote: Another facet to look at is the fact that the further we spread out, the less area we have for agriculture. If population isn't controlled, that'll provide a REAL nasty situation and lead to that massive conflict I mentioned before. So spreading out is not viable, euthanizing the populace isn't viable, currently colonization isn't viable, so we're looking at expanding up instead of out. THAT would also create thoroughfares for automated vehicles with less human traffic on them, plus the massive sanitation/maintenance staff needed for a hive city to give work to all those displaced by automation. It hits pretty much EVERYONE'S prediction buttons.
There's about 14 million square kilometres of urban development on earth. That sounds like a lot, until you realize there's a bit over 200 million square kilometres of farming land (about 40% of the land on earth). The former is not going to consume the latter in any meaningful quantity. This isn't to say there aren't problems with urban sprawl and with pressures on agricultural land, but the two issues aren't really linked.
Nor is the issue about spreading out, it is about redirecting. A city with 2 million people where about 500k of them all work in the centre of the city is going to have enormous pressures twice every day. Because it is a lot of people all moving from the outside to the inside, they're all heading in the same direction, all putting pressure on a small group of roads.
But that same city, with say 6 secondary commercial districts averaging 50,000 workers each would mean you've only got 200,000 people heading in to the city, which is far less pressure. The city would have the same population and take up the same amount of space, but you have redirected traffic to take pressure away from the chokepoints.
Just Tony wrote: Another facet to look at is the fact that the further we spread out, the less area we have for agriculture. If population isn't controlled, that'll provide a REAL nasty situation and lead to that massive conflict I mentioned before. So spreading out is not viable, euthanizing the populace isn't viable, currently colonization isn't viable, so we're looking at expanding up instead of out. THAT would also create thoroughfares for automated vehicles with less human traffic on them, plus the massive sanitation/maintenance staff needed for a hive city to give work to all those displaced by automation. It hits pretty much EVERYONE'S prediction buttons.
There's about 14 million square kilometres of urban development on earth. That sounds like a lot, until you realize there's a bit over 200 million square kilometres of farming land (about 40% of the land on earth). The former is not going to consume the latter in any meaningful quantity. This isn't to say there aren't problems with urban sprawl and with pressures on agricultural land, but the two issues aren't really linked.
Much of that land has poor yields because of outdated farming practises.
Arable land is in regression in most countries (mostly because urban expansion and road/rail building is eating at it while mass deforestation is no longer a thing), the key is to increase yields without increasing surface.
It's my understanding that they tried with factory style farming, the idea being that they could keep plant root systems in water solutions with minerals and fertilizer. It failed, but from that they started to gain a greater understanding of the importance of the plant/fungal interaction at the root level and that many plants require certain types of fungus growing on their roots (and thus the fungus being present in the soils) in order to fix/release the nutrients that the plant requires.
Personally I'd love vertical farm structures as a means to produce more off the same parcel of land, but also as a fixed means to control run-off of pollutants from farming. High yield farming only works by adding fertilizers and other chemicals which leach into our natural ecosystems.
Prestor Jon wrote: Some jobs might be able to be enticed to relocate with tax breaks or whatever benefits the government is offering to encourage relocation but some jobs can't be moved. My wife is a nurse, the hospital she works at isn't going to move, so all the jobs that are created directly by the hospital, plus all the support role jobs that exist in close proximity to the hospital plus the jobs that are created by businesses that feed off the hospital area jobs (restaurants, stores, hotels) can't relocate.
Weird example, hospitals are decentralized already. We don't have 5 out of 6 major hospitals in a city all within a stone's throw of each other in the CBD. Instead they're spread out among the population centers.
Whereas major corporate headquarters are almost all located right next to each other in the city. And even more ridiculously most government departments are right there next to them. There's no reason an insurance company or a bank must have its corporate hq in the city centre, other than prestige.
Municipalities could do more to encourage business development in the suburbs in regards to zoning and taxes but they'd also have to contend with the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) backlash. People want convenience and jobs but they usually don't want stores and office parks in their neighborhoods.
A lot of the problem is NIMBY. A lot of the rest is even more cynical, with local residents controlling zoning laws to create artificial scarcity. What is happening in places like the Bay area with zoning being used to almost completely shut down new housing development, so existing homeowners can see their house prices sky rocket is a disgrace.
That's true about hospitals but the same problems can crop up with other examples. Wall St doesn't have to be in NYC but relocating it would be a PITA so all of the ancillary jobs that stem from Wall St are difficult to move as well.
My town used to a textile mill town back in the day. While there are plenty of negatives about those old company towns that we would want to avoid the idea of pushing mixed use developments into the mold of residential neighborhoods for workers adjacent to office parks has merit. A lot of new developments put apartments in or adjacent to retail and commercial space to increase convenience and desirability for the development. I think the city planning issues in the US are more rooted in the need to redevelop existing areas than new developments being unplanned urban sprawl (aside from notorious problem cities like Houston). New developments are better/smarter than ever in a lot of instances but redeveloping existing urban areas only get more difficult and expensive over time.
I think Prestor is right on that count. There's plenty of planning in how we build things. The problem is that the modern American living space is a giant cluster of fresh booming residential and economic areas interspersed with tired, dying, and outright dead neighborhoods and shopping spaces with little to no interest put into redevelopment of older spaces because it's always cheaper to just develop something undeveloped.
Just Tony wrote: Another facet to look at is the fact that the further we spread out, the less area we have for agriculture. If population isn't controlled, that'll provide a REAL nasty situation and lead to that massive conflict I mentioned before. So spreading out is not viable, euthanizing the populace isn't viable, currently colonization isn't viable, so we're looking at expanding up instead of out. THAT would also create thoroughfares for automated vehicles with less human traffic on them, plus the massive sanitation/maintenance staff needed for a hive city to give work to all those displaced by automation. It hits pretty much EVERYONE'S prediction buttons.
There's about 14 million square kilometres of urban development on earth. That sounds like a lot, until you realize there's a bit over 200 million square kilometres of farming land (about 40% of the land on earth). The former is not going to consume the latter in any meaningful quantity. This isn't to say there aren't problems with urban sprawl and with pressures on agricultural land, but the two issues aren't really linked.
Actually, a lot of Urban development is swallowing up agricultural land. Largely because a good amount of Agricultural land, and developed agricultural land, is right next to cities and there is overlap between what makes good agricultural land and what makes land good for building cities on.
Just take where I live in the North Bay. The cities around here are growing at a crazy pace, while every year farms disappear into urban developments of some kind. Especially the local Dairy farmers who are struggling with massive running costs and low prices for product(even the organic dairies). They're barely scraping by selling milk, but then they look at what their land is worth they could become massively wealthy if they just sold the land to developers. And if a farmer retires or dies and leaves the dairy to family who have no interest in keeping a slowly dying business afloat they're just going to sell it.
There is of course a lot of "agricultural land" which isn't anywhere near cities. But that land also tends to have poor water availability, meaning it is only useful for growing crops which have low water needs, or for grazing. But being a few hours away from a transportation hub also creates problems.
This could be solved if we began building cities in places where cities aren't traditionally built, areas with little to no agricultural value, while simultaneously tearing down developments on prime agricultural land. But thats basically a pipe dream.
LordofHats wrote: I think Prestor is right on that count. There's plenty of planning in how we build things. The problem is that the modern American living space is a giant cluster of fresh booming residential and economic areas interspersed with tired, dying, and outright dead neighborhoods and shopping spaces with little to no interest put into redevelopment of older spaces because it's always cheaper to just develop something undeveloped.
I think this is doubly true when you look at the "bad" perception that the term gentrification brings up. . . Im not saying that ALL redevelopment goes this route, but there are certainly some very real problems with redevelopment and gentrification (I think I'd argue that gentrification specifically is cheaper than full on redevelopment, just because most of the gentrifiers (not sure that's a word, but hey) want to use the existing, historical structures for new purposes as much as possible).
This could be solved if we began building cities in places where cities aren't traditionally built, areas with little to no agricultural value, while simultaneously tearing down developments on prime agricultural land. But thats basically a pipe dream.
It's my understanding that they tried with factory style farming, the idea being that they could keep plant root systems in water solutions with minerals and fertilizer. It failed, but from that they started to gain a greater understanding of the importance of the plant/fungal interaction at the root level and that many plants require certain types of fungus growing on their roots (and thus the fungus being present in the soils) in order to fix/release the nutrients that the plant requires.
Hydroponics is a thing, even combo aquaculture/hydroponics facilities crop up every now and then.
They have their own set of intrinsic problems (basically not being suitable to all crops and power needs) that's why they're just a small fraction of agricultural production.
Prestor Jon wrote: That's true about hospitals but the same problems can crop up with other examples. Wall St doesn't have to be in NYC but relocating it would be a PITA so all of the ancillary jobs that stem from Wall St are difficult to move as well.
I agree that it is a pain to move whole sectors, but that doesn't mean we can't do it. The trick is not to move to existing business, but lure new business to start in some other area.
To use your Wall St example, no major financial company is going to leave the financial district. They'd be announcing themselves as small time, no tax incentive on Earth could offset the reputation impact of not having an office in the district. But most of the jobs in these places are backroom jobs, they don't have to be on Wall St. So when a fund is planning to set up an enormous block of computers to run its algorithmic HVT, it makes sense for the city to offer up commercial space with high speed cabling outside of the financial district. If it was just the retail arm of these financial companies set up in Wall St and everything else got moved to outlying areas, it'd be an enormous shift of jobs and a massive improvement in transport pressures.
All that said, NY isn't the best example, because they have a large and highly used subway system. So the economics there are wildly different. But the general example still holds.
Trick is to look to evolve this over time, luring new business away from pressure points, rather than shift established business.
My town used to a textile mill town back in the day. While there are plenty of negatives about those old company towns that we would want to avoid the idea of pushing mixed use developments into the mold of residential neighborhoods for workers adjacent to office parks has merit. A lot of new developments put apartments in or adjacent to retail and commercial space to increase convenience and desirability for the development. I think the city planning issues in the US are more rooted in the need to redevelop existing areas than new developments being unplanned urban sprawl (aside from notorious problem cities like Houston). New developments are better/smarter than ever in a lot of instances but redeveloping existing urban areas only get more difficult and expensive over time.
Definitely, the mixed developments are a great trend.
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LordofHats wrote: I think Prestor is right on that count. There's plenty of planning in how we build things. The problem is that the modern American living space is a giant cluster of fresh booming residential and economic areas interspersed with tired, dying, and outright dead neighborhoods and shopping spaces with little to no interest put into redevelopment of older spaces because it's always cheaper to just develop something undeveloped.
I read an amazing piece a couple of years back that I might have linked to here on dakka back in the day... anyhow, the piece was saying that the way we now plan cities has had a major impact on income inequality and social mobility. Thing is, a poor person once would have been in a crappy inner city apartment, it wasn't a nice place but he was within walking distance or short public transport of a lot of potential jobs. But these days he's more likely to be in low income housing a in the outlying suburbs, with very few jobs in the area.
It isn't the whole of the issue, but it is a part of it, I think.
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Grey Templar wrote: Actually, a lot of Urban development is swallowing up agricultural land. Largely because a good amount of Agricultural land, and developed agricultural land, is right next to cities and there is overlap between what makes good agricultural land and what makes land good for building cities on.
None of that is remotely sufficient to explain the simple reality of scale - 14m is just so much smaller than 200m.
There is of course a lot of "agricultural land" which isn't anywhere near cities. But that land also tends to have poor water availability, meaning it is only useful for growing crops which have low water needs, or for grazing. But being a few hours away from a transportation hub also creates problems.
You wildly misunderstand the yield difference of 'good' and 'bad' agricultural land. There is a difference, but it isn't so massive that it will make a meaningful dent in the difference between 14m and 200m.
Getting back to the original point of the thread, it seems that the Uber car which ran over a pedestrian had the factory-installed automatic braking system disabled. The sensor system was tested using the dashcam footage, and it would have triggered one second before impact. Not much, but; a) that's using the dashcam video, which is of a lower quality than the actual cameras fitted to the car and b) would have at the very least reduced the speed of the collision, perhaps to a survivable level.
In fairness to Uber I can see why they might turn that off if the auto stop system was simply a car feature and separate from the actual AI of the car driving. Ergo so that the car was driving itself without "driver aids" and assuming that the Uber AI had its own detection and auto-stop features.
It would likely make it easier to review test data from its use if they only have to check their own AI systems and not other auto detection/control systems within the car. It wouldn't surprise me if other car aid features might have been turned off as well.
That said if the safety feature works better than Ubers own then I can't see why they'd want to turn it off or at least not release the car to the wilds until they'd made their own as good as the driver aid feature. Of course it might be that Ubers own internal testing proved otherwise under test conditions (ergo that Ubers system was as good or better than the cars own driver aid) so how much Uber tested that and compared them and thus what they based their choice of turning the aid off on would be something I'd expect to be reviewed during the investigation.
That said I'm unsure if, legally speaking, there is any requirement to keep such driver aids on in standard use of a car (I can see turning them off being a benefit and a need if going off-road for example). Ergo if there's no legal requirement to keep such aids running for a normal person can we then give Uber blame if their self driving system also had the aids turned off (which leads us back into that comparison aspect - as well as debate on suitable testing practice - whcih brings us back to putting those self driving cars back into testing facilities instead of unleashing them on the roads just yet)
You wildly misunderstand the yield difference of 'good' and 'bad' agricultural land. There is a difference, but it isn't so massive that it will make a meaningful dent in the difference between 14m and 200m.
There is. The difference between irrigated and non irrigated alone can make a five-fold difference in yield everything else being equal.
Average yield for almonds in Spain is around 300Kg/ha, in California you're looking at anything between 2.000/2.500Kg/ha. Why? Irrigated crops in good soils vs non-irrigated in marginal soils. Farmers in both countries make money, btw. It takes more to get more.
That was quick. Clearly they want to put this behind them.
I suspect the family wants to put it behind them and the car company wants to resolve it fast. Something like this can turn into a huge situation legally speaking and can be the sort of thing that sparks the creation of new laws and suchlike. So it can fast snowball into something huge that, I suspect, the family might not want to get dragged through and which the car company certainly don't want to have to defend against.
That was quick. Clearly they want to put this behind them.
I suspect the family wants to put it behind them and the car company wants to resolve it fast. Something like this can turn into a huge situation legally speaking and can be the sort of thing that sparks the creation of new laws and suchlike. So it can fast snowball into something huge that, I suspect, the family might not want to get dragged through and which the car company certainly don't want to have to defend against.
Either that, or the number the family requested was lower than Uber was anticipating and paid out cuz they thought "wow, that's cheap, hells yeah we'll pay you!"
Kilkrazy wrote:Does a private settlement preclude the possibility of a criminal liability prosecution?
According to the professor of the ethics class I'm in (in which we've spent plenty of time talking about Uber as a whole), who is a lawyer, what he's said is that *usually* civil suits come after criminal cases. While I'm no lawyer, I would imagine that criminal cases may still be on the table, if there's a legal team working on it, and a prosecutor is sold on that work.
Might be a tough sell to get a criminal case going, though. The video clearly puts at least some of the fault on the woman for walking out into traffic.
Tesla car involved in fatal crash while on auto-pilot.
Thats a... wildly inaccurate summary.
More accurate would be 'Tesla car with driver assist (unfortunately named the Autopilot system) failed to bend the laws of physics in under five seconds, after driver decided to point the car at the concrete barrier and take his hands off the wheel'
Just Tony wrote:I'm starting to really like the concept of the hive city, and having layers of street so as to have traffic be slowed less. TONS of infrastructure needed to make that dream a reality, but if they can pull in off in some place like Manhattan, then we're looking at a viable alternative.
Interesting question: who came up with the idea of the hive city? Asimov used to concept in Caves of Steel, but I don't know where else it was used, or possibly before that.
E M Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1908) mentions hive habitation?
Tesla car involved in fatal crash while on auto-pilot.
Thats a... wildly inaccurate summary.
More accurate would be 'Tesla car with driver assist (unfortunately named the Autopilot system) failed to bend the laws of physics in under five seconds, after driver decided to point the car at the concrete barrier and take his hands off the wheel'
Clickbait title is clickbait.
Sure, Autopilot as a name sounds more autonomous than a "driving assistance" feature, but the driver should have known this. Taking your hands off the wheel for 6 seconds and driving straight into a concrete barrier is hardly the fault of the driving assistance.
Thing is was the driver trained in how the assisted driving features would work or was it a case of "here's a car, there's a manual inside off you go".
This harkens back to my view that a lot of the issues with driving are linked back to a lack of sufficient training and too much relying on the idea that drivers will read and understand the manual.
The driver might well have figured that the car would see the barrier, make the turn itself and correct the situation -- esp if the car has some assisted features where it will turn the car itself whilst driving to aid the driver. Might even be the driver knew they were driving into the barrier at the wrong angle; decided that they couldn't correct the action in that time and that instead they'd let the faster correction features of the car correct the issue;
Tesla car involved in fatal crash while on auto-pilot.
Thats a... wildly inaccurate summary.
More accurate would be 'Tesla car with driver assist (unfortunately named the Autopilot system) failed to bend the laws of physics in under five seconds, after driver decided to point the car at the concrete barrier and take his hands off the wheel'
Work to do. Current issue of Economist, special section on AI. One European bank has asked Infosys to help it cut operations staff from 50,000 to 500. (No typo.)
What I'm noticing is that it's the service industry that's getting hit with these things now. Manufacturing isn't automating NEARLY as fast. So your McJobs are going way, but your GMJobs are not going away, at least not in the same vein.
Just Tony wrote: What I'm noticing is that it's the service industry that's getting hit with these things now. Manufacturing isn't automating NEARLY as fast. So your McJobs are going way, but your GMJobs are not going away, at least not in the same vein.
Manufacturing isn’t automating as fast right now because manufacturing has been automating for decades now. Manufacturing already employs far fewer workers than it used to due to the persistent increase in automating assembly lines. The service sector has been automating much slower because there is a much lower skill threshold to get into the service sector labor pool so labor costs wee lower so the service sector needed to wait for the cost of automation to go down/technology to improve. Now that we’re at that point we are seeing more service sector/food industry jobs get replaced with automation.
Just Tony wrote: What I'm noticing is that it's the service industry that's getting hit with these things now. Manufacturing isn't automating NEARLY as fast. So your McJobs are going way, but your GMJobs are not going away, at least not in the same vein.
Manufacturing isn’t automating as fast right now because manufacturing has been automating for decades now. Manufacturing already employs far fewer workers than it used to due to the persistent increase in automating assembly lines. The service sector has been automating much slower because there is a much lower skill threshold to get into the service sector labor pool so labor costs wee lower so the service sector needed to wait for the cost of automation to go down/technology to improve. Now that we’re at that point we are seeing more service sector/food industry jobs get replaced with automation.
There was a word you breezed past in my post: now. I said that the service industry is getting hit with automation now, as in that's the focus. Since I've been working in industry for over two decades, I know EXACTLY what the rate of automation is, and what jobs can't be automated.
Just Tony wrote: What I'm noticing is that it's the service industry that's getting hit with these things now. Manufacturing isn't automating NEARLY as fast. So your McJobs are going way, but your GMJobs are not going away, at least not in the same vein.
Manufacturing isn’t automating as fast right now because manufacturing has been automating for decades now. Manufacturing already employs far fewer workers than it used to due to the persistent increase in automating assembly lines. The service sector has been automating much slower because there is a much lower skill threshold to get into the service sector labor pool so labor costs wee lower so the service sector needed to wait for the cost of automation to go down/technology to improve. Now that we’re at that point we are seeing more service sector/food industry jobs get replaced with automation.
There was a word you breezed past in my post: now. I said that the service industry is getting hit with automation now, as in that's the focus. Since I've been working in industry for over two decades, I know EXACTLY what the rate of automation is, and what jobs can't be automated.
I'm not trying to 'gotcha' here, but i do find it amusing that you're willing to bet the speed of light can be broken by as-yet-unheard of means, but that a fully automated manufacturing plant is beyond our capability
Speaking of service industry robots: Self checkouts. These fething things are a pain. Unless the store is practically deserted, it always faster to queue up and get checked out by a human.
Just Tony wrote: What I'm noticing is that it's the service industry that's getting hit with these things now. Manufacturing isn't automating NEARLY as fast. So your McJobs are going way, but your GMJobs are not going away, at least not in the same vein.
Manufacturing isn’t automating as fast right now because manufacturing has been automating for decades now. Manufacturing already employs far fewer workers than it used to due to the persistent increase in automating assembly lines. The service sector has been automating much slower because there is a much lower skill threshold to get into the service sector labor pool so labor costs wee lower so the service sector needed to wait for the cost of automation to go down/technology to improve. Now that we’re at that point we are seeing more service sector/food industry jobs get replaced with automation.
There was a word you breezed past in my post: now. I said that the service industry is getting hit with automation now, as in that's the focus. Since I've been working in industry for over two decades, I know EXACTLY what the rate of automation is, and what jobs can't be automated.
I'm not trying to 'gotcha' here, but i do find it amusing that you're willing to bet the speed of light can be broken by as-yet-unheard of means, but that a fully automated manufacturing plant is beyond our capability
Speaking of service industry robots: Self checkouts. These fething things are a pain. Unless the store is practically deserted, it always faster to queue up and get checked out by a human.
Speaking of service industry robots: Self checkouts. These fething things are a pain. Unless the store is practically deserted, it always faster to queue up and get checked out by a human.
Just Tony wrote: What I'm noticing is that it's the service industry that's getting hit with these things now. Manufacturing isn't automating NEARLY as fast. So your McJobs are going way, but your GMJobs are not going away, at least not in the same vein.
Manufacturing isn’t automating as fast right now because manufacturing has been automating for decades now. Manufacturing already employs far fewer workers than it used to due to the persistent increase in automating assembly lines. The service sector has been automating much slower because there is a much lower skill threshold to get into the service sector labor pool so labor costs wee lower so the service sector needed to wait for the cost of automation to go down/technology to improve. Now that we’re at that point we are seeing more service sector/food industry jobs get replaced with automation.
There was a word you breezed past in my post: now. I said that the service industry is getting hit with automation now, as in that's the focus. Since I've been working in industry for over two decades, I know EXACTLY what the rate of automation is, and what jobs can't be automated.
I'm not trying to 'gotcha' here, but i do find it amusing that you're willing to bet the speed of light can be broken by as-yet-unheard of means, but that a fully automated manufacturing plant is beyond our capability
Speaking of service industry robots: Self checkouts. These fething things are a pain. Unless the store is practically deserted, it always faster to queue up and get checked out by a human.
I prefer to be paid for my labor, so I avoid the self-checkout.
The last time I went to the USA and hired a car, the gas stations had two lanes of pumps with different prices. The more expensive price was for human service, in other words, if you drove in there the man would come out and fill up your car for you. This was nearly 25 years ago, though. Do they still have them now?
Kilkrazy wrote: The last time I went to the USA and hired a car, the gas stations had two lanes of pumps with different prices. The more expensive price was for human service, in other words, if you drove in there the man would come out and fill up your car for you. This was nearly 25 years ago, though. Do they still have them now?
Depends. In most places that doesn't exist at all, in a few states it's still illegal to pump your own gas because the state doesn't want to allow those obsolete jobs to disappear.
The thing I notice with a lot of service sector automation is that its not adaptive automation. As a result if anyone wants to do something or request something "off the system" then they've got to flag down and wait for an attendant anyway.
Even if its just to casually discuss pros and cons of a purchase choice; and most would expect to get info from the attendant beyond what's on the product label (which many times does not hold "all" the information and also won't go into details such as ease of use, practical applications etc...).
I would also say that part of the service sector is salesmanship - ergo the art of encouraging a customer to part with their money. Put automation in and its great for those who already know what they want, but its not so great at those who don't know. Or (for the shop) those who can afford better but are looking at the lower end - that means less potential sales than a good salesman.
Then again a lot of, at least retail, jobs are not based on skilled salesmen anymore since they often cycle staff very regularly and keep a lot of staff on short term limited hours contracts - so many can serve well but have no incentive to learn the trade of what they sell.
TL/DR: Uber self-driving cars have software that let's them ignore false positive readings like plastic bags. The car read the pedestrian as a false positive, so it did not slow down for her.
On the plus side I'm willing to bet there's going to be some sensor interpretation redundancies now to give "oversight". I realize human judgment is fallible as well, but I can't help but think that AI judgment calls are going to get a black eye over this.
What I'm getting at is that either we need to have people anticipate more potential logic bombs like this. If this is going to have a chance of working, it needs to basically be human error causing any fatalities. The industry can't afford something as catastrophic as "the AI chose to ignore it", which is how you KNOW it will be spun, especially by the transportation industry.
So essentially we'll have to put L plates on every single driver-free car because the driver will have to act like a driving instructor. Watching and monitoring and taking over from the car when required (after a training course in learning how the car thinks so that they can anticipate when the car will fail).
Granted if everyone drove as if everyone else were a beginner the roads might well be a lot safer.
the risk will be complacency. Everyone will be really attentive and observant for the first few weeks of owning the driverless car; but if the car never makes a failure on any trip out there's a high chance the person will stop paying attention. It takes a lot of concentration to pay attention to nothing and not allow your mind to wander - to turn your head to chat to the person next to you; to listen to that favourite music track; to glance at the scenery; to take a yawn and 50seconds nap because your'e super tiered but its ok the car is doing the work.
All that said cars could harvest vast amounts of data if regular cars are fitted with all the sensors the computer requires and then that data is fed back into a central archive - reviewed and added to the cars brain. Many newer edition cars already have cameras and sensors so adding in the option to opt into having this data go back to home-base for review would be a powerful teaching tool for the AI
Thinking on it more it wouldn't surprise me if, barring companies like Uber, we never actually see a marketed driverless car. Instead we'll see a steady increase in the number of machine driver aids. There's already good braking aids based on sensors which can be far faster to react than the driver. So one could expect to see more and more driver aids steadily creep out into the market until the majority of cars are heavily aid reliant.
Groups like Uber might push for the whole package, but I see the manufacture side being a steady advance. Policies like the UK governments push for all electric by 2020 might aid this as it forces the market to evolve and advance (although honestly I think that policy is a pie-in-the-sky dream - if not just from a production side, but also from a consumer side - not everyone can afford brand new cars all the time nor want to sign up to hire-purchase deals
Just Tony wrote: What I'm getting at is that either we need to have people anticipate more potential logic bombs like this. If this is going to have a chance of working, it needs to basically be human error causing any fatalities. The industry can't afford something as catastrophic as "the AI chose to ignore it", which is how you KNOW it will be spun, especially by the transportation industry.
We've never demanded zero fatalities from anything ever before. Right now we tolerate hundreds of thousands of car fatalities and we barely even talk about it. In fact, we just shrug and accept a long history of car manufacturers fighting against regs that made cars safer, and it never stopped us buying and driving cars.
As long as AI cars show a record of being clearly safer than human drivers they'll be adopted just fine.
sebster wrote: As long as AI cars show a record of being clearly safer than human drivers they'll be adopted just fine.
I kind of disagree with that. From an engineering point of view it's absolutely true. Zero fatalities is a stupid goal, and the moment automated cars can demonstrate a better safety record than human drivers they should be put into mass production. The system should continue to be refined, of course, but holding back on a major safety improvement because it isn't quite perfect yet is insanity. But we aren't dealing with a pure engineering decision. Automated cars are going to be a political decision, and public perception of the situation is clearly not rational. People will get stupid and emotional and blow every accident out of proportion, and politicians will listen to their idiot base and impose regulations on automated cars.
In contrast politicians/car companies could seriously push the news on car fatalities. Right now its accepted because its basically repressed news - or rather its not shouted about. There's the "serious crash" every so often, but there's no big news on how many are killed each year nor each day.
If it got political as much as the kills from automated cars can be bumped up the kills from human controlled ones can be blown up even more into a huge debate. Indeed its almost crazy to think how we are super strict with industries as to health and safety; and yet the most dangerous thing for most people is just travelling to work.
Kilkrazy wrote: Automated cars will have to be preceded by a walking robot carrying a red warning flag.
Hey it only took over 2 decades full of accidents and fatalities to get Detroit to pioneer the kind of traffic laws and roadways we have today. Automated cars probably won’t take more than 12-15 years to sort out.
Since all this comes from a Tesla issue and going backup to the issue of automation it's worth noting that Tesla themselves had to roll back on automation because it was slowing down production.
And that was a mistake already repeated from GM efforts a few decades back. At least in the automotive industry the flexibility and adaptability of humans still beat robots
sebster wrote: As long as AI cars show a record of being clearly safer than human drivers they'll be adopted just fine.
I kind of disagree with that. From an engineering point of view it's absolutely true. Zero fatalities is a stupid goal, and the moment automated cars can demonstrate a better safety record than human drivers they should be put into mass production. The system should continue to be refined, of course, but holding back on a major safety improvement because it isn't quite perfect yet is insanity. But we aren't dealing with a pure engineering decision. Automated cars are going to be a political decision, and public perception of the situation is clearly not rational. People will get stupid and emotional and blow every accident out of proportion, and politicians will listen to their idiot base and impose regulations on automated cars.
Bam. Touching on part of this, the issue here is public and political perception. There are fears and ignorance tied to AI in general, and pop culture tech gone wrong stories and movies don't help this. Add in that you have one side of the debate wanting to use this tech to basically replace ALL human transport industry drivers, and one side that wants NONE on there, the people in the middle that see a useful asset are left with making sure that they "sell" the tech as well as possible, which means FAR less screw ups than would be expected by anyone who engineers these things.
Bam. Touching on part of this, the issue here is public and political perception. There are fears and ignorance tied to AI in general, and pop culture tech gone wrong stories and movies don't help this. Add in that you have one side of the debate wanting to use this tech to basically replace ALL human transport industry drivers, and one side that wants NONE on there, the people in the middle that see a useful asset are left with making sure that they "sell" the tech as well as possible, which means FAR less screw ups than would be expected by anyone who engineers these things.
I'm in the NONE braket. I've seen too many screw ups and failures to think this is a safe idea.
You saw the blowback from the older lady on a bike? Wait til it's a kid that gets mowed down by a vehicle that commits an error along that line. Support will evaporate fast.
BaronIveagh wrote: I'm in the NONE braket. I've seen too many screw ups and failures to think this is a safe idea.
And this is just proving my point. You have seen screw ups and failures, but you take for granted that human drivers will regularly screw up and fail and kill people and you don't call for banning human drivers. Automated vehicles, even automated vehicles that occasionally screw up and kill people, can still be much safer than human drivers and provide a net improvement in safety.
BaronIveagh wrote: I'm in the NONE braket. I've seen too many screw ups and failures to think this is a safe idea.
And this is just proving my point. You have seen screw ups and failures, but you take for granted that human drivers will regularly screw up and fail and kill people and you don't call for banning human drivers. Automated vehicles, even automated vehicles that occasionally screw up and kill people, can still be much safer than human drivers and provide a net improvement in safety.
I think the difference here is the potential magnitude of a single error.
With human drivers. if a human driver makes an error its just isolated to that particular human driver. His failure doesn't guarantee other drivers will make errors.
With a driverless car, if there is a programming error like the one that occurred with the biker, that error is duplicated across thousands or even hundreds of thousands of vehicles. Not to mention, lets say a terrorist hacks into the software updates for a particular brand of driverless car and plants a directive that would cause them all the crash with a specific environmental trigger.
I think there will be a number of different driverless systems, one from each manufacturer. This will make it more difficult to hack all the cars simultaneously.
Of course it would be disastrous even if only one brand of car got hacked. There is also the possibility that Google's software will be installed in every manufacturer's cars.
Grey Templar wrote: With human drivers. if a human driver makes an error its just isolated to that particular human driver. His failure doesn't guarantee other drivers will make errors.
It really isn't isolated. For example, a great many human drivers have the "using phone while driving" bug in their software. Its presence may not guarantee an accident for any particular driver, but it's sure as hell a recurring problem. We just take this baseline level of errors in human drivers for granted, and only consider it a "real error" if they do something exceptionally stupid.
With a driverless car, if there is a programming error like the one that occurred with the biker, that error is duplicated across thousands or even hundreds of thousands of vehicles.
Again, you're making the mistake of comparing to perfection rather than comparing to human drivers. The question is not "is this error going to be present", it's "is an automated vehicle with this error present more or less dangerous than a human driver and that human driver's known errors". And to answer it you have to look at failure rates caused by the error. Is it an error that happens every time you drive the car? Is it an error that only happens when certain rare conditions are met? If the error causes 100 deaths a year across all vehicles you accept the error and the deaths it causes because it's still safer than human drivers in those vehicles.
Not to mention, lets say a terrorist hacks into the software updates for a particular brand of driverless car and plants a directive that would cause them all the crash with a specific environmental trigger.
This is a bad movie plot not a realistic threat. Aside from the technical difficulties of executing such an attack terrorists aren't that good. Look at the overwhelming theme of terrorist attacks. They aren't spending years working their way into a company's engineering staff and getting enough of their friends hired that they can slip an attack through, they're buying an AR-15 at the local gun shop and heading for the largest concentration of people they can find nearby. These are incredibly simple attacks using weapons that are easily available. In terms of terrorism any vulnerability to a complex software attack is going to be more than offset by introducing automated rental trucks that shut down if you try to drive them into a crowd.
Well, to be fair, hijacking and then crashing a plane avoids two of the most difficult aspects of flight, take off and landing.
True, but simply dismissing the enemy as too incompetent to pull off a successful attack leads us down the path to things like 9/11, Isandlwana, and St Clair's Defeat.
Grey Templar wrote: With human drivers. if a human driver makes an error its just isolated to that particular human driver. His failure doesn't guarantee other drivers will make errors.
It really isn't isolated. For example, a great many human drivers have the "using phone while driving" bug in their software. Its presence may not guarantee an accident for any particular driver, but it's sure as hell a recurring problem. We just take this baseline level of errors in human drivers for granted, and only consider it a "real error" if they do something exceptionally stupid.
With a driverless car, if there is a programming error like the one that occurred with the biker, that error is duplicated across thousands or even hundreds of thousands of vehicles.
Again, you're making the mistake of comparing to perfection rather than comparing to human drivers. The question is not "is this error going to be present", it's "is an automated vehicle with this error present more or less dangerous than a human driver and that human driver's known errors". And to answer it you have to look at failure rates caused by the error. Is it an error that happens every time you drive the car? Is it an error that only happens when certain rare conditions are met? If the error causes 100 deaths a year across all vehicles you accept the error and the deaths it causes because it's still safer than human drivers in those vehicles.
Not to mention, lets say a terrorist hacks into the software updates for a particular brand of driverless car and plants a directive that would cause them all the crash with a specific environmental trigger.
This is a bad movie plot not a realistic threat. Aside from the technical difficulties of executing such an attack terrorists aren't that good. Look at the overwhelming theme of terrorist attacks. They aren't spending years working their way into a company's engineering staff and getting enough of their friends hired that they can slip an attack through, they're buying an AR-15 at the local gun shop and heading for the largest concentration of people they can find nearby. These are incredibly simple attacks using weapons that are easily available. In terms of terrorism any vulnerability to a complex software attack is going to be more than offset by introducing automated rental trucks that shut down if you try to drive them into a crowd.
Nope. All it would take is a disgruntled programmer, maybe one who works for one of these companies, getting radicalized by some terrorists or doing it of his own accord as a “lone wolf”. Criminals are usually less intelligent individuals, key word ‘usually’. It might be bad movie plot material, but as technology becomes more common it’s going to become reality soon enough. Hackers won’t always stick to stealing credit cards and identities.
Nope. All it would take is a disgruntled programmer, maybe one who works for one of these companies, getting radicalized by some terrorists or doing it of his own accord as a “lone wolf”. Criminals are usually less intelligent individuals, key word ‘usually’. It might be bad movie plot material, but as technology becomes more common it’s going to become reality soon enough. Hackers won’t always stick to stealing credit cards and identities.
BaronIveagh wrote:Yeah, they'd never make all that effort to learn to fly planes or take over a civilian jumbo jet for a suicide attack! That's silly!
And that problem was solved with sturdier cockpit doors and passengers who now know that terrorists are actually willing to fly planes into buildings so they have incentives to fight back instead of hoping for a regular old-school hijacking.
Vulcan wrote: Has there even been a successful aircraft hijacking since 9/11?
There was that co-pilot who locked out the pilot when he went to the loo and crashed the plane into a mountain a few years ago. It wasn't a terrorist attack though, I think it was a bitter suicide. Can't think of any others.
Exactly. For decades, successful skyjacking depended heavily on the willingness of the passengers to go along quietly. And for decades, going along quietly was the best way to survive a skyjacking.
9/11 changed the rules, and now the passengers are not willing to go along quietly anymore.
Vulcan wrote: Has there even been a successful aircraft hijacking since 9/11?
Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702
Turkish Airlines Flight 1476
EgyptAir Flight 181
Air West Boeing 737 was hijacked over Sudan, but landed safely at N'Djamena, Chad.
a Sun Air (Sudan) Air Boeing 737 flying from Nyala
CanJet Flight 918
Aeroméxico Flight 576
Afriqiyah Airways Flight 209
Just last month there was the Air China CA1350 hijacking (extra credit on this one, one guy took the whole plane with a knife)
Those were the successful ones that they took over, post 9/11. There were about ten unsuccessful ones including the Germanwings Flight 9525 were the copilot crashed the plane.
Peregrine wrote: I kind of disagree with that. From an engineering point of view it's absolutely true. Zero fatalities is a stupid goal, and the moment automated cars can demonstrate a better safety record than human drivers they should be put into mass production. The system should continue to be refined, of course, but holding back on a major safety improvement because it isn't quite perfect yet is insanity. But we aren't dealing with a pure engineering decision. Automated cars are going to be a political decision, and public perception of the situation is clearly not rational. People will get stupid and emotional and blow every accident out of proportion, and politicians will listen to their idiot base and impose regulations on automated cars.
People get stupid and emotional about things they don't experience directly, or only experience occasionally. There will be lots of concerns at first, but as automated cars are increasingly seen and experienced, the irrational concern will be replaced by an understanding learned from actual experience.
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Grey Templar wrote: I think the difference here is the potential magnitude of a single error.
With human drivers. if a human driver makes an error its just isolated to that particular human driver. His failure doesn't guarantee other drivers will make errors.
The only way that complaint makes sense is if we assume it is an error so blatant that all cars in the same situation will fail in the same way, and it's a circumstance that is common enough to happen often. Which is silly, as that's a level of programming automated cars moved past in their earliest stages.
And while focusing on that issue, you missed the great strength of that situation. When a mistake is found in a human driver, maybe we fix that driver's technique, or maybe not. A few billion other drivers carry on, with many suffering from that same problem. But with a car if its found that it reacts badly to a situation more than it should, we can improve the software and systems. We can begin a process of failing forward that we can't do with human drivers.
Grey Templar wrote: Nope. All it would take is a disgruntled programmer, maybe one who works for one of these companies, getting radicalized by some terrorists or doing it of his own accord as a “lone wolf”. Criminals are usually less intelligent individuals, key word ‘usually’. It might be bad movie plot material, but as technology becomes more common it’s going to become reality soon enough. Hackers won’t always stick to stealing credit cards and identities.
Uh, no. It would take way more than that because safety-critical things like the software for automated vehicles are not given to a single programmer. Aside from deliberate sabotage concerns that produces a single point of failure where any mistake the one programmer creates and doesn't catch gets into the final product. Any code is going to be thoroughly reviewed and tested by a team of engineers before it makes it into a final release. You aren't going to slip a blatant "crash all cars" attack past that unless you compromise an entire department of a company. And TBH if you're talking about that level of resources and dedication you're better off driving a bunch of rented trucks full of bombs into every crowd you can find. It's almost certainly going to cause more damage than crashing a bunch of vehicles that are designed to maximize crash resistance and passenger survivability.
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BaronIveagh wrote: Yeah, they'd never make all that effort to learn to fly planes or take over a civilian jumbo jet for a suicide attack! That's silly!
9/11 is actually strong support for my point. It was a very unsophisticated attack that exploited the fact that everyone assumed that a hijacking is resolved by a hostage situation and not by a deliberate crash. Once you find that assumption all you need is some people with knives and a willingness to die murdering thousands of innocent people. It doesn't take any particularly impressive skill or resources, just willingness to die. And resorting to that kind of attack demonstrates an inability to do anything more effective. Where a real threat would fire a barrage of cruise missiles (preferably armed with nukes) from a safe distance the 9/11 attacks were designed to compensate for the fact that the terrorists had very limited resources beyond willing martyrs. It's a kind of clever way around it, sure, but still a very clear reflection of their limits.
Multiple programmers didn’t stop a bug that makes a car think a person walking across the street was a plastic bag. If multiple people double checking can miss bugs and errors they could easily miss a line designed to cause a crash. There are lots of opportunities to insert this sabotage, not just the initial creation of the software. The countless updates that a smart cars computer would have would give plenty of opportunities to hide it. The line of code could also be quite small and difficult to spot.
It’s not a “crash all cars” command. It would be something simple like “turn wheels 90 degrees right and apply brakes if speed = 65 and there is another vehicle to the right “. Disguised as an evasive maneuver. And then the update goes out, with this hidden in its mass of other updates, and now every car has this line of code with nobody the wiser.
Grey Templar wrote: Multiple programmers didn’t stop a bug that makes a car think a person walking across the street was a plastic bag. If multiple people double checking can miss bugs and errors they could easily miss a line designed to cause a crash. There are lots of opportunities to insert this sabotage, not just the initial creation of the software. The countless updates that a smart cars computer would have would give plenty of opportunities to hide it. The line of code could also be quite small and difficult to spot.
It’s not a “crash all cars” command. It would be something simple like “turn wheels 90 degrees right and apply brakes if speed = 65 and there is another vehicle to the right “. Disguised as an evasive maneuver. And then the update goes out, with this hidden in its mass of other updates, and now every car has this line of code with nobody the wiser.
The bug in the OP got through because it was an edge-case scenario where, under certain unlikely conditions, the system could make the wrong decision. It slipped through because testing can't cover every possible scenario. But to have a successful terrorist attack you need something that happens constantly, or at least very frequently. That's going to be much easier to catch in testing, and it's going to be much harder to disguise it by making it happen as the unpredictable consequences of a piece of code rather than a direct instruction to do something wrong.
9/11 is actually strong support for my point. It was a very unsophisticated attack that exploited the fact that everyone assumed that a hijacking is resolved by a hostage situation and not by a deliberate crash. Once you find that assumption all you need is some people with knives and a willingness to die murdering thousands of innocent people. It doesn't take any particularly impressive skill or resources, just willingness to die. And resorting to that kind of attack demonstrates an inability to do anything more effective. Where a real threat would fire a barrage of cruise missiles (preferably armed with nukes) from a safe distance the 9/11 attacks were designed to compensate for the fact that the terrorists had very limited resources beyond willing martyrs. It's a kind of clever way around it, sure, but still a very clear reflection of their limits.
You and I have very different ideas about the effectiveness of that attack, or the level of sophistication involved.
That said, by your logic a much more effective attack would have been to highjack a LNG carrier and do a Texas City in the middle of New York Harbor. If done right, it'd be the equivalent of a megaton range nuke.
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Grey Templar wrote: Multiple programmers didn’t stop a bug that makes a car think a person walking across the street was a plastic bag. If multiple people double checking can miss bugs and errors they could easily miss a line designed to cause a crash. There are lots of opportunities to insert this sabotage, not just the initial creation of the software. The countless updates that a smart cars computer would have would give plenty of opportunities to hide it. The line of code could also be quite small and difficult to spot.
It’s not a “crash all cars” command. It would be something simple like “turn wheels 90 degrees right and apply brakes if speed = 65 and there is another vehicle to the right “. Disguised as an evasive maneuver. And then the update goes out, with this hidden in its mass of other updates, and now every car has this line of code with nobody the wiser.
Just think how many game companies have things inserted by underpaid overworked coders that cause embarrassment later. Hot Coffee, anyone?
Vulcan wrote: Has there even been a successful aircraft hijacking since 9/11?
Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702
Turkish Airlines Flight 1476
EgyptAir Flight 181
Air West Boeing 737 was hijacked over Sudan, but landed safely at N'Djamena, Chad.
a Sun Air (Sudan) Air Boeing 737 flying from Nyala
CanJet Flight 918
Aeroméxico Flight 576
Afriqiyah Airways Flight 209
Just last month there was the Air China CA1350 hijacking (extra credit on this one, one guy took the whole plane with a knife)
Those were the successful ones that they took over, post 9/11. There were about ten unsuccessful ones including the Germanwings Flight 9525 were the copilot crashed the plane.
Grey Templar wrote: Multiple programmers didn’t stop a bug that makes a car think a person walking across the street was a plastic bag. If multiple people double checking can miss bugs and errors they could easily miss a line designed to cause a crash. There are lots of opportunities to insert this sabotage, not just the initial creation of the software. The countless updates that a smart cars computer would have would give plenty of opportunities to hide it. The line of code could also be quite small and difficult to spot.
Cars right now have software that controls breaking, acceleration, steering and a lot of other stuff. To the extent that cars could be hacked to kill people, we're already in that world.
Grey Templar wrote: Multiple programmers didn’t stop a bug that makes a car think a person walking across the street was a plastic bag. If multiple people double checking can miss bugs and errors they could easily miss a line designed to cause a crash. There are lots of opportunities to insert this sabotage, not just the initial creation of the software. The countless updates that a smart cars computer would have would give plenty of opportunities to hide it. The line of code could also be quite small and difficult to spot.
Cars right now have software that controls breaking, acceleration, steering and a lot of other stuff. To the extent that cars could be hacked to kill people, we're already in that world.
Yes and no. You could only hack a current car by physically connecting to it, since they don’t ever go online after they hit the road. A ‘smart car’ in the future would connect periodically, if not continually, for software patches, map updates, etc. like my computer at home does.
So cars right now are effectively immune to hacking because they are closed systems. A smart car system would be infinitely more susceptible because if you hack a software update you’ve now hacked all the cars, not just one, and it’s not a closed system anymore.
Just think how many game companies have things inserted by underpaid overworked coders that cause embarrassment later. Hot Coffee, anyone?
Hot Coffee wasn't inserted by a malicious coder. It was an originally planned feature which was later cut. As with most games, when you cut something you don't delete all the files, just remove enough that it will no longer activate during play, and so people who know what they're doing can get them back by going through the games files to find unused assets and setting them up to be used again.
Grey Templar wrote: Yes and no. You could only hack a current car by physically connecting to it, since they don’t ever go online after they hit the road. A ‘smart car’ in the future would connect periodically, if not continually, for software patches, map updates, etc. like my computer at home does.
First of all you were talking about malicious software being included during development. You need to follow your own argument.
Second of all, it's a completely blind assertion that automated cars will be constantly updated, while other modern cars never will be. Maybe automated cars will only have software updates at dealerships, much like you get satnav maps updated now. Or maybe in the future all cars, automated or not, will have live updates. There's no reason that automated cars will be any different, claiming that's a unique risk to automated cars is just you making stuff up to try and ignore the flaws in your idea.
Grey Templar wrote: Multiple programmers didn’t stop a bug that makes a car think a person walking across the street was a plastic bag. If multiple people double checking can miss bugs and errors they could easily miss a line designed to cause a crash. There are lots of opportunities to insert this sabotage, not just the initial creation of the software. The countless updates that a smart cars computer would have would give plenty of opportunities to hide it. The line of code could also be quite small and difficult to spot.
It’s not a “crash all cars” command. It would be something simple like “turn wheels 90 degrees right and apply brakes if speed = 65 and there is another vehicle to the right “. Disguised as an evasive maneuver. And then the update goes out, with this hidden in its mass of other updates, and now every car has this line of code with nobody the wiser.
The bolded is something that I have a legitimate concern about. Anyone with electronic devices knows that processing speed is affected the more stuff you fill a hard drive with. Can they rate exactly how many updates this computer can take before the slower processing speed prevents it from performing a safety correction in time? Do we have to basically swap out the drive once a year? Are we going to have official versions of the programming with the updates that are more compressed? I have a desktop at my house that is only about five or six years old. When I first got it, it could run Mark of Chaos: Battle March with no lag time at all. Load times in game were phenomenally fast. It may have been two years in when running the exact same game started to experience noticeable lag when trying to load battles or that town screen where you replace your troops etc. I can't imagine that a self driving car is going to have some magical drive that doesn't suffer from t hose issues with updates.
BaronIveagh wrote: You and I have very different ideas about the effectiveness of that attack, or the level of sophistication involved.
Clearly we do. Mine are right, yours are wrong. Virtually everything about the 9/11 attacks is a result of limited resources. It was a fairly clever case of getting the most from limited resources and exploiting a one-time security hole as effectively as possible, but it was still an attack that anyone could have done. I could have done it, if I was a murderous cultist willing to die killing thousands of innocent victims. All you needed was some easily accessible training and tools, a willingness to die, and an utter lack of a conscience.
Just think how many game companies have things inserted by underpaid overworked coders that cause embarrassment later. Hot Coffee, anyone?
That is not at all comparable. Aside from the question of deliberate insert vs. failure to properly delete old material you're also talking about a video game. Video games are frivolous entertainment, the worst that can happen if you screw up a video game is that the customers aren't happy with it. Therefore a video game's code isn't going to be subject to the same review and testing standards as safety-critical software like an automated vehicle's driving code. It's very easy to slip something in when nobody cares enough to put much effort into stopping it. It's very hard to do it when you have a whole team of people dedicated to catching every possible flaw and procedures that are carefully designed to ensure that no single person can just throw something in.
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Just Tony wrote: The bolded is something that I have a legitimate concern about. Anyone with electronic devices knows that processing speed is affected the more stuff you fill a hard drive with. Can they rate exactly how many updates this computer can take before the slower processing speed prevents it from performing a safety correction in time? Do we have to basically swap out the drive once a year? Are we going to have official versions of the programming with the updates that are more compressed? I have a desktop at my house that is only about five or six years old. When I first got it, it could run Mark of Chaos: Battle March with no lag time at all. Load times in game were phenomenally fast. It may have been two years in when running the exact same game started to experience noticeable lag when trying to load battles or that town screen where you replace your troops etc. I can't imagine that a self driving car is going to have some magical drive that doesn't suffer from t hose issues with updates.
You don't need a magical drive, you just need proper software design. Unlike a PC you aren't going to be installing a bunch of new stuff on top of the existing data. In fact, you aren't going to have control over the software at all. An update can wipe the drive entirely at every update cycle (other than a small amount of space required for the updater code) and replace it with a fresh copy of the latest version of the software.
Commercial aircraft have been using autopilots for years. Are there any examples of those being hacked? I should think car autopilots will be held to the same standards, which means if there have been a lack of plane incidents, that would suggest car incidents are similarly likely to be incredibly rare.
I am not talking about failures of autopilot programming/sensors that have been corrected due to having pilots onboard, I mean incidents of autopilots being deliberately hacked to cause damage (which would probably still result in the pilots taking control).
Grey Templar wrote: Yes and no. You could only hack a current car by physically connecting to it, since they don’t ever go online after they hit the road. A ‘smart car’ in the future would connect periodically, if not continually, for software patches, map updates, etc. like my computer at home does.
First of all you were talking about malicious software being included during development. You need to follow your own argument.
Second of all, it's a completely blind assertion that automated cars will be constantly updated, while other modern cars never will be. Maybe automated cars will only have software updates at dealerships, much like you get satnav maps updated now. Or maybe in the future all cars, automated or not, will have live updates. There's no reason that automated cars will be any different, claiming that's a unique risk to automated cars is just you making stuff up to try and ignore the flaws in your idea.
You weren’t paying attention then. I was talking about both initial construction and updates after the fact. Maybe I wasn’t 100% clear, but it was obvious enough. And you are deluding yourself if you think self driving cars will not get updates with similar frequency to your desktop computer. Especially since such ability to update would be necessary to fix any bugs that are found after development. If your car is unsafe because of a bug you can’t drive it to a dealer for an update, it would need to update from your garage/driveway for that to work. Just for liability reasons if nothing else. And that same functionality will make them extra vulnerable to hacking.
And manually driven cars will still be different than driverless cars. You might be able to hack a regular car remotely eventually, but you’d never be able to actually drive it. That limits what could be done with your hack.
Haighus wrote: Commercial aircraft have been using autopilots for years. Are there any examples of those being hacked? I should think car autopilots will be held to the same standards, which means if there have been a lack of plane incidents, that would suggest car incidents are similarly likely to be incredibly rare.
I am not talking about failures of autopilot programming/sensors that have been corrected due to having pilots onboard, I mean incidents of autopilots being deliberately hacked to cause damage (which would probably still result in the pilots taking control).
Yes and no. As you define it 'to cause damage' then no, not that I know of, but given that there are also several unexplained and missing aircraft, maybe? 'To take control of the aircraft' yes. The Department of Homeland Security managed to pull off penetrating the avionics system of a Boeing 757 (how is classified) in September of 2016 (but not revealed until November of last year) though rumors and FBI warrants have suggested it may have happened before, possibly as far back as 2008, sometimes using the onboard inflight entertainment systems as a point of entry into the aircraft's network.
Boeing, of course, claims that God Himself could not hack our planes.
I meant with the intention of causing damage, because it would be difficult to actually do so sufficiently quickly with the pilots ready to take over. A plane cannot exactly swerve into the car a metre away, so it takes longer to do something bad to the plane.
Ok, so some probable isolated incidents, and one by a massive state actor working in a research position to test the system security.
Haighus wrote: I meant with the intention of causing damage, because it would be difficult to actually do so sufficiently quickly with the pilots ready to take over. A plane cannot exactly swerve into the car a metre away, so it takes longer to do something bad to the plane.
Ok, so some probable isolated incidents, and one by a massive state actor working in a research position to test the system security.
According to one FBI affidavit, a hacker bypassed the autopilot and directly took over the thrust control system. This would preclude pilots being able manually take control of the plane again without the hacker allowing it. However, again, this was done by someone ON the airplane. So...
Haighus wrote:Commercial aircraft have been using autopilots for years. Are there any examples of those being hacked? I should think car autopilots will be held to the same standards, which means if there have been a lack of plane incidents, that would suggest car incidents are similarly likely to be incredibly rare.
I am not talking about failures of autopilot programming/sensors that have been corrected due to having pilots onboard, I mean incidents of autopilots being deliberately hacked to cause damage (which would probably still result in the pilots taking control).
I wouldn't compare those two (aviation and cars). In short: In aviation the defining principle is "humans make mistakes" and all processes are based on that. That's why they have a multitude of checklists and failsafe mechanisms. If a plane crashes it gets investigated and the results are used to improve the process.
With cars the expectation is that the driver has to perform as perfect as possible to stay safe. There are not numerous checklists, no copilots, or similar features. Cars improved from an "it works" situation to become safer while planes start with "it has to be safe because there are hundreds of people on this thing".
Grey Templar wrote: You weren’t paying attention then. I was talking about both initial construction and updates after the fact. Maybe I wasn’t 100% clear, but it was obvious enough. And you are deluding yourself if you think self driving cars will not get updates with similar frequency to your desktop computer. Especially since such ability to update would be necessary to fix any bugs that are found after development. If your car is unsafe because of a bug you can’t drive it to a dealer for an update, it would need to update from your garage/driveway for that to work. Just for liability reasons if nothing else. And that same functionality will make them extra vulnerable to hacking.
And manually driven cars will still be different than driverless cars. You might be able to hack a regular car remotely eventually, but you’d never be able to actually drive it. That limits what could be done with your hack.
While you are partly correct the comparison of a car's computer with a regular desktop is rather bad. They use different hardware and operating systems (usually much simpler) and your car doesn't have to be able to interface with thousands of printers and all kinds of USB knick-knacks. That means they usually have a much, much smaller target area for attacks (but they are still not magically invincible). The same goes for the idea that updates will slow them down like they do with regular computers. Car MCUs usually don't collect cruft like PCs for generic everyday use (because they are used for very specific jobs and are not used to run the entertainment system where convenience is king).
Car companies have some problems when it comes to programming as their industry had to evolve once cars included more and more electronic components but they are also rather conservative when it comes to that. They don't work like games companies or VC funded web startups (quick and reckless) because recalls at that scale and are really expensive for them and they want to avoid those if possible (and they still feth up a lot). If I remember correctly the creator μTorrent worked as a programmer for a company in the automotive industry before switching to the consumer after μTorrent. In the early μTorrent versions you could see traces of his old work pattern. Very compact yet efficient, few bugs (probably mostly due to how the program had to interface with all kinds of consumer OS features).
Cars have already been hacked. Some time ago there were a few rather public articles about how somebody was able to gain control of some parts of a Land Rover (I think) electronics and shut it down and do some minor mischief which doesn't sound bad until you think about what could happen if somebody were to shut down your car on a highway at high speed. And there were multiple instances of electronic keys not being sufficiently secure. An autopilot isn't needed to create a lot of damage with or to a car.
Haighus wrote:Commercial aircraft have been using autopilots for years. Are there any examples of those being hacked? I should think car autopilots will be held to the same standards, which means if there have been a lack of plane incidents, that would suggest car incidents are similarly likely to be incredibly rare.
I am not talking about failures of autopilot programming/sensors that have been corrected due to having pilots onboard, I mean incidents of autopilots being deliberately hacked to cause damage (which would probably still result in the pilots taking control).
You're also looking at whether or not they keep the autopilot connected to a wifi signal to allow the Autopilot constant updates. If my computer, for instance, is disconnected from an internet source, during that period the ONLY way someone could hack it is to physically walk up to it. Harder to do that to a plane. Now, if they're satellite linked and constantly updating, then that's the issue. And also can the autopilot be isolated once connection is made? All questions we don't have ready answers for unless we have some commercial pilots or other professionals in the travel industry on here to sign in and chime in.
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Just Tony wrote: The bolded is something that I have a legitimate concern about. Anyone with electronic devices knows that processing speed is affected the more stuff you fill a hard drive with. Can they rate exactly how many updates this computer can take before the slower processing speed prevents it from performing a safety correction in time? Do we have to basically swap out the drive once a year? Are we going to have official versions of the programming with the updates that are more compressed? I have a desktop at my house that is only about five or six years old. When I first got it, it could run Mark of Chaos: Battle March with no lag time at all. Load times in game were phenomenally fast. It may have been two years in when running the exact same game started to experience noticeable lag when trying to load battles or that town screen where you replace your troops etc. I can't imagine that a self driving car is going to have some magical drive that doesn't suffer from t hose issues with updates.
You don't need a magical drive, you just need proper software design. Unlike a PC you aren't going to be installing a bunch of new stuff on top of the existing data. In fact, you aren't going to have control over the software at all. An update can wipe the drive entirely at every update cycle (other than a small amount of space required for the updater code) and replace it with a fresh copy of the latest version of the software.
Then somebody needs to tell AT&T that is possible while I still have memory left on my phone...
Ok, lots of discussion on the aviation comparison. My thoughts are that there is clearly a precedent, so car companies should be liasing with the existing industry, and should ideally be held to similar standards in many regards.
The current car industry operates differently, but I think the new automated industry could operate more simarly to the aviation model if they are regulated as such in these early stages. Although robust regulation in this day and age seems to be a rarity...
Grey Templar wrote: And you are deluding yourself if you think self driving cars will not get updates with similar frequency to your desktop computer.
I am explaining to you that you are are making up completely unfounded assumptions. There is nothing saying automated cars will be treated like PC software. It is unknown, but it is at least as likely that they'll be treated like the existing software in cars is right now - with updates performed at dealerships. This is even likely to be regulated, as implementation testing will probably be required after each update. Hell, the industry will probably lobby for this as it ties you to your dealership and makes it more likely that's where you'll get your car serviced.
If your car is unsafe because of a bug you can’t drive it to a dealer for an update, it would need to update from your garage/driveway for that to work.
What in the hell? Right now cars are regularly recalled. They are driven to the dealers and fixed. Just last year my car was caught up in the air bag debacle, and I drove it to the dealership where the air bag was replaced.
Automated cars that are due for software updates will be approached the same way. Because people understand that just because a car is identified as having a problem that will cause some accidents as 10,000 units each drive their next 100,000 kms, that doesn't mean those cars are deadly dangerous death on wheels that can't be driven to the dealership.
Just for liability reasons if nothing else.
You raise liability issues, but don't see the liability issues in remote, blind software updates.
What's really ridiculous about this is you've identified a whole bunch of problems with remote, blind updates to the software. If you were being sensible you would conclude that remote updates are a bad idea, and that's probably why they won't be used. Instead you just insist remote updates are bad and lurch to 'and therefore automated cars are bad', without ever stopping to think that maybe if remote updates are bad they just won't use them.
It's all very silly and you should stop.
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BaronIveagh wrote: Boeing, of course, claims that God Himself could not hack our planes.
Sure, but God is really old. The old people I know type with two fingers and refer to it as 'the google'. And God is older than them. God's hacking skills are probably pretty limited, it what I'm saying.
Here is the flaw in your view, illustrated with a story.
We have some driverless cars. Suddenly, there is a recall regarding their software. They all have a glitch which causes them to mistake pedestrians crossing the street for harmless trash or leaves blowing in the wind. Now, all the cars need a software update to fix this. But they can only be updated at a dealership.
Oooops, We have a problem here. In order to fix the issue, the cars all have to drive to the dealership. But their current software guarantees that if they encounter a pedestrian crossing a road they'll fail to avoid the pedestrian. All those driverless cars obediently go to a dealership to get the update, but a few of them will hit some pedestrians on the way there and cause even more havoc. Which the driverless car companies will be liable for because they are, legally speaking, the ones responsible for what the cars do while they are driving on the road.
That is why these updates will happen at home via the internet and not at a dealership, just like your computer sometimes updates its OS via the internet. You'd be a moronic car company not to do your software updates just like a company like Microsoft does the updates for their computer operating systems.
It would also be far cheaper than having every dealership do each car individually as it comes in instead of just queuing up an update and having each car update its software while its parked somewhere with WiFi access, most likely overnight while its not being used. This is probably an even bigger reason you'd have remote updates, just trying to save some money. In this case a lot of money.
Customers as well I think wouldn't appreciate being told "Your car's software needs an update. Your car will now detour to the nearest licensed dealer for an update. We apologize for the inconvenience!" while they're in the middle of trying to go somewhere. And its not like a software update for a complex computer system necessary on a driverless car would be a once a year thing, it would be a monthly if not weekly occurrence. Just going by how often my computer has to download small updates.
There is liability either way for these driverless car manufacturers, but for them the better choice would be having the cars update remotely. Because its looks less bad for your cars to get hacked by a terrorist via your remote updates than for your cars to kill people while they're traveling to get an update that you told them to get/its worth the risk to save $ by not having dealerships update cars manually.
They have wifi for the passengers. They connect to smartphone apps to let the driver prep them or lock them remotely. They tell the system where they are and what they are doing, so the satnav can provide the best route and the maker can get remote data on performance.
Kilkrazy wrote: A lot of modern cars are online all the time.
They have wifi for the passengers. They connect to smartphone apps to let the driver prep them or lock them remotely. They tell the system where they are and what they are doing, so the satnav can provide the best route and the maker can get remote data on performance.
So at worst, currently, an outside source could foul someone's GPS and misdirect them. Cars are still piloted by humans currently, so the damage would be minimal. Now, a great test run for someone trying to hack would be to see if they could cause the parallel park assist to guff up. If that was plausible, then sitting in wait until the transportation industry automates and utilize what they've learned to pull a truck off the side of the road to rob it. I'm not even thinking as big as turning a vehicle into a WMD, I'm looking at something as small as create a vulnerability window to take advantage of. You wouldn't even have to feel threatened by the anti-automation crowd sabotaging the process, tech savvy gang members could ruin the whole thing.
Fun fact: as I'm sitting here at work, being as vague as possible to not violate any NDA I might violate, an automated system is down for the 3rd time this week. Near as I can see, it's a simple communication issue between aspects of the operation, but the robot is still refusing to process the entire rest of the job that is unaffected by that one section of the cell. Now for a nifty exercise: picture that happening with a vehicle that has a family in it at 75 MPH on the interstate because of trust in the AI.
Just Tony wrote: And also can the autopilot be isolated once connection is made?
Isolated while still functioning? Depends on the autopilot, but probably not a very relevant question. The autopilot is not your PC/phone, you don't type in an address and tell it to go download something. You can't send the pilot an email with a fake link to the update page and get them to download your hack. It's connecting to a very specific address to send/receive very specific data, and none of that in any way interacts with the software that actually moves the controls. You're downloading GPS updates, current weather information, etc, that goes into an entirely separate location. It's possible that someone with detailed knowledge of a particular autopilot and airplane combination could find a way to exploit it, but it is certainly not an easy task at all. You'd probably have to start by compromising the other end of the system and getting your malicious code onto the server the plane is trying to connect to for its updates. And you'd almost certainly have to find a major bug in the software to exploit, without something seriously wrong with the system's code it would be an impossible task.
Isolated, who cares if it functions? Effortlessly. Pull one circuit breaker, which can be reached within seconds, and the plane is immediately back on manual control. Any pilot knows this resolution to a malfunctioning autopilot.
(Minor nitpick that the "autopilot" on a plane is a particular piece of hardware that probably never receives updates, and things like the flight planning tools/GPS database/etc are separate components. But the general discussion applies just fine to the broader category of the airplane's computer systems as a whole.)
Then somebody needs to tell AT&T that is possible while I still have memory left on my phone...
Again, you're making an invalid comparison. Your phone can't use the same approach to updates and accumulated junk data because that approach is not compatible with what you as a customer want. AT&T could easily make your phone work indefinitely without slowing down, but it would require a complete wipe and factory-new reset with every update. And I suspect you'd be pretty unhappy if every update deleted everything you have on your phone. So, instead, they have to use an update system where everything already on the phone is preserved and you never get a complete "nuke it all" reset. That allows junk data to accumulate, more and more processes to start running in the background and eating resources, etc.
The same is not true of a car's control computer. You don't have any data to keep, each update can completely wipe the hard drive and install a fresh copy of the software. You can't have accumulated garbage slowing everything down because nothing is allowed to accumulate. And you certainly don't have to allow idiot users to download every random app they find, regardless of the source. The manufacturer has full control over exactly what is on that computer at all times.
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Just Tony wrote: Fun fact: as I'm sitting here at work, being as vague as possible to not violate any NDA I might violate, an automated system is down for the 3rd time this week. Near as I can see, it's a simple communication issue between aspects of the operation, but the robot is still refusing to process the entire rest of the job that is unaffected by that one section of the cell. Now for a nifty exercise: picture that happening with a vehicle that has a family in it at 75 MPH on the interstate because of trust in the AI.
Ok, I'm picturing it. The AI system encounters the communication issue and determines that it is a fatal one preventing continued safe operation. The AI turns on the hazard lights, brings the engine to idle, and applies controlled braking to stop the vehicle. Once the vehicle is stopped it either shuts down there (safest, but inconvenient to other drivers) or enters a recover mode where the vehicle's speed is capped at 5mph and location can not exceed a short distance of the initial incident, allowing the vehicle to be pulled off the road. This happens because the engineers involved in the project understand how safety-critical software works and have paid attention to fail-safe systems and good error handling.
Now picture this alternative scenario: the human driver is texting while driving at 95mph on the interstate because something very important is happening. The driver loses control of their vehicle, crosses the median, and hits another car head-on. Everyone in both vehicles is instantly killed.
Now could you explain why the AI situation is considered an unacceptable level of risk, while the situation with the human driver is just taken for granted as the price of having cars and nobody uses it as an argument for banning human drivers?
You answered my question fairly quick about autopilot, and it can be disabled/isolated from external influence on the fly.
To me, yes I CAN deal with a phone wipe/reinstall. I save my contacts to my SIM, and my SD holds my pics, so anything else is completely superfluous and doesn't need to save every last whatever that's been done with it. But that's me, not the populace at large.
So when they automate the entire world, lag and hard drive space won't be a problem. Nifty. A little unbelievable, but nifty.
Last but not least, in direct response to you picturing the engineers involved who paid attention to good error handling: pedestrian=plastic bag. We already have a documented example of how "infallible" this sort of design by committee could be.
And since we're playing whataboutism and cherry picking the worst possible scenario to further our points, I submit the middle aged person who doesn't text and maintains situational awareness while driving safely wherever they need to go without ever experiencing an accident despite having people littering his traffic stream who are foreign college students with no driving experience and drive constantly distracted (This'd be me, for the record) and we'll compare it to a comp crash that shuts down the engine completely which lock up the gearing preventing the wheels of the car from turning and flip it end over end in high traffic on the interstate at 75 MPH because reasons.
Now, if you want to have a genuine dialogue, can you say with a serious face that AI and automated systems operate REMOTELY flawlessly enough to not warrant at least some concern?
For the record, I don't view some 16 year old twit who's Facebooking while driving as an acceptable level of risk. I'd personally love it if cars had jammers inside rendering phones inoperative.
Just Tony wrote: So when they automate the entire world, lag and hard drive space won't be a problem. Nifty. A little unbelievable, but nifty.
Again, you're comparing situations that are not at all similar, considering "automate the world" as a single problem, and ignoring the reasons why lag and hard drive space aren't an issue in certain cases. Automating the world will produce issues with lag and hard drive space, in cases where the user has data to preserve, gets to install their own software on a device, etc. In fact, it may even be a problem if cars get phone-like entertainment devices for the passengers. But it won't be an issue for the AI driving software because the manufacturer controls it, not the user. Tools that are not available for consumer-controlled devices like a phone are available for manufacturer-controlled devices, and those tools can eliminate lag and hard drive space.
Last but not least, in direct response to you picturing the engineers involved who paid attention to good error handling: pedestrian=plastic bag. We already have a documented example of how "infallible" this sort of design by committee could be.
You are confusing rare edge-case scenarios with common error handling. The vision system interpreting an image incorrectly is an entirely different failure case compared to the question of how, when the car encounters an internal error, that error is handled.
And since we're playing whataboutism and cherry picking the worst possible scenario to further our points
I'm not cherry picking the worst possible scenario, I'm describing the risk level of a common human driver. Lots of people text while driving, and only by sheer luck do they avoid having accidents. A real worst-case scenario on the level of yours would be someone texting while driving 95mph on the interstate while drunk and also deliberately attempting to kill people in an act of terrorism and suffering a medical crisis that prevents them from turning the steering wheel properly.
we'll compare it to a comp crash that shuts down the engine completely which lock up the gearing preventing the wheels of the car from turning and flip it end over end in high traffic on the interstate at 75 MPH because reasons.
This has nothing to do with AI driving software. The engine control software that could completely shut down the engine like that is already running on your car. If this was actually a relevant risk we would see it happening already. But we don't. And the fact that you present this as if it was a relevant risk just shows how poorly you understand the issues involved.
Now, if you want to have a genuine dialogue, can you say with a serious face that AI and automated systems operate REMOTELY flawlessly enough to not warrant at least some concern?
The fact that you are asking this question at all just demonstrates that you have very little understanding of the subject. The standard is not "flawless", it's "better than human drivers, who are absolutely terrible at driving and produce horrifying risk levels". Of course first-generation automated systems will not be flawless, and we should continue to work on improving them. But even in a badly flawed state they can be better than the alternative, and we should replace human drivers with that flawed AI for a net improvement in safety. The only argument against this is to take for granted that human drivers will kill people and that's ok, while using every single death to an AI vehicle as grounds for banning AI vehicles.
Grey Templar wrote: Here is the flaw in your view, illustrated with a story.
Your story is obviously ridiculous, and it's clear you're not even trying to think about this sensibly.
You suggest a critical software flaw that produces a significant chance of a fatality every time the car travels a short distance. Which is a staggeringly silly scenario to begin with, but then you double down on that by assuming that if that were to happen, then there's no alternative but to just send the cars to the dealership with fingers crossed. You're trying to pretend that tow trucks don't exist.
That's the sum total of your argument. 'What if they released automated cars that are so crappy they kill people every few miles, then everyone forgets tow trucks exist... then they'd need to have remote updates and that means they could be hacked by terrorists turning all the cars in to death traps!'
I don't like doing this. I don't want to be mean. But what's the alternative when you keep putting this nonsense up? So please just admit you really didn't think your initial idea through, then you got caught up in protecting your ego and starting making stuff that didn't make any sense, and we can all stop.
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Kilkrazy wrote: A lot of modern cars are online all the time.
They have wifi for the passengers. They connect to smartphone apps to let the driver prep them or lock them remotely. They tell the system where they are and what they are doing, so the satnav can provide the best route and the maker can get remote data on performance.
There's a big and obvious difference between being on-line for satnav etc, and being able to update core software.
sebster wrote: You're trying to pretend that tow trucks don't exist.
You don't even need tow trucks; the dealership will be connecting the car to a laptop or doing some short-range update, so there's no reason the dealers technician can't come to the broken car(s).
But you (as in one) needs to appreciate that cars are tested before going out into production and again before the real world, so a bug that causes them to mow down every pedestrian they encounter will never make it onto the road. There will be edge cases like this pedestrian-pushing-bike-on-freeway issue, and the odds of that being triggered if automated cars have to return to a dealership or update point are minimal. If the update goes wrong, it should be detectable before the car is allowed to drive off.
It's not without flaws; there will be some way to confuse the cars, but there should be sufficient fail-safes in place to prevent them doing more than getting lost or stopping in the middle of the road.
As said, the bar for automated cars is to be better than people, which at the moment is 1.18 fatalities per million vehicle miles traveled. Ideally we want that to drop to 0 but anything under 1.18 is better than humans are doing.
The problem at this stage is more political/social than technological - people are terrified of letting cars drive themselves. I suspect that by the time my kids or their kids can drive, if they even need to, then automated cars will be no big deal.
Herzlos wrote: You don't even need tow trucks; the dealership will be connecting the car to a laptop or doing some short-range update, so there's no reason the dealers technician can't come to the broken car(s).
You're not considering that in the future the same space virus that destroyed the tow trucks also caused all employees of car dealerships to develop an acute form of agoraphobia that prevents them ever leaving the dealership.
But you (as in one) needs to appreciate that cars are tested before going out into production and again before the real world, so a bug that causes them to mow down every pedestrian they encounter will never make it onto the road.
I thought I covered that in a very unsubtle way;
"You suggest a critical software flaw that produces a significant chance of a fatality every time the car travels a short distance. Which is a staggeringly silly scenario to begin with..."
Grey Templar wrote: Yes and no. You could only hack a current car by physically connecting to it, since they don’t ever go online after they hit the road. A ‘smart car’ in the future would connect periodically, if not continually, for software patches, map updates, etc. like my computer at home does.
First of all you were talking about malicious software being included during development. You need to follow your own argument.
Second of all, it's a completely blind assertion that automated cars will be constantly updated, while other modern cars never will be. Maybe automated cars will only have software updates at dealerships, much like you get satnav maps updated now. Or maybe in the future all cars, automated or not, will have live updates. There's no reason that automated cars will be any different, claiming that's a unique risk to automated cars is just you making stuff up to try and ignore the flaws in your idea.
You weren’t paying attention then. I was talking about both initial construction and updates after the fact. Maybe I wasn’t 100% clear, but it was obvious enough. And you are deluding yourself if you think self driving cars will not get updates with similar frequency to your desktop computer. Especially since such ability to update would be necessary to fix any bugs that are found after development. If your car is unsafe because of a bug you can’t drive it to a dealer for an update, it would need to update from your garage/driveway for that to work. Just for liability reasons if nothing else. And that same functionality will make them extra vulnerable to hacking.
And manually driven cars will still be different than driverless cars. You might be able to hack a regular car remotely eventually, but you’d never be able to actually drive it. That limits what could be done with your hack.
My friend works for Centcom at MacDill Airforce Base, and the first thing he did when he got his new truck was take the blue tooth out. Thats all I need to know about wireless tech in my car.
I will never, ever trust a self-driving car. Nor do I want to get used to riding in one to where I sit and watch Netflix without a care. But I know trucking companies drool over this, so I see if happening at some point.
But I don't see this asked much, nor answered, but for insurance and legal reasons, if your 'auto-pilot' is responsible for an accident, especially one that results in a death, who is responsible? The manufacturer for the auto-pilot? What if you missed a key update? Is it all on you? I mean, the litigation storm on the horizon is going to be messy. And what if an auto-pilot hits you and doesn't stop? I mean, its going to be f'in crazy I can't believe people think this isn't going to be a massive cluster f.
I enjoy driving, so not going to give that up. Plus I am a control freak. I don't even like friends and family driving, so damn will never let my car drive itself while I nap.
KTG17 wrote: My friend works for Centcom at MacDill Airforce Base, and the first thing he did when he got his new truck was take the blue tooth out. Thats all I need to know about wireless tech in my car.
Oh really? Does your friend actually work in a security-related area where he would be expected to have significant technical knowledge about computer security, especially for such a specialized application? Or are you just assuming that because he works in the building he must be an expert? I mean, technically the janitor there "works for Centcom at MacDill Airforce Base", but I wouldn't trust them with security decisions or give any credibility to their choices.
I will never, ever trust a self-driving car.
That's a pretty short-sighted view given that self-driving cars will, if not already, soon be safer than human-driven cars. Do you have a good reason for believing that human drivers, with all their well-demonstrated flaws and constant fatal accidents, are going to be safer? Or just reflexive paranoia about technology?
I enjoy driving, so not going to give that up.
You likely won't have a choice about it. Once self-driving cars demonstrate a better safety record than human drivers (a very low bar to clear) they will likely become mandatory and human drivers will no longer be allowed on public roads.
Grey Templar wrote: Here is the flaw in your view, illustrated with a story.
Your story is obviously ridiculous, and it's clear you're not even trying to think about this sensibly.
You suggest a critical software flaw that produces a significant chance of a fatality every time the car travels a short distance. Which is a staggeringly silly scenario to begin with, but then you double down on that by assuming that if that were to happen, then there's no alternative but to just send the cars to the dealership with fingers crossed. You're trying to pretend that tow trucks don't exist.
That's the sum total of your argument. 'What if they released automated cars that are so crappy they kill people every few miles, then everyone forgets tow trucks exist... then they'd need to have remote updates and that means they could be hacked by terrorists turning all the cars in to death traps!'
I don't like doing this. I don't want to be mean. But what's the alternative when you keep putting this nonsense up? So please just admit you really didn't think your initial idea through, then you got caught up in protecting your ego and starting making stuff that didn't make any sense, and we can all stop.
Really? They're going to send Tow Trucks to collect potentially thousands upon thousands of cars? And they're going to do this with every software update? Instead of the easy solution of remote updates via the internet, that every other similarly complex computer uses already. And yes, in your scenario the only way for the cars to be fixed is for them to come to the dealership. Because you are suggesting that cars will not be hackable because they'll not be connecting to the internet at all and will receive updates only via direct linkups while being serviced. You proposed this scenario dude.
And I didn't pull this critical software flaw example out of thin air. It was an actual software flaw that happened with a real driverless car, and it actually killed someone. Your proposal to make these cars immune to remote hacking would make such a critical flaw(again, a flaw that actually happened) more difficult to fix, because the cars would have to be brought to the dealership. Either driving themselves(meaning those flawed vehicles are on the road with a critical error), sending technicians out to each car individually(impractical and hideously expensive given how often a complex computer like a self-driving car would need to be updated), or have a towtruck bring the cars in individually(again impractical and hideously expensive).
Many factors are in play here forcing driverless cars to be developed in a certain way, and they are going to result in cars which can be hacked remotely. Its far easier, cheaper, and makes more sense in every way for these cars to get software updates remotely. The only negative here is that they become susceptible to remote hacking. The question is, is that an acceptable downside for the benefits of Driverless Cars?
And I don't get why you insist on bringing ego into. The only person making any deal over ego is you Seb. Stop trying to appear and feel superior with your "If you'd only think this through" and "I don't like doing this" crap.
But you (as in one) needs to appreciate that cars are tested before going out into production and again before the real world, so a bug that causes them to mow down every pedestrian they encounter will never make it onto the road.
I'm sure the self-driving car that mistook the jaywalker for a plastic bag got tested with jaywalkers before it got sent out, and yet someone still got killed.
Bugs can also be created unintentionally with software updates. Changing one part of the code can have unexpected consequences elsewhere. And thats ignoring any deliberate acts of sabotage.
Sure, a bug that causes a car to maliciously run over every pedestrian will get caught. One which causes the car to run someone over when there is a certain light level or there is additional debris might not, and this bug might happen in the real world much more often than you'd think.
Grey Templar wrote: Really? They're going to send Tow Trucks to collect potentially thousands upon thousands of cars? And they're going to do this with every software update?
You claimed it was for updates that rendered cars so unreliable they're dangerous to be on the roads. Now you shift to 'every software update'. You're all over the place.
Instead of the easy solution of remote updates via the internet
Out of one side of your mouth you're claiming remote updates are so easy, then out of the other side you're claiming remote updates make cars . You have to pick one of these things - either remote updates are just fine, or remote updates are a terrible security risk.
that every other similarly complex computer uses already.
It isn't about complexity, but about the consequences of a bad update. A computer update is a bit buggy then Battletech won't load. A car update is a bit buggy, and there's a ton of metal moving at 80mph with a sensor failure.
Because you are suggesting that cars will not be hackable because they'll not be connecting to the internet at all
Nope, didn't say that. You're making things up.
And I didn't pull this critical software flaw example out of thin air. It was an actual software flaw that happened with a real driverless car, and it actually killed someone.
You're ignoring the difference between prototype models and final consumer production versions. You're ignoring the very concept of 'prototype'.
How much longer are we going to keep doing this? Seriously, I'm getting that puppy kicking feeling and it's not fun. I know you don't like me mentioning that, but it is what it is. So seriously, you're argument isn't going to suddenly came back from the ashes if you just make one more post throwing in new made up stuff. And knowing me, I'm gonna feel compelled to just keep pointing out all the mistakes in your theory every time. So where does this silly nonsense end?
Grey Templar wrote: One which causes the car to run someone over when there is a certain light level or there is additional debris might not, and this bug might happen in the real world much more often than you'd think.
Now you're back to using the wrong standard. Yes, a bug like that can slip in, but does it really matter? It's a rare edge-case situation, and we still haven't done anything to solve common bugs with human drivers such as "driving while drunk and killing someone" or "texting while driving and killing someone". It would be nice to fix the bug, obviously, but even if the solution is "fix it next time the owner brings their car in for an oil change" it may result in fewer deaths than allowing human drivers to continue to exist.
Grey Templar wrote: Really? They're going to send Tow Trucks to collect potentially thousands upon thousands of cars? And they're going to do this with every software update?
You claimed it was for updates that rendered cars so unreliable they're dangerous to be on the roads. Now you shift to 'every software update'. You're all over the place.
You're the one who suggested towtrucks in the first place, so you tell me what the towtrucks are for.
Instead of the easy solution of remote updates via the internet
Out of one side of your mouth you're claiming remote updates are so easy, then out of the other side you're claiming remote updates make cars . You have to pick one of these things - either remote updates are just fine, or remote updates are a terrible security risk.
Obviously its both. The updates are easy, and safe in the sense that if there is a critical flaw that is discovered the car can be patched remotely. While at the same time it is a security risk because it is exposing the car to outside interference. It can be both. I'm sure you are able to see that.
that every other similarly complex computer uses already.
It isn't about complexity, but about the consequences of a bad update. A computer update is a bit buggy then Battletech won't load. A car update is a bit buggy, and there's a ton of metal moving at 80mph with a sensor failure.
Yes.
Because you are suggesting that cars will not be hackable because they'll not be connecting to the internet at all
Nope, didn't say that. You're making things up.
You seem to be arguing that bad guys couldn't hack driverless cars for terrorism purposes, so yes.
And I didn't pull this critical software flaw example out of thin air. It was an actual software flaw that happened with a real driverless car, and it actually killed someone.
You're ignoring the difference between prototype models and final consumer production versions. You're ignoring the very concept of 'prototype'.
I'm sure that makes a big difference to the person who got run over. And like being a "final production version" will magically make the car less likely to have fatal flaws or software glitches. Computers still get software glitches after they've been released to the consumer, so I'm not sure what you're even trying to say.
How much longer are we going to keep doing this? Seriously, I'm getting that puppy kicking feeling and it's not fun. I know you don't like me mentioning that, but it is what it is. So seriously, you're argument isn't going to suddenly came back from the ashes if you just make one more post throwing in new made up stuff. And knowing me, I'm gonna feel compelled to just keep pointing out all the mistakes in your theory every time. So where does this silly nonsense end?
Again with the saying stuff to make yourself feel morally and intellectually superior. Its a habit you have, and not an endearing one. I suggest you be an adult and leave if you can't exercise some self-control.
Grey Templar wrote: You're the one who suggested towtrucks in the first place, so you tell me what the towtrucks are for.
Don't play dumb. I pointed out vehicles are taken to dealerships right now to fix issues. You said this was flawed, and invented the story of a glitch so terrible that "a few of them will hit some pedestrians on the way there". I explained that a software flaw so extreme would be extremely unlikely in a final consumer model, and if such an error were to present then tow trucks could be used to get the deadly dangerous cars to the dealership. At which point you claimed that tow trucks would be needed for every single update that happened. I pointed out that was ridiculous, because the tow trucks would only needed in your hypothetical of cars with a glitch so serious it's deadly just putting them on the road.
At which point we get to your last post, where you've now decided you're now very confused about the concept of tow trucks, and when they would and wouldn't be needed.
Obviously its both. The updates are easy, and safe in the sense that if there is a critical flaw that is discovered the car can be patched remotely. While at the same time it is a security risk because it is exposing the car to outside interference. It can be both. I'm sure you are able to see that.
Which means either the security risk of remote updates is so minimal that it's not worth talking about, or the security risk is very serious, in which case we won't use remote updates. You're trying to have it both ways, presenting remote access as a real threat, but also a threat no-one will avoid with a simple measure.
Yes.
And yet you insist that systems will updated with the same 'it should be okay' approach we take to updating PCs. Okay.
You seem to be arguing that bad guys couldn't hack driverless cars for terrorism purposes, so yes.
Nope, not arguing that at all. You're just making up random stuff.
And like being a "final production version" will magically make the car less likely to have fatal flaws or software glitches.
That's literally what the development process is. That's why we have prototypes, to identify and reduce flaws and glitches before production.
You've now put yourself in a place where you're arguing against the concept of product development.
Again with the saying stuff to make yourself feel morally and intellectually superior. Its a habit you have, and not an endearing one. I suggest you be an adult and leave if you can't exercise some self-control.
Why would I try and endear myself to you? What on earth makes you think I'm sitting here hoping the guy spouting ever expanding nonsense about nothing is someone I really want to have endeared to me?
Grey Templar wrote: Computers still get software glitches after they've been released to the consumer, so I'm not sure what you're even trying to say.
You're making the same common error that has already been made far too often in this thread. Your average PC is not a relevant comparison for two reasons:
1) Normal PC software development is not safety-critical software like a car's automated driving software. It doesn't have to go through the same level of review and testing, and companies are encouraged to use a "sell now, patch later" approach because customers want their stuff ASAP. Nothing is at stake if a bug happens, so why spend vast amounts of time and money on preventing them in advance? Safety-critical stuff, on the other hand, does get that investment and bugs are much less likely.
2) Normal PC software has a major comparability burden to deal with. It has to run on a near-infinite combination of hardware, it has to play nicely with everything else you have installed, the operating system has to allow any random software to run, etc. Because the customers demand the ability to do whatever they want with their PC the software developers can't use some powerful tools to keep bugs (and active hacking) under control. And testing all of these possible interactions is effectively impossible, especially with the budget constraints imposed (see factor #1). Single-task software like a car's driving system doesn't have to deal with that. It runs on known hardware with known other software, and the original manufacturer has full control over both parts. There's no "oops, this other game you installed modified a key file and now your game can't run" because nobody but the original manufacturer has any access to that computer.
The more relevant comparison would be with the engine computer your car is currently using. How often have you patched the software on it? I'd be willing to bet that the answer to that is extremely rarely, if ever.
KTG17 wrote: My friend works for Centcom at MacDill Airforce Base, and the first thing he did when he got his new truck was take the blue tooth out. Thats all I need to know about wireless tech in my car.
Oh really? Does your friend actually work in a security-related area where he would be expected to have significant technical knowledge about computer security, especially for such a specialized application? Or are you just assuming that because he works in the building he must be an expert? I mean, technically the janitor there "works for Centcom at MacDill Airforce Base", but I wouldn't trust them with security decisions or give any credibility to their choices.
Yeah! He is the janitor! Does all the floors and everything! When I told him about your post, he assured me that he knew what was going on, and not to be worried, 'he knows a guy'. Then he showed me his new mop and explained how it cleaned up the floor better than other mops.
Humor aside, do you really think I am going to put your opinion over his? Come on.
I will never, ever trust a self-driving car.
That's a pretty short-sighted view given that self-driving cars will, if not already, soon be safer than human-driven cars. Do you have a good reason for believing that human drivers, with all their well-demonstrated flaws and constant fatal accidents, are going to be safer? Or just reflexive paranoia about technology?
No its not short sighted. I am a software developer by career. I know a thing or two about developing. I also know a thing or two about software issues, and the time and money it takes to resolve them. And how management will ignore many of them due to time and cost. There will be millions and millions of lines of code written to handle god knows the amount of real life variables that can occur just driving to work. I would rather put the responsibility of getting there in the hands of a driver than a bunch of procedures written by god knows who. My iPhone freezes, my laptop needs a reboot at times, gak happens. Do I want to deal with that while on the road? Nevermind the fact that none of it will be standard among manufacturers. I will have to just trust the same companies who don't always make recalls on certain parts because they feel they are too expensive to do, so they will just deal with the litigation. No thanks.
I enjoy driving, so not going to give that up.
You likely won't have a choice about it. Once self-driving cars demonstrate a better safety record than human drivers (a very low bar to clear) they will likely become mandatory and human drivers will no longer be allowed on public roads.
One day that might happen, but it wont happen in our lifetime.
Are you in the self-driving car field? You sure are pushing this pretty hard.
Something to consider about drivers and how seriously we take the dangers of human drivers.
We let 16 year olds operate cars anywhere they want once licensed with few restrictions. However, in a commercial kitchen a 16 year old is not even allowed to use a knife with no option to be licensed for safety reasons.
Let's all think about that for a moment.
Clearly, as a society we have let convenience of travel and movement trump safety concerns about human drivers. Why are we being stricter on robots driving?
Easy E wrote: Something to consider about drivers and how seriously we take the dangers of human drivers.
We let 16 year olds operate cars anywhere they want once licensed with few restrictions. However, in a commercial kitchen a 16 year old is not even allowed to use a knife with no option to be licensed for safety reasons.
Let's all think about that for a moment.
Clearly, as a society we have let convenience of travel and movement trump safety concerns about human drivers. Why are we being stricter on robots driving?
At 16 I was not allowed to be hired at an auto parts store, because you had to be 18 to use the pipe cutter (for some reason). Another parts shop couldn't hire me because they used ladders that were too tall for a 16 y/o to climb on.
And I know it's been pointed out numerous times in this thread but, despite growing numbers of laws against it, I STILL see at least half a dozen times per day: people talking on phone, with phone to ear while driving, doing makeup while driving, eating while driving (hey, I'm guilty of this one), texting while driving, and all kinds of distractions going on behind the wheel. . . The reason why the law books keep getting bigger and thicker on this subject is simple: these things cause accidents, and many times are deadly. These are all things an automated driving system would not be doing. But these automated systems are not to a point today, where they are feasible. However, I do think that when it works, it will work better than any of the above drivers.
No its not short sighted. I am a software developer by career. I know a thing or two about developing. I also know a thing or two about software issues, and the time and money it takes to resolve them. And how management will ignore many of them due to time and cost. There will be millions and millions of lines of code written to handle god knows the amount of real life variables that can occur just driving to work. I would rather put the responsibility of getting there in the hands of a driver than a bunch of procedures written by god knows who.
What kind of software do you do? Cars will all be using something that's adhering to MISRA and an appropriate ASIL (Automotive Safety Integrity Level) level, with lots of checks, they won't just be code thrown together for a website.
My iPhone freezes, my laptop needs a reboot at times, gak happens.
They are both running an OS that needs to handle all sorts of software running on all sorts of hardware, which introduces bloat and incompatibilities.
Your car will be running an embedded OS with just the code it needs to run on that set of hardware. There will probably be a head unit that resembled a phone OS but it won't be in any way responsible for making the decisions on what the car does. It'll likely make requests about configuration changes but all the real work will be done by a 'secure' system.
And it's not a case of whether you trust a computer to drive the car, but do you trust computers to drive cars better than a random selection of people?
Your car will be running an embedded OS with just the code it needs to run on that set of hardware. There will probably be a head unit that resembled a phone OS but it won't be in any way responsible for making the decisions on what the car does. It'll likely make requests about configuration changes but all the real work will be done by a 'secure' system.
And it's not a case of whether you trust a computer to drive the car, but do you trust computers to drive cars better than a random selection of people?
A little to this point, when I bought my most recent car, I was told by the sales guy that my vehicle has 220 different computers on board. I didn't believe him. . . Finance lady said the same gak, and it wasn't until the mechanics echoed the same thing that I started to believe them.
Many of the "computers" on board modern automobiles are more akin to calculators than laptops, as in, they have one specific job and everything about them supports doing only that one thing.
Remember the Pinto? The car with a design flaw that made it burst into flames in even a low speed collision?
Exactly. The Pinto is famous as one of the great disasters of car manufacturing. Its design flaw caused 27 deaths over a 10 year period, with 3 million cars sold. That's the level of danger that causes people to be outraged, and a car to be removed from the market with immense reputational harm to its manufacturer. In contrast, Gray Templar is arguing that self-driving cars would be expected to have such design flaws that we couldn't risk them driving to the local dealership for updates, and that such things would be routine, and that both consumers and manufacturers would accept this as the normal course of events.
Thanks for adding further details making clear how ridiculous Gray Templar's position was. I'm sure that was your intention.
sebster wrote: and that both consumers and manufacturers would accept this as the normal course of events.
No, but thanks for playing.
The point was (since you clearly can't figure it out so I must walk you through it like a small child) that the sort of flaw that you're claiming could never happen has happened before. Things like the Pinto have slipped through quality control and regulation. So, saying that what Grey Templar is arguing is impossible is to not only ignore the past, but also how auto manufacturers go about deciding if a recall is warranted.
"You must be this disastrous to ride'. ______
Interestingly, if the owners are likely to all die, a recall is actually less likely than if only some of them are likely to die. This is because the math for a recall goes something like this: Does the cost of a recall meet or exceed expected lawsuit costs?
sebster wrote: and that both consumers and manufacturers would accept this as the normal course of events.
No, but thanks for playing.
The point was (since you clearly can't figure it out so I must walk you through it like a small child) that the sort of flaw that you're claiming could never happen has happened before. Things like the Pinto have slipped through quality control and regulation. So, saying that what Grey Templar is arguing is impossible is to not only ignore the past, but also how auto manufacturers go about deciding if a recall is warranted.
"You must be this disastrous to ride'. ______
Interestingly, if the owners are likely to all die, a recall is actually less likely than if only some of them are likely to die. This is because the math for a recall goes something like this: Does the cost of a recall meet or exceed expected lawsuit costs?
But the Pinto didn't "slip through". It passed the regulations of the time.
It is just that the regulations weren't stringent enough. None of the cars in the same class as the Pinto made at that time would come close to passing the current regulations and laws.
It is just that the regulations weren't stringent enough. None of the cars in the same class as the Pinto made at that time would come close to passing the current regulations and laws.
I notice you don't bring up that it did slip past Quality Control, however.
That said, do you honestly thing that regulations for self driving cars will be nearly what they need to be when they hit the street compared to what they might be 40 years after the technology matures?
BaronIveagh wrote: That said, do you honestly thing that regulations for self driving cars will be nearly what they need to be when they hit the street compared to what they might be 40 years after the technology matures?
Again, you are making the wrong comparison. It doesn't matter how automated cars now compare to automated cars in the future. Of course the technology is going to improve, nobody is disagreeing with that idea. But the question that matters is how the current technology compares to the known poor safety of human drivers. Automated cars can have safety problems and kill people but still be an improvement over human drivers, and if that improvement exists they should become mandatory even if they aren't perfect yet.
BaronIveagh wrote: The point was (since you clearly can't figure it out so I must walk you through it like a small child) that the sort of flaw that you're claiming could never happen has happened before.
But what Gray Templar is claiming hasn't happened. You used the Pinto because it is famous for being a death trap, but a look at its record shows how little increased danger a car has to have before we see a massive consumer and legal reaction, which helps us establish how ludicrous the scenario Gray Templar lays out actually is.
The Pinto's design flaw caused 27 deaths over ten years, from 3 million units sold. So if you bought one and drove it around for 10 years, you had a 27 / 3,000,000 chance of suffering from that particular flaw. That increase in death was a big deal that trashed the manufacturer's brand and forced recalls and lawsuits.
Gray Templar is trying to argue that future automated cars will suffer from such incredible design flaws that when identified when won't even dare to put them on the road to return them to the dealer. He is talking about a level of failure several orders of magnitude greater than the Pinto. And then his argument starts to get crazy, because he is arguing that in the face of such chronic product failure we won't see recalls and lawsuits. Instead he is arguing consumers will shrug, and accept that cars which are routinely found to be too dangerous to take themselves to the dealership will just have to be updated without that trip, instead being updated by remote access. He thinks we'll find out our cars are so deadly they can't be driven for update, but we'll just shrug and continue to let them drive around once updated. And he thinks these kinds of updates will be routine.
Seriously, Gray Templar's argument is not the argument you want to try and fight for. Give this one up.
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BaronIveagh wrote: That said, do you honestly thing that regulations for self driving cars will be nearly what they need to be when they hit the street compared to what they might be 40 years after the technology matures?
You missed the point completely. The argument isn't whether self driving cars will improve. Of course updates and improvements will happen. The point is that the original version will still be safe enough to drive that it drive to the dealership to receive updates.
BaronIveagh wrote: That said, do you honestly thing that regulations for self driving cars will be nearly what they need to be when they hit the street compared to what they might be 40 years after the technology matures?
Again, you are making the wrong comparison. It doesn't matter how automated cars now compare to automated cars in the future. Of course the technology is going to improve, nobody is disagreeing with that idea. But the question that matters is how the current technology compares to the known poor safety of human drivers. Automated cars can have safety problems and kill people but still be an improvement over human drivers, and if that improvement exists they should become mandatory even if they aren't perfect yet.
You forgot to sling a few digs about cell phone use and the like. Here's the beef, and one you ignore. Not everyone texts while driving. I sincerely doubt that it hits 50% amongst drivers over the age of 21. The flaw that allowed the AI car to kill that woman is in EVERY SINGLE AUTOMATED CAR USING THAT PROGRAM. Do you see the issue now? Humans do stupid things from time to time, that much is a given even before pointing out Tide Pods, but you don't have all humans doing the same stupid thing that results in fatalities. With AI, if that problem exists, it will exist wholesale. THAT is the issue that you refuse to accept.
Just Tony wrote: You forgot to sling a few digs about cell phone use and the like. Here's the beef, and one you ignore. Not everyone texts while driving. I sincerely doubt that it hits 50% amongst drivers over the age of 21. The flaw that allowed the AI car to kill that woman is in EVERY SINGLE AUTOMATED CAR USING THAT PROGRAM. Do you see the issue now? Humans do stupid things from time to time, that much is a given even before pointing out Tide Pods, but you don't have all humans doing the same stupid thing that results in fatalities. With AI, if that problem exists, it will exist wholesale. THAT is the issue that you refuse to accept.
None of this matters, because that's not how you calculate risks. All that matters is the total number of accidents in two potential scenarios: the one we live in now, with 100% human drivers, and a hypothetical one with 100% automated cars. If the accident rate in the second case is lower you ban human drivers and replace them with AI. If the accident rate in the second case is higher then you work on improving AI before implementing it. It doesn't matter how the overall human-driver risk breaks down between particular humans because that's not the question you're asking. From a total deaths point of view there is zero difference between a binary distribution between high-risk and low-risk drivers and an even risk level among all drivers as long as the end result is the same number of deaths. 100 deaths is 100 deaths no matter how you get there, and it's still more than 95 deaths.
Now, it would in theory matter from a prevention point of view, if you want to do detailed studies about improving the safety of AI vs. programs to improve the safety of human drivers. A binary distribution would allow you to focus efforts on a small subset of drivers that cause the greatest risk, and potentially involve different risk-reduction strategies. But at this point, with so many years of accidents establishing such a solid record of human drivers taking risks and causing accidents, there is no reason to believe that the problem can be solved by trying to make people safer drivers. A certain number of people are simply going to be killed or injured in accidents involving human drivers.
I understand risk management explicitly. I use these principles at work both in the machine shop AND in the military. Variance is to be expected, as well as outliers. You refuse to accept that outliers are outliers while dealing with humans and refuse to accept the concept of reliably duplicated faults in AI that will pop up and need to be fixed. Yes, there ARE methods of correcting drivers. Our traffic laws approach that every day. Jammers in cars to prevent cell signal would be another, since teens and some young adults don't have the impulse control to put their phones down while driving, However, you won't accept that because of your particular political bend.
Let me rephrase your statement to better reflect that.
None of that matters because my communist dream of not working and having all my needs catered to by taking money from the wealthy can't come to fruition unless automation takes most if not all jobs.
Here's a thought from a corporation's point of view: If nobody is working and getting paid to make our products and others products, who will be BUYING our products? That is why automation will not replace the workforce: commerce will simply cease to exist. Well, I guess it'd have to go the USSR route and have the state take over production of goods. That's the dream in the end, isn't it? Same snake oil as the old burgoise/proletariat argument, just repackaged to be more palatable to the new generations?
Kilkrazy wrote:The flaw in the Uber car programming is not in Google car programming.
They are different programs and the Google one is a lot better, though no doubt it has its own particular flaws.
Fair enough, but it shows an example of a system wide flaw. Can we agree on that? So ONLY Uber cars will misjudge and kill pedestrians. So they fix it. Got it. We stumble on one flaw that severe in one programming suite (sure there's a better term, but with the baby home from the hospital my time is finite) after implementation, and now we think there won't be another in other systems? That's how development works. That's how we find out that air bags become frag grenades in some instances. We learn and move on. My take is we need to keep doing controlled testing before we fling this tech out wholesale. Others don't agree.
skyth wrote:Tony, you need to go read up on the Prisoner's Dilemna.
I did, can you elaborate how a gaming concept has ANY bearing on the conversation?
Because you mentioned that businesses will not automate jobs because they need people to buy their products. Problem is each company has the incentive to automate but if everyone automates you run into issues...
Just Tony wrote: The flaw that allowed the AI car to kill that woman is in EVERY SINGLE AUTOMATED CAR USING THAT PROGRAM.
Did you see that the investigation turned up solid information that the automated driver people DISABLED the factory braking/safety programs??
There is a reason why increasing number of manufacturers are starting to do their own research and development on automated technology. They already have tons of driver assist capabilities, and there are significant issues when one company thinks it knows better than another, and turns their gak off because, reasons.
Just Tony wrote: Here's a thought from a corporation's point of view: If nobody is working and getting paid to make our products and others products, who will be BUYING our products? That is why automation will not replace the workforce: commerce will simply cease to exist.
You've made an assumption that each company makes its business decisions based on its need to preserve the market used by all companies. This is a junk assumption and it's going to produce some really broken analysis.
Read up on the Prisoner's Dilemma and The Tragedy of the Commons. It will teach you how each individual/company makes decisions based on their own personal interests, which can produce situations which are sub-optimal for the whole. For instance, if there's 1,000 companies and each of them is given the option to fully automate or keep using humans to manufacture, then each company is going to automate if that is cheaper. Sure it might kill demand overall, but each company is only responsible for 1,000 of total demand on average.
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Just Tony wrote: I did, can you elaborate how a gaming concept has ANY bearing on the conversation?
Gaming concept? Uh, game theory isn't about playing games. It's about using mathematical models to analyse individual decision making, and tweaking the rules in that model to try and make the individual's decision as optimal as possible for the overall group.
It is a huge part of economics. In this care your economic argument that companies won't automate because it will harm demand ignores the self-motivated actions of each individual company.
Yeah, like how Henry Ford didn't raise employee pay so they could afford the products he made, Or how other employers did the same because they saw that having no market generates revenue. No, wait, they DID do that. Despite Ford making advances that should have crippled his workforce.
Maybe I just need to rerereread the Prisoner's Dilemma, The Tragedy of the Commons, and throw in pretty much anything by Max Weber while I'm at it. Get my mind right.
Just Tony wrote: Yeah, like how Henry Ford didn't raise employee pay so they could afford the products he made, Or how other employers did the same because they saw that having no market generates revenue. No, wait, they DID do that. Despite Ford making advances that should have crippled his workforce.
That's an often quoted story that's actually total nonsense. Ford didn't raise wages to produce his own market. I mean how the feth would that work anyway, one company keeping an economy afloat with wages? What nonsense.
Anyhow, the truth is Ford increased wages to $5 a day because work on his factory lines was extremely demanding, and despite already paying a relatively high $2.50 a day he was still suffering extremely high turnover, after turnover was four months. This crippled productivity. So Ford raised wages to make people stay.
And if you still don't get it, Ford's labour force at the time was about 15,000 people. It was producing about 200,000 cars. In what kind of broken, nonsense maths do you think a workforce of 15,000 people are going to produce sufficient demand for a production run of 200,000?
Maybe I just need to rerereread the Prisoner's Dilemma, The Tragedy of the Commons, and throw in pretty much anything by Max Weber while I'm at it. Get my mind right.
Well you should know game theory isn't about games, for a starter.
You clearly don't, because you're saying things that display a very poor understanding of the subject.
You refuse to accept that outliers are outliers while dealing with humans and refuse to accept the concept of reliably duplicated faults in AI that will pop up and need to be fixed.
No, I accept the concept of AI faults, they are just accounted for in the overall risk numbers. Again, it doesn't matter how you get to a final deaths per year number, only what that number is. If AI vehicles, despite having faults pop up and need fixing, kill/injure fewer people per year than the human drivers they replace then the AI is a success. You keep arguing that the AI will have faults and ignoring the fact that even a flawed AI that causes accidents can still be safer than human drivers, and implementing it can be a net improvement in safety.
Also, bad human drivers are not outliers. People driving drunk, while on their phones, etc, are common events. Drunk driving alone is ~10k deaths per year in the US and ~1 million arrests per year, or an average of a drunk driving death and 100 arrests every hour. AI vehicles would have to kill 10,000 people per year just to equal the deaths from drunk drivers, a problem that is 100% eliminated by removing human control over vehicles.
Yes, there ARE methods of correcting drivers. Our traffic laws approach that every day. Jammers in cars to prevent cell signal would be another, since teens and some young adults don't have the impulse control to put their phones down while driving, However, you won't accept that because of your particular political bend.
First of all, the idea that I won't accept these things because of my "particular political bend" is just laughable. You have no idea what my position on those ideas is, it's just convenient for you to assume I'm blindly opposed to your great ideas because of "politics".
Second, those ideas are nice in theory but the real world doesn't match your theory. It is indisputable fact that we are not currently implementing them, and the laws we do have (for example, against drunk driving) are not effective. And there does not appear to be any meaningful effort to make the laws you are suggesting in the foreseeable future. You can talk all you want about what could happen in theory, but the reality is that these things continue to kill people.
None of that matters because my communist dream of not working and having all my needs catered to by taking money from the wealthy can't come to fruition unless automation takes most if not all jobs.
It's not a dream, it's simple fact. Automation is improving. Capitalist desire for increased profits will continue to drive it forward and eliminate jobs. Eventually it will reach a point where communism/socialism is the only possible answer to the unemployment problem. Whether you or I want these things to happen is irrelevant. The technology is going to be developed, and the market pressure to implement it is extremely powerful.
Here's a thought from a corporation's point of view: If nobody is working and getting paid to make our products and others products, who will be BUYING our products? That is why automation will not replace the workforce: commerce will simply cease to exist. Well, I guess it'd have to go the USSR route and have the state take over production of goods. That's the dream in the end, isn't it? Same snake oil as the old burgoise/proletariat argument, just repackaged to be more palatable to the new generations?
Other people covered this, and they are correct. If I'm in charge of a company I don't give a about the economy as a whole. I care about the fact that automation can massively reduce my labor costs and put a ton of extra profit in my pocket. That's why companies have a long history of killing off jobs with automation and pocketing the extra profits, without any concern for what the now-unemployed people will do. And if I don't do it now my competition will, allowing them to undercut my prices and put me out of business. Automation is the only acceptable answer, as fast as the technology allows it to happen.
The only way to escape the automation trap is increased state control of business, making automation illegal and imposing minimum employee quotas that must be maintained. And you know, that sounds an awful lot like all that communism and planned economies stuff you claim to hate...
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Just Tony wrote: Maybe I just need to rerereread the Prisoner's Dilemma, The Tragedy of the Commons, and throw in pretty much anything by Max Weber while I'm at it. Get my mind right.
Add as much sarcasm as you want, but you absolutely do need to read those things. It's impossible to make any kind of informed comment on economics without at least a basic understanding of game theory. Even the most pro-capitalist economic theories depend on game theory principles, making your attempt to present them as some kind of leftist/communist fringe ideas pretty amusing.
Peregrine wrote: No, I accept the concept of AI faults, they are just accounted for in the overall risk numbers. Again, it doesn't matter how you get to a final deaths per year number, only what that number is. If AI vehicles, despite having faults pop up and need fixing, kill/injure fewer people per year than the human drivers they replace then the AI is a success. You keep arguing that the AI will have faults and ignoring the fact that even a flawed AI that causes accidents can still be safer than human drivers, and implementing it can be a net improvement in safety.
Also, bad human drivers are not outliers. People driving drunk, while on their phones, etc, are common events. Drunk driving alone is ~10k deaths per year in the US and ~1 million arrests per year, or an average of a drunk driving death and 100 arrests every hour. AI vehicles would have to kill 10,000 people per year just to equal the deaths from drunk drivers, a problem that is 100% eliminated by removing human control over vehicles.
To add to this: Google's driverless cars are already better than humans and they are still in the prototype stage for various reasons (I think thee was recently some new development that'll allow for drastic miniaturisation of LIDAR equipment). They probably could (if legislation were ready and people were willing to have clunky add-ons on their cars) sell kits that would save lives, at least in relatively clean conditions (I think regular detritus and rain is okay for their system but winter is still not optimal). If I remember correctly all accidents their autonomous cars were involved in were caused by humans and not the AI. From a year ago (http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/googles-self-driving-car-is-ridiculously-safe):
"We just got rear-ended again yesterday while stopped at a stoplight in Mountain View. That's two incidents just in the last week where a driver rear-ended us while we were completely stopped at a light! So that brings the tally to 13 minor fender-benders in more than 1.8 million miles of autonomous and manual driving — and still, not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident.”
Google announced Tuesday that its self-driving cars have completed 300,000 miles of test-drives, under a "wide range of conditions," all without any kind of accident. (The project has seen a few accidents in the past — but only with humans at the wheel.)
To put that into perspective, the average U.S. driver has one accident roughly every 165,000 miles. Here's how we got that figure: our average mileage per year is 16,550, according to the Federal Highway Administration; the average length of time we go between traffic accidents is 10 years, according to Allstate. (In particularly safe cities such as Fort Collins, Colo., that number can rise to 14 years — which is still no match for Google's 300,000 miles.)
With self-driving test mules roaming around California, it’s been found that some of them are overly cautious. Human drivers are so unaccustomed to cars coming to a complete stop and obeying the speed limit that it’s resulting in a lot of low-speed accidents according to a Bloomberg report.
BaronIveagh wrote: That said, do you honestly thing that regulations for self driving cars will be nearly what they need to be when they hit the street compared to what they might be 40 years after the technology matures?
Again, you are making the wrong comparison. It doesn't matter how automated cars now compare to automated cars in the future. Of course the technology is going to improve, nobody is disagreeing with that idea. But the question that matters is how the current technology compares to the known poor safety of human drivers. Automated cars can have safety problems and kill people but still be an improvement over human drivers, and if that improvement exists they should become mandatory even if they aren't perfect yet.
You forgot to sling a few digs about cell phone use and the like. Here's the beef, and one you ignore. Not everyone texts while driving. I sincerely doubt that it hits 50% amongst drivers over the age of 21. The flaw that allowed the AI car to kill that woman is in EVERY SINGLE AUTOMATED CAR USING THAT PROGRAM. Do you see the issue now? Humans do stupid things from time to time, that much is a given even before pointing out Tide Pods, but you don't have all humans doing the same stupid thing that results in fatalities. With AI, if that problem exists, it will exist wholesale. THAT is the issue that you refuse to accept.
Before we blame that whole incident on the AI, we do need to remember the woman in question walked right out in front of a car doing 40 mph, and not at a crosswalk or stop sign. She must take a certain amount of responsibility for her own death.
And... I wouldn't be so sure that EVERY SINGLE AUTOMATED CAR USING THAT PROGRAM still has that flaw. I'm quite sure they have eliminated it in an update now that they have identified the flaw. In contrast, we've been trumpeting about how driving drunk kills people for over forty years that I am aware of... and drunk drivers STILL kill hundreds of people a year, if not thousands.
EDIT: Excuse me. TEN thousand. Per year. For at least forty years. We don't seem to be doing all that great a job fixing known flaws in human drivers....
Vulcan wrote: EDIT: Excuse me. TEN thousand. Per year. For at least forty years. We don't seem to be doing all that great a job fixing known flaws in human drivers....
This is the key element that a lot of people are refusing to get. If a human driver screws up and has a serious accident, then it is a learning experience for that human driver and no-one else. That one guy finds out that driving the speed limit in the wet on poor roads might be legal, but its also very stupid. Other drivers will have to have their own near death experiences to learn that lesson. Whereas an AI that doesn't fully account for those conditions and crashes will lead to an adjustment not just in that car but in all similar makes and models.
AI driving systems can fail forward in a way that human drivers haven't.
Another factor to consider- while it is true that a programming flaw like the one that caused the death of the woman was present in all of the cars- not all the self driving cars killed someone before the problem was identified and solved. You can bet that competition to create the safest AI program is huge- because companies will have to payout big time for lawsuits with any known defects that lead to injury or death.
This isn't some static system- every year the programming will get better, problems will be discovered and resolved, probably even optimized for different terrain, or states with the individual limits and such built in.
Compare that against humans, who, as a group, are about as safe as we're going to get as drivers. We're young, nervous and stupid, then pretty good for a while, and finally our reflexes go, our vision decreases and our pride keeps us driving longer than we're physically able to do safely.
I would love for this technology to become standardized, so my children need never learn how to drive, or get into the inevitable traffic incidents that occur in a lifetime.
Oh, it's lovely to see them flashing, honking and gesticulating at me daring to stick to the speed limit!*
Wind up the Eurozone so normal currency factors begin impacting the German economy and then we can talk.
about the economy as a whole. I care about the fact that automation can massively reduce my labor costs and put a ton of extra profit in my pocket. That's why companies have a long history of killing off jobs with automation and pocketing the extra profits, without any concern for what the now-unemployed people will do. And if I don't do it now my competition will, allowing them to undercut my prices and put me out of business. Automation is the only acceptable answer, as fast as the technology allows it to happen.