The Not-So-Safe Self-Driving Car

[Anti Federalist]

The Not-So-Safe Self-Driving Car

by eric • December 22, 2015

http://ericpetersautos.com/2015/12/2...f-driving-car/

Obeying the law can sometimes get you killed. Humans – those not asleep at the proverbial wheel – know this.

Self-driving cars don’t.

They are programmed to be obey every law, all the time – regardless of circumstances. This is creating problems.

Potentially, fatalities.

Example: Up ahead, there’s a red light. Your autonomous Google car is coming to a stop because its sensors can tell the light’s red. But your Google car hasn’t got a brain, so it can’t override its Prime Directive – obey the red – in order to deal with the big rig coming up behind you that’s locked up its brakes and is clearly going to crush you to death in about three seconds if you don’t run the red light and get out of the truck’s way.

You’d mash the accelerator pedal, blow the light. But the Google car won’t. That would be illegal.

So now, you’re dead.

Or, you’re trying to make your way home in a blizzard. If it’s you controlling the car, you know that coming to a full stop for a stop sign at the crest of a steep hill is probably going to result in your car sliding back down the hill and into the cars behind you.

So, you California Stop the sign. It’s technically illegal – but it’s the right thing to do, in order to not lose momentum – and to avoid losing control.

The Google car would stop. And you’d roll back down the hill.

Evasive/emergency maneuvers are almost always technically illegal. But they are often the only way to avoid an accident.

Humans can process this – and are capable of choosing the lesser of two evils. A driverless car cannot. It only knows what the sign (and law) says and is programmed to obey as doggedly as Arnold’s T800 in the Terminator movies.

Nuance is not yet a machine thing.

And that’s a real problem, not a hypothetical one. Prototype driverless cars that are in circulation have twice the crash rate of cars with human drivers, according to a just-released study by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (see here).

Apparently, Bobo (human drivers) not so stupid after all.

It’s not that autonomous cars are stupid. It’s that they lack the uniquely (so far) human attribute of judgment. They cannot weigh alternatives.

It is either – or.

Black – or white.

Parameters are programmed in – and the computer executes those parameters without deviation.

Because that’s what it was programmed to do.

Human drivers, on the other hand, can foresee the consequences of a developing situation and take action based on intangibles no computer can (yet) grok. Humans know that most traffic laws are, as they teach in law school, malum prohibitum (i.e., technical fouls, violations of a statute, certainly, but not moral violations) rather than malum in se (morally wrong, like stealing things).

Computers cannot appreciate the distinction. They defer to the law – even if it means that eighteen wheeler bearing down on you isn’t going to stop, regardless of the law about running red lights.

Humans also know when a law is ridiculous – and (provided no cop is around) will ignore it outright.

And here we come to a possibly happy unintended consequence.

Autonomous cars may end up highlighting the ridiculousness of certain traffic laws; most posted speed limits, for instance. By obeying them. The old man in a Buick will be replaced by the autonomous Corvette doing exactly 65 with everyone else running 70-75 (at least).

The machine Mind Cloverized Corvette will never move over.

He – it – is “doing the limit,” after all.

old cootThere are only a few old men in Buicks out on the highway. But there could be millions of autonomous cars. All programmed to do the speed limit – no matter how dumbed-down and preposterous for conditions, road… or car.

How about right on red? Forget it!

Even if it’s obviously clear – and safe – to proceed. The law is the law.

Merging and yielding? Better leave ten minutes early.

If a deer runs in front of the car, will the autonomous car swerve briefly (and illegally) into the other lane – and break the law forbidding crossing over the double yellow – in order to avoid the deer?

Probably not.

So, you wreck the car.

And if there’s a wreck, who gets the blame … and the bill? If the human inside is just a passenger, it’s hard to write him a ticket (or sue him for damages). But computers don’t care about DMV “points,” you can’t send them to driving school and they haven’t got any wages that can be garnished to pay your medical bills.sharks

Ironically, these autonomously driven vehicles were touted as being more competently driven than cars driven by humans. One of the claimed benefits being that we’ll be able to get where we’re going going faster. But unless speed limits are raised dramatically – to reflect the speeds people are already driving, the law be damned – it’ll take us longer to get where we’re headed.

No more hammer time. Instead, a conga line of self-driving cars driving extra, extra cautiously – at the “safe” pace of the least common denominator.

Which is what almost all traffic laws presume.

Imagine your car controlled by your fearful, hesitant and rigidly law-abiding mother-in-law.

That’s the Autonomous Future looming in the rearview.

Oh, we’re gonna have some fun!

[timosman]

[DevilsAdvocate]

Driverless cars are likely just going to be an upgraded cruise control for a while yet.

Later after billions spent lobbying, buying cabinet positions and legislation, and injecting propaganda into movies and television, they can start to force it down our throats as a mandate. Every car on the road MUST use this system, which is managed from a central database. Thus, lives are saved and every detail of our movements across the face of the earth are catalogued and studied.

Moral dilemmas will eventually be programmed in. Any fatalities will be the responsibility of the car company, not the driver. If the public wants to change the car's programming, they will have to lobby their government to mandate certain requirements on the car's programming. Every municipality will have it's own standards.

Every time a death makes news, we will be reminded that this new system is preferable because the net number of fatalities is lower, even though the occupants of the vehicle are no longer in manual control of their own fate.

If this seems implausible to you, you haven't been paying attention. It will happen gradually. Drip drip drip

[osan]

Mean human intelligence is diminishing by the minute. This vision of the future stands to be so unbearably dull, people will start trouble just not to die of boredom.

[timosman]

Mean human intelligence is diminishing by the minute. This vision of the future stands to be so unbearably dull, people will start trouble just not to die of boredom.

It feels like nobody is having fun anymore. Everything is so scripted these days.


They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTTC_fD598A

[jmdrake]

Example: Up ahead, there’s a red light. Your autonomous Google car is coming to a stop because its sensors can tell the light’s red. But your Google car hasn’t got a brain, so it can’t override its Prime Directive – obey the red – in order to deal with the big rig coming up behind you that’s locked up its brakes and is clearly going to crush you to death in about three seconds if you don’t run the red light and get out of the truck’s way.

Oh but there's a fix for that. The big rig should be self driving as well and set to self destruct, killing its own human passenger (if it has one) and all of the people in nearby cars, if this ever happens. Problem solved!

Actually I wonder what would happen in this case under Azimovs laws of robotics?

[phill4paul]

If this seems implausible to you, you haven't been paying attention. It will happen gradually. Drip drip drip

Oh, no. It'll be here in our lifetime. As sure as a sand glider, to propeller planes to jets, to moon landing were to our parents. I'd say five years / 10 yrs. to ban individual control. Hums are the only thing holding this brave new future from coming to fruition.
If we ban guns we can save 30k. If we ban autonomous driving we can save 40k.
it's crazy nobody on these forums are on board.

[AngryCanadian]

This idea of self driving vehicles could turn out so bad.
-I see it as restriction for recent areas. And these self driving vehicles can drive to recent areas.
-A win for hackers.

[RonPaulIsGreat]

It seems like you are just making up examples, that aren't even real.

As in a computer that can identify a moving object and it's make and model will easily be able to determine if it will be possible for it to stop in order to avoid a collision, this could even take into account current weather and feed back from the wheels slipping. Now, I'm pretty sure an auto company that allowed a death to happen in order to avoid a minor traffic violation will find itself at the end of a large lawsuit and if it goes to jury I'd bet they will find the car company guilty of forcing the car to operate in an unreasonable and unsafe manner. So, I'd put my money on fully autonomous cars that are street legal will avoid collisions like a semi barreling out of control towards you even if it means running a stop sign.

Even now, you can count on not be charged with jaywalking if running from a boulder. Traffic laws are pretty well enforced based on "normal operating conditions". Like I drove like 30 MPH on the highway before, because there was a blizzard. Normally a cop would give you a ticket for that, but abnormal situation. People have driven onto sidewalks to avoid collisions, and they don't charge them with a crime, because they were avoiding someone else out of control that might kill them. Whether it is stated explicitly in the law or not it is universally understood you can break the law in order to prevent your own death. No one will convict you, and the software makers know that as well.

They'll get sued hard, often and for a $#@!load of money if they allow an autonomous car to simply sit there while a semi ran into the car, and simulations can show the car could have escaped preventing harm to the driver or innocent bystanders. All that data I'm sure is being stored, or will be once widely rolled out, like a black box of sensory, video, audio data for like a rolling 30 second window up to the point a crash happens.

Simply don't buy it, because following the law will result in more monetary loss, a jury will never accept a baby being killed in order to not run a stop sign. They simply won't. Jury finds Tesla Motors guilty and the jury awards the parents of baby Jane 10 million versus the slight minuscule possibility a jury would find Tesla liable for running a traffic stop in order to save baby Jane.

[Voluntarist]

xxxxx

[Anti Federalist]

Really though, it's going to happen eventually.

Of course it is, just like freedom slowly dying.

Freedom is messy, it does not follow the "plan", it is hard to quantify and program for, it is, in short, a pain in the ass.

At least to the technocrats that are running this circus show these days, it is.

Humanity is building a future in which it is no longer needed, a biological throwback to dim and best forgotten past.

I'm glad I won't be around to see it.

[CaptUSA]

Of course it is, just like freedom slowly dying.

Freedom is messy, it does not follow the "plan", it is hard to quantify and program for, it is, in short, a pain in the ass.

At least to the technocrats that are running this circus show these days, it is.

Humanity is building a future in which it is no longer needed, a biological throwback to dim and best forgotten past.

I'm glad I won't be around to see it.

So much doom and gloom, AF. Technology is an unreliable master, but a powerful servant. The problem is that some humans will use it to serve their own nefarious purposes.

I don't think it needs to be that way. The problem is not with the technology, but with the people. In my mind, we are coming on a time when technology is interconnected, but completely de-centralized. I'm more optimistic about this than ever before. When each of us has access to information and have the ability to direct our technology for our own purposes, I see more liberty as a result. Central governance will become an old joke. I'm just hoping I can pour a little more into your half empty glass.

[CaptUSA]

There's a lot of city and county governments that will lobby against it - the ones that pull in a significant amount of income from speed traps and such.

Really though, it's going to happen eventually. I was in a "Future of Systems Engineering" seminar a couple of weeks ago where the car company engineers were discussing some of their current planning. Individual automobile ownership within population-dense areas as well as for long-haul is something that doesn't make sense - because the vehicles sit idle for the majority of the time taking up space better utilized for other things. From a cost perspective to individual users, it makes sense to replace car ownership with a transportation service. It'll eventually get to the point where when you want/need to go somewhere, you put in a request via your smart phone and a driverless car/truck configured to your needs will show up within minutes to take you where you want to go, drop you off, and then move on to the next customer. The supposition is that running this transportation service (or licensing/regulating it) is how cities will replace the revenue lost to what are now law enforcement traffic stops.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to the transition is the decades of marketing that auto manufacturers have already invested in - an investment which changed the culture so that now people view themselves through their vehicles as being more successful, more manly, more sexy, or more environmentally conscious based upon the brand and model of car they drive and/or maintain (there are individuals of the auto maintenance subculture that will feel emasculated by giving up their own auto maintenance).

There are going to be a number of painful cultural changes. If you're a long haul truck driver, you ought to be looking to transition your career. Long haul drivers are required to take rest/sleep breaks - long haul driverless trucks are not. The cultural change: the middle class further shrinks, or at least is redefined. The lanes on the roads available to driver-controlled cars will shrink as lanes dedicated to driverless cars take over (in a similar fashion to the HOV lanes now in use). The technology curve is likely to be similar to mobile phones in acceptance.

An article explaining this... http://www.marketwatch.com/story/get...car-2015-12-14

Within a generation, automobiles will be endowed with what’s known as Level 4 autonomy—full self-driving artificial intelligence for cars—which will not so much change the game as burn down the casino. Autonomy will make it possible for unmanned automobiles to be summoned, via app, to your location. And not just any passing tramp steamer, but exactly the vehicle you need for the occasion, cleaned and fueled, for as little or as long as you need (offers may vary in your state). When you’re done—poof!—it will go away.

You don’t pay for the car. You pay for the miles. And only the miles. It’s a whole new way to fly. Let’s start small. Need a pickup for three weekends a year but don’t want to pay for the other 49? Autonomy can make that happen easily without a visit to the dreaded U-Haul depot. Need a car to take mom to the doctor’s, or fetch a spouse from the airport? A decade hence, major auto makers and smaller players will be at each others’ throats for the privilege of sending consumers vehicles a la carte, for a one-way trip, an afternoon, a weekend, a month. These transactions will move through the glowing bowels of your monthly credit accounts, and you won’t even feel them.

[Zippyjuan]

Driverless cars have been pretty successful in their operation so far- with over a million miles logged. However, that has pretty much been under optimal conditions. They still have troubles identifying objects during snow or rain.

[Anti Federalist]

So much doom and gloom, AF. Technology is an unreliable master, but a powerful servant. The problem is that some humans will use it to serve their own nefarious purposes.

I don't think it needs to be that way. The problem is not with the technology, but with the people. In my mind, we are coming on a time when technology is interconnected, but completely de-centralized. I'm more optimistic about this than ever before. When each of us has access to information and have the ability to direct our technology for our own purposes, I see more liberty as a result. Central governance will become an old joke. I'm just hoping I can pour a little more into your half empty glass.

Thank you my brother, and a Merry Christmas to you.

[phill4paul]

Driverless cars have been pretty successful in their operation so far- with over a million miles logged. However, that has pretty much been under optimal conditions. They still have troubles identifying objects during snow or rain.

And they have trouble adjusting to their human counterparts. Which means one or the other will have to go. Which do you think it will be?

As much as I hate them liaryers might be the only saving grace.

Here's why lawyers are 'salivating' over self-driving cars

When, in the near future, a driverless car gets into an accident with another driverless car, it's going to be difficult to establish who is at fault. Is it the "driver," the car company, or even the programmer?

But what's not hard to establish is who will likely benefit: lawyers.

Bloomberg interviewed plaintiff's lawyers and described them as "salivating” over the potential paydays from driverless cars.

“You're going to get a whole host of new defendants,” Kevin Dean, an attorney suing General Motors over its faulty ignition switches, told Bloomberg. “Computer programmers, computer companies, designers of algorithms, Google, mapping companies, even states. It's going to be very fertile ground for lawyers.”

http://www.businessinsider.com/lawye...s-cars-2015-12

[Ronin Truth]

I SWAG they'll be getting very much better, very quickly.

[20,000 years of tech progress this century. ]

[Son_of_Liberty90]

Our wonderful fed. government has just declared Google's self driving cars to be legal drivers.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/n...say/80183418/#

Can you believe this s***?

Also, I heard on the radio Google will not install manual override pedals or steering wheels because that would interfere with the car's programming. Doesn't surprise me, Google's founders basically want all of us to have our brains linked up to a hive network.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...stupid/306868/

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

AUTONOMY, THY NAME IS OUTDATED!!!

[PaulConventionWV]

我不要这样！

[Anti Federalist]

Mean human intelligence is diminishing by the minute. This vision of the future stands to be so unbearably dull, people will start trouble just not to die of boredom.

I've had a thought coalescing in my mind, that runs counter to most dystopian views of the future, the "Logan's Run" idea of youth at all costs and a hard assed system that culls the old off.

I'm thinking of something even more nightmarish.

Imagine a future where mandatory life extension technologies keep you alive to serve the system for 100 years or more.

Where even death itself is not permitted as an escape from the technocrats hellish vision of the future and the Borg collective.

[osan]

It feels like nobody is having fun anymore. Everything is so scripted these days.

"Scripted" --> "managed" --> "no mystery" --> "boring" --> "agony" --> "begging for death".

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTTC_fD598A

My understanding/vision of hell came to me in room 104 of the chemistry building at UC Davis in 1979. My roommate, Peter, asked me "hey, you wanna go see Devil In Miss Jones?" I said "OK" - I had nothing better to do.

Opening scene, Ms. Spelvin is sitting in an impossibly dull looking room, nude and furiously diddling herself, unable to "get there". Her company is a man who does naught but stare blankly into space, his participation being the only way she can relieve her tensions. IIRC, a voiceover explains that she can never get herself where she wants to go and the man has no will to help. This is the eternal damnation to which she has to look forward in reward for having committed suicide. The rest of the film has escaped my memory as the irrelevancy that it was.

Who would have thought that a notorious pornographic film would become the source of a profoundly transformative moment? This scene was, at least for me and perhaps accidentally so, constructed with such absence of flaw to the end of driving home into the geometric center of my core a true, complete, and piercing vision of the deepest meaning of "hell", it actually jarred me, the effect remaining with me to this very moment.

Boredom is the single thing from which God hisownself flees with the wingèd speed of a photon piercing the folds of infinite space. I admit to knowing absolutely nothing of this world, myself, and others, but I do know that this is the truest nature of hell. Boredom is the one thing for which God will do anything, whether it be to create passion flowers or peel the skin from living infants, in order to escape its ravaging stillness. I cannot tell you how it is that I know this with the certainty of God's own infinite knowledge, but only that I do. That is why the world is as it is. This is why we "die", that we may evade the tyranny and agony of memory, that all things may be born anew. Without that, existence would become unbearable.

[osan]

I've had a thought coalescing in my mind, that runs counter to most dystopian views of the future, the "Logan's Run" idea of youth at all costs and a hard assed system that culls the old off.

I'm thinking of something even more nightmarish.

Imagine a future where mandatory life extension technologies keep you alive to serve the system for 100 years or more.

Where even death itself is not permitted as an escape from the technocrats hellish vision of the future and the Borg collective.

Film: World Of Tomorrow. 16 minutes long, crudely animated, and worth the watch. It touches on this.

There was a short story in Omni magazine ca. 1981 about a method of punishment where a man sentenced to death is put into a vast spacecraft with tens of thousands of his clones. He is executed in horrible ways, over and over. Each time, just prior to irretrievability, his consciousness is sucked from the cadaver and inserted into a blank clone. He is then put through the process again, the anticipation, anxiety, fear, terror... then the agony of execution, only to be sucked from that body and deposited into another as a cat gingerly delivers a poo to the litter box. IIRC this is repeated endlessly as bodies are recycled and made into new clones.

If it can be imagined...

[Anti Federalist]

"Scripted" --> "managed" --> "no mystery" --> "boring" --> "agony" --> "begging for death".

Quite right.

They touched on this in "The Matrix".

How the first system was so perfect and benign that it killed the imprisoned subjects with dull safety and wretched boredom.

[Son_of_Liberty90]

Film: World Of Tomorrow. 16 minutes long, crudely animated, and worth the watch. It touches on this.

There was a short story in Omni magazine ca. 1981 about a method of punishment where a man sentenced to death is put into a vast spacecraft with tens of thousands of his clones. He is executed in horrible ways, over and over. Each time, just prior to irretrievability, his consciousness is sucked from the cadaver and inserted into a blank clone. He is then put through the process again, the anticipation, anxiety, fear, terror... then the agony of execution, only to be sucked from that body and deposited into another as a cat gingerly delivers a poo to the litter box. IIRC this is repeated endlessly as bodies are recycled and made into new clones.

If it can be imagined...

Try this from 1967, "I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have..._I_Must_Scream

The story takes place 109 years after the complete destruction of human civilization. The Cold War had escalated into a world war, fought mainly between China, Russia, and the United States. As the war progressed, the three warring nations each created a super-computer capable of running the war more efficiently than humans.
The machines are each referred to as "AM," which originally stood for "Allied Mastercomputer", and then was later called "Adaptive Manipulator". Finally, "AM" stands for "Aggressive Menace". One day, one of the three computers becomes self aware, and promptly absorbs the other two, thus taking control of the entire war. It carries out campaigns of mass genocide, killing off all but four men and one woman.

The survivors live together underground in an endless complex, the only habitable place left. The master computer harbors an immeasurable hatred for the group and spends every available moment torturing them. AM has not only managed to keep the humans from taking their own lives, but has made them virtually immortal.

The story's narrative begins when one of the humans, Nimdok, has the idea that there is canned food somewhere in the great complex. The humans are always near starvation under AM's rule, and anytime they are given food, it is always a disgusting meal that they have difficulty eating. Because of their great hunger, the humans are actually coerced into making the long journey to the place where the food is supposedly kept—the ice caves. Along the way, the machine provides foul sustenance, sends horrible monsters after them, emits earsplitting sounds, and blinds Benny when he tries to escape.

On more than one occasion, the group is separated by AM's obstacles. At one point, the narrator, Ted, is knocked unconscious and begins dreaming. It is here that he envisions the computer, anthropomorphized, standing over a hole in his brain speaking to him directly. Based on this nightmare, Ted comes to a conclusion about AM's nature, specifically why it has so much contempt for humanity; that despite its abilities it lacks the sapience to be creative or the ability to move freely. It wants nothing more than to exact revenge on humanity by torturing these last remnants of the species that created it; Ted and his four companions.

The group reaches the ice caves, where indeed there is a pile of canned goods. The group is overjoyed to find them, but is immediately crestfallen to find that they have no means of opening them. Finally, in a final act of desperation, Benny attacks Gorrister and begins to gnaw at the flesh on his face. Ted notices that AM does not intervene when Benny is clearly hurting Gorrister, though the computer has in the past always stopped the humans from killing themselves.

Ted seizes a stalactite made of ice, and kills Benny and Gorrister. Ellen realizes what Ted is doing, and kills Nimdok, before being herself killed by Ted. Ted runs out of time before he can kill himself, and is stopped by AM. However, while AM could restore massive damage to their bodies and horribly alter them, AM is not a god: it cannot return Ted's four companions to life after they are already dead. AM is now even more angry and vengeful than before, with only one victim left for its hatred. To ensure that Ted can never attempt to kill himself, AM transforms him into a large, amorphous, fleshy blob that is incapable of causing itself or anybody else harm, and constantly alters his perception of time to deepen his anguish. Ted is, however, grateful that he was able to save the others from further torture. Ted's closing thoughts end with the sentence that gives the book its title. "I have no mouth. And I must scream."

[silverhandorder]

I cant wait for self driving cars.

[Anti Federalist]

I cant wait for self driving cars.

Why?

[GunnyFreedom]

Why?

Maybe he owns a body shop and a morgue?

[Anti Federalist]

Maybe he owns a body shop and a morgue?

Bazinga!

[ChristianAnarchist]

我不要这样！

For all those who don't speak Chinese... "I do not like this!"

[Son_of_Liberty90]

Film: World Of Tomorrow. 16 minutes long, crudely animated, and worth the watch. It touches on this.

.

Good God...I just watched it. What a miserable pile...it's like someone took existential philosophy and mashed it together with tanshumanism in a short, 15 minute animation.

Thought provoking, but dreary, extremely depressing. So cold, lifeless. Just like a machine. And I couldn't stand that monotone female voice.