The Humans Crashing Into Driverless Cars are Exposing a Key Flaw (bloomberg.com) 748
schwit1 sends in a story from Bloomberg pointing out that the rigid adherence to traffic laws and overcautious programming have caused self-driving cars to rack up a crash rate twice that of an average human driver. "This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up — all minor scrape-ups for now — the arguments among programmers at places like Google and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?" While the autonomous vehicles aren't at fault in these crashes, their relative unpredictability on the road are nonetheless leading to more accidents than expected.
Unison (Score:5, Insightful)
I have always thought that for automated vehicles to be a reality, ALL traffic has to be automated.
It takes almost an A.I. to be able to adjust to the random nature of human driving.
Re:Unison (Score:5, Funny)
http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-... [dilbert.com]
Re:Unison (Score:5, Interesting)
I've thought this too and I think it'll be a city that does it first. City traffic is the worst affected by the start stop of signalling and a perfected driverless system wouldn't need signalling as they could flow efficiently (assuming the system is aware of every other car's location).
We have a few cities here in the UK that are becoming completely pedestrian/mass, you get to a point on the city boundary where you have to park and a bus takes you in the rest of the way. I think a city might pilot a "auto mode only" area at some point.
The law abiding nature of them reminds me of another dilemma I've wondered about. If the car is about to crash and has become sophisticated enough to know that X maneuver would result in 5 pedestrian deaths but Y maneuver only kills the driver.
Do they make it kill the driver?
How do you sell something that is programmed to kill you if certain circumstances are met?
Re:Unison (Score:5, Interesting)
So, you've never been in an accident that was not your fault on the highways?
Sometimes, going at speed and a deer jumps out means hitting the deer and possibly killing the driver, or swerving off the road and killing the driver, or serving into another car and killing others. Often, coming 'to a full and complete stop' isn't possible. Or may be on train tracks.
There are definitely more important questions, but these questions definitely need to be answered as they are literally life & death questions and will have huge financial consequences on the robot car companies if not answered well.
Sorry to interrupt your rant.
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Shit I've had Whitetails Deer drop out of the sky in front of me, they can jump 10 feet straight up when they're scared, come up out of a ditch over their heads in one bound and land right in front of you. On a foggy drive, a whitetail ran passed me while driving, the slipped on the pavement and fell down in my lane. They will run into you when your completely stopped too, one ran through a parking lot and damaged 15 parked cars.
Re:Unison (Score:5, Informative)
Really, when will idiot philosophers get over their wet dream of getting people to condone murder? There are more important and useful questions to ask, but all I keep hearing about is some stupid variant of the trolley scam.
The trolley is a thought experiment, but the situation is not totally out of the way. Nearly every time there is a drone strike, or an air strike, or an encounter between a US cop and a dark-skinned person, plenty of innocents are killed. One can only hope that the people responsible at least convince themselves (if nobody else) that in the long term this saves lives, instead of acting purely reactively.
Michael Sandel's Justice [justiceharvard.org] course at Harvard is online, and is full of interesting discussions of moral dilemmas. There is not always a perfect solution, but there is a lot of value in thinking about the problem.
Re: Unison (Score:5, Insightful)
That's true anyway though. Speed limits are typically set not to completely prevent fatalities, but to minimise them.
Speed limits in the UK around pedestrianised areas are set at 30mph not because that means you're guaranteed to be able to stop if a kid runs out in front of you, but because at that speed there's a very high chance that such a collision will not be fatal (whereas at 40mph it would pretty much always be fatal).
Getting driverless cars to adhere to the limit doesn't seem like a particularly big deal - they don't need to slow down to avoid all collisions altogether, just enough to almost certainly prevent fatalities - that's always going to be way better than now where human reaction times are such that they can't react to drop speed as fast as a computer.
There is no moral dilemma because existing standards are sufficient, we've already made these decisions, computers needn't be treated specially. It's like saying if 5 people jump out in front of a car now, should you swerve into a wall and kill yourself, or should you kill them? Sorry but if they jump in front of a car that's travelling legally without giving it time to stop then that's on them - in this case the driver is the only innocent, because they're the one that hasn't acted in a profoundly stupid manner and so does simply not deserve to die, whereas the other 5 people were basically choosing an action equivalent to suicide.
Even if you come up with some convoluted theory such as "What if the people are being blown across the road by a hurricane and have no choice" there's no real argument, because you're legally supposed to drive in a manner safe enough for the weather conditions, not simply the speed limit - any driverless car programmed to follow the rules of the road will know this and will be travelling slowly and safely enough in hurricane conditions for this to not be an issue.
We already have automated trains, and if you jump out onto the track in front of them without them having chance to stop we call it what it is - suicide.
Driverless cars only really introduce questions of liability and responsibility for people who don't know that those liability and responsibility questions are already well answered in existing law. All you have to do is substitute "What should the computer do?" with "What should the driver do?" and you already have your answer enshrined and well tested in existing law.
Re: Unison (Score:4, Insightful)
As for children playing dare across the road - it'd be good to stop if you see them, but if not there's also a little thing called natural selection that's been really underrated lately.
So your cars are programmed to kill stupid people? Good to know. Does that extend to pedestrians peering at their mobile phone and blind people too, or just children?
I am curious though. How does the car know the child is stupidly playing Dare and not merely still going through the 'Learning roads are dangerous' phase? Or are all children fair game?
I guess it'll help with overpopulation.
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Adaptation (Score:2)
This should go both ways. People will need to adapt to the way automated vehicles drive (this would be helped by labeling them so they are easy to spot). Then automated vehicles should be given a set of exception to the rules and this would need to be legal, so the can override the regulations when the regulations are likely to create trouble.
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This should go both ways. People will need to adapt to the way automated vehicles drive (this would be helped by labeling them so they are easy to spot). Then automated vehicles should be given a set of exception to the rules and this would need to be legal, so the can override the regulations when the regulations are likely to create trouble.
If your goal is to give privilege to the wealthy who will be able to afford autonomous vehicles than this would certainly do it. The rich, riding in these new vehicles, will get special rules related to operating a vehicle in traffic compared to the rest of us. Then, in addition, if there is an accident where a regular car hits an autonomous vehicle, it will be the regular drivers fault because the autonomous vehicle wasn't breaking the law in what it was doing.
A better and more practical solution would be
Re:Adaptation (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're not paying attention to the driver in front of you, then you're distracted. If you''re not leaving enough room to stop if the driver in front of you brakes, then you're driving recklessly. Neither is to be condoned.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Make them all Caddys and Priuses (Score:5, Funny)
People expect Caddys to drive slow and do weird things, because Uncle Harry is driving. Same for Priuses, because it's either Aunt Marge or some granola-head hippy doing his "hyper-mileing" thing. Problem solved :-)
Either that or put a sticker on the back: "This car rigorously obeys all traffic laws"
Re:Make them all Caddys and Priuses (Score:4, Funny)
Disguise all self driving cars as police cars... That should keep the drivers in the cars around them from driving as if there are no rules...
Re:Make them all Caddys and Priuses (Score:5, Interesting)
Disguise all self driving cars as police cars... That should keep the drivers in the cars around them from driving as if there are no rules...
You have a good point with your funny comment.
Autonomous cars should have a very distinctive indicator light marker.
Slow vehicles have to use an orange rotating beacon here.
Cars operating autonomously should have something similar.
No, but it doesn't matter (Score:2)
It might be safer in some situations, but you won't be able to buy an autonomous car that's programmed to break the law. The DoT will just never allow it, and I can't blame them.
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They might have to allow them to break the law.
Studies have found that cities would grind to a halt if everyone holds to the law. The only other way is to get mathematicians to design the road so that dead locks are not possible.
Citation please. Most major cities do hold people to the law -- trying sitting in an intersection in Manhattan when the light is red and see what happens. City traffic depends on people obeying the law because of the high density. Highway engineers will tell you that congestion in city streets and highways is not related to speed limit, unless set very low. For safety, higher speeds mean increased distance between vehicles, so fewer vehicles per mile than lower speeds. Higher speeds also means traffic fl
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84 in a 70
This is what I see people in California doing all day long every day.
The last time I visited California the people went 5 in a 70 for what seemed all day long.
Human drivers are terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure there will be AI defenders who will question the assertion about a crash rate "double" that of average humans. But it doesn't matter. The point is that human drivers are idiots and drive in all sorts of unpredictable ways. They also tend to hate other drivers who operate in demonstrably safer ways (e.g., allowing plenty of space in front of them, not accelerating wildly just to stop 100 feet ahead in stop-and-go traffic, not zooming past a slower lane in a merge situation, but instead attempting a "zipper merge" at the same speed as the slower lane, etc). Of course, a lot of the less safe human behaviors also tend to be the reason for traffic snarls in the first place, but you'll have a hard time convincing most drivers of that, since they want to drive as if they are on a racetrack and somehow think that weaving back and forth to get into that tiny gap you've left in front for safety is going to allow them to get home so much faster (even if it's only 2 seconds earlier).
I imagine the biggest problem with having AI cars obey traffic laws strictly is not the accidents -- rather that it's going to lead to human road rage, which often leads humans to be even more irrational and drive in even less safe ways. Thus, while AI cars are still a minority on the roads, I'm not sure it will lead to a net improvement in accident statistics -- just as a "slow driver" on a highway can block up traffic, cause other drivers to drive unsafely around them, and ultimately lead to the potential for more accidents, even if that slow driver thinks they are being "safe" by driving the speed limit or a little below.
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The point is that human drivers are idiots and drive in all sorts of unpredictable ways.
All of this is true, yet accident rate of these idiotic humans is half of what rigidly-abiding robots are. Perhaps, driving like an idiot in all sorts of unpredictable ways is the right approach to reducing accidents in a system that presently dominated by idiots driving in all sorts of unpredictable ways?
Re:Human drivers are terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
Or... it's simply a learning curve. For both AI and human drivers.
Besides, all of the robot crashes have been minor fender benders. It may be worth living with double the rate of those if the serious crashes that injure people are perhaps halved.
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Still, if it is necessary for humans to change and adapt to make autonomous driving a possibility, then it is clear indication that AI is not up to the task of driving by itself.
Re:Human drivers are terrible (Score:4, Informative)
Besides, all of the robot crashes have been minor fender benders. It may be worth living with double the rate of those if the serious crashes that injure people are perhaps halved.
Bingo. The relevant question is "What is the crash rate involving injury?" If that is lower, then it is reasonable to accept a higher rate of non-injury crashes. Trading injury for property damage is a good deal, since increased property damage can be handled by increased insurance costs on non-automated drivers.
Re:Human drivers are terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, all of the robot crashes have been minor fender benders. It may be worth living with double the rate of those if the serious crashes that injure people are perhaps halved.
Bingo. The relevant question is "What is the crash rate involving injury?"
Not quite. The relevant question is "What is the crash rate involving injury for a desired level of traffic throughput.
If all we wanted to do is reduce injury, we could enforce 10 mph speed limit with automatic speed traps and draconian fines and completely eliminate any kind of traffic-related injury.
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If traffic throughput is important, then because it peaks at about 60 mph on freeways [onesearch.id], freeway speed limits should be lowered, right? As a bonus, it would also improve fuel economy, which peaks at around 25-60 mph depending on the vehicle [wikipedia.org].
But that's only if you value throughput over speed, which not even traffic engineers do [strongtowns.org].
Re:Human drivers are terrible (Score:5, Interesting)
all of the robot crashes have been minor fender benders
Note that, for example, Google's cars are never going faster than 25 mph. So it's a little disingenuous to say they only get into fender benders when a human in the same situation would likely not have anything more than a minor fender bender either, even if they were very bad at driving.
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All of this is true, yet accident rate of these idiotic humans is half of what rigidly-abiding robots are. Perhaps, driving like an idiot in all sorts of unpredictable ways is the right approach to reducing accidents in a system that presently dominated by idiots driving in all sorts of unpredictable ways?
Maybe, maybe not. It depends on how you count accidents. Do you want to reduce accidents in general, or do you want to reduce serious accidents that cause serious or fatal injuries?
It's unclear from the limited data what effect the robotic rules are having. If "driving like an idiot in all sorts of unpredictable ways" causes 50 accidents with 25 serious ones and 10 fatalities, but driving in a more rigid rule-based way results in 100 fender-benders but no serious accidents and no fatalities, I think mo
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If you want to eliminate accidents the simplest way is to ban all driving. We don't do that, because what we really are after is reduction of accidents for any given throughput of transportation system. It is difficult to measure throughput, so we approximate it by miles driven.
Every adherent of "rigid rule-based" approach ignores the death toll caused by increased traffic as a result of rigidly following all rules. It is easy to measure direct fatalities caused by traffic
Re:Human drivers are terrible (Score:4, Interesting)
"Rigid rule based approach" would probably result in many fewer snarl-ups.
Let's imagine 2 extremes: the M6 southbound near Manchester as it is today. Traffic is very heavy, and impatient drivers tend to bunch up. An impatient driver cuts from one lane to the next because the next lane is moving 1mph quicker, forcing their way into the remaining space in lane 3 causing someone to brake, and it causes a chain reaction - all the close following cars with too little distance start braking progressively harder and harder until the entire motorway stops (or worse, someone gets rear-ended). You now have a self-sustaining traffic jam with no discernible reason (from the air you just see a standing wave of stopped traffic with no obvious cause) until the evening when finally fewer vehicles are arriving at the back of the jam than are leaving from the front.
The other extreme is the same entire motorway is populated by rigidly rule following automated cars. They will all be following a safe distance. No one will cut across a lane because the other one is going 1 mph faster. Traffic flows freely all day long despite the density.
Re:Human drivers are terrible (Score:5, Insightful)
All of this is true, yet accident rate of these idiotic humans is half of what rigidly-abiding robots are.
No. The accident rate of the idiot humans is twice as high with robot cars as it is with other idiot humans.
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1. Ban rigidly-abiding robots from the roads
2. Ban idiotic humans from the roads
I hope you can see that 1. is by far more economical and feasible solution, especially considering we have a shortage of rigidly-abiding robots and over-supply of idiotic humans.
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The point is that human drivers are idiots and drive in all sorts of unpredictable ways.
All of this is true, yet accident rate of these idiotic humans is half of what rigidly-abiding robots are. Perhaps, driving like an idiot in all sorts of unpredictable ways is the right approach to reducing accidents in a system that presently dominated by idiots driving in all sorts of unpredictable ways?
Actually, that's not what the article stated. The overall accident rate for autonomous vehicles is lower than human vehicles. However, the likelihood of your vehicle being hit by a vehicle driven by a human is twice as high if you drive an autonomous vehicle.
The other issue, which has not been tested yet, is how will the autonomous vehicles fair against different manufacturers who have developed their own AI? It is much more predictable to program all AI cars to obey the traffic laws than to have each man
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As a fellow road user, your assertion that you don't have to follow the rules of the road is arrogant and dangerous. As far as I am concerned if you don't want to follow the rules of the road get off public roads.
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I imagine the biggest problem with having AI cars obey traffic laws strictly is not the accidents -- rather that it's going to lead to human road rage, which often leads humans to be even more irrational and drive in even less safe ways.
This is a real problem with bad traffic laws, and in a way I'll be glad if having a "perfectly law-abiding" driver demonstrate it unambiguously makes the point.
We have a related problem in my home city (Cambridge, UK) at the moment. There are many cyclists here and congestion is also increasing with new housing developments nearby. The local council have responded by lowering the speed limits on almost all roads in the city to 20mph instead of the normal 30mph.
On the face of it, this looks like a reasonable
Break the rules to keep traffic flowing (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a study a few years ago about traffic in cities. They found that if all the drivers kept to rules that most cities would halt into complete grid lock.
People need to break rules to clear junctions, to pass cars that are stuck, and even force priority to not starve lanes going into a junction.
I travel by bus to and from work in Amsterdam, it is quite a long trip which includes traffic jams in the inner city. The bus driver needs to often break the rules to be able to pass cars, and force priority on junction because they are often stuck. Cars are backing up, cars are trying to make room.
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All of this just highlights how primitive current AI really is. I have a lot of experience dealing with drivers who behave in random, unpredictable ways. A self-driving car doesn't. Current AI is a long, long way from being able to handle all the situations that a human driver encounters every day.
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There was a study a few years ago about traffic in cities. They found that if all the drivers kept to rules that most cities would halt into complete grid lock.The bus driver needs to often break the rules to be able to pass cars
That depends on the rules. It is illegal for a bus to pass a car where you are?! As for buses, there is a fortunate tendency in the UK to give way to them; otherwise they would never be able to pull away from any bus stop in cities. Perhaps that is what you mean by "breaking the rules"?
My experience is the opposite. Every day I am in a long traffic jam of cars waiting to pull out at a "T" junction onto another road which has priority. This is all in a city suburb with 30mph speed limit. The traffic
Human nature could muck this up. (Score:2)
Best Answer (Score:2)
No. Human or machine, it's a fallacy (Score:4, Insightful)
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Indeed. If more accidents are prevented or at least the seriousness of them reduced from other aspects of enforcing the speed limit, then it's worth the occasional fantastical corner case crash.
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Having everybody ignore the rules and not change them is the worst possible outcome.
And yet, it's what we have.
Driving is a complex mix of the statutory, the habitual and the negotiated. Getting a car to obey the first is the easy part. Good luck with the other two. Especially the third. When a driver flashes his lights at you at a junction, what do you do?
The real world is messy and the corner cases kill you. If you're fortunate, you work in an industry where that's metaphor. If you're unlucky you work in an industry where that's a literal truth.
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how do you enforce something 100% without going for a big brother solution? there are only so many cops.
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Believe it or not, "everybody does it", or, called by the official term, "customary law" is part of the anglo-saxon law system.
Drafting new rules is non trivial I guess, as they have to allow cars to do what the humans do, as well as still being understandable by humans, so that the humans stay legal, and the humans know what to expect from cars.
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The problem is far more complicated that you realize.
It has already been shown that if everyone followed existing laws perfectly, traffic would grind to a complete stop. So obviously you need to change the rules, right? But, trying to change the rules to accommodate every possible situation will simply result in a mess that's even worse than what it is right now, because those "fantastical corner cases" are much more common than you think.
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It has already been shown that if everyone followed existing laws perfectly, traffic would grind to a complete stop.
Oh, come on. Who showed this? Where?
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This is nothing more than a sophisticated from of "everybody else is doing it" argument that you get from small children. If the rules aren't working, the solution is to either enforce the rules better or to change the rules. Having everybody ignore the rules and not change them is the worst possible outcome. It creates a situation where things simply can't get better. Nobody can know the real effect of properly enforced rules so there's no data that can be used for improvement of the rules. What we need is better enforcement for human drivers. It's almost inexcusable that neither cars (nor trains) have automatic speed control systems that prevent exceeding the limit. Invariably somebody will point out the fantastical corner case where accelerating and swerving makes sense but those can be easily solved.
You sir, are part of the problem and not the solution. For one thing, it is perfectly reasonable and acceptable to exceed the speed limit in order to safely merge into traffic. If you end up directly next to a car and need to merge then you have two options. One is to speed up and one is to slow down. If you're already going the speed limit then the safest option is not to slow down. You can see in front of you and next to you much more clearly than behind you. So why would you stick to a strict inter
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Once we apply control system concepts to this, it becomes immediately obvious that any system of rigid adherence to traffic laws is a lot less efficient than more flexible system based on human-to-human interactions and learning.
Congratulations. This is the most amazingly elaborate rationalization for road rage I have ever seen.
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Once we apply control system concepts to this, it becomes immediately obvious that any system of rigid adherence to traffic laws is a lot less efficient than more flexible system based on human-to-human interactions and learning.
[Citation needed]
Your primary argument is that the benefit comes from "dynamic" systems that "are capable of adjusting to a wide range of situations." Except with more predictable adherence to traffic laws, you'd have a smaller range of situations occurring.
Also, in terms of "efficiency," it's pretty well demonstrated in traffic theory that traffic has "transition thresholds" kind of like fluid dynamic transitions between laminar and turbulent flow. When you have conditions like people trying to drive
Not an Infraction (Score:3, Interesting)
Not only is it not an infraction to drive in such a way as to save lives and prevent accidents, when you can save a life or prevent an accident, but it requires you to go against the suggested speed, or swerve into the left lane (even when the divider is solid) you are actually required to do so. That is the entire point of cars having a maximum speed of several times the maximum suggested speed is because you are supposed to speed in many situations to save lives.
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You obviously have not taken a motorcycle training course. They will teach you these strategies.
For example, when coming to a stop you never just downshift to first, you down shift with the speed as you slow down. This allows you to quickly start moving again if you are about to be rear ended.
If you are traveling quickly and someone slams on their breaks, the correct answer is often not to panic stop, but to use the bikes agility to quickly move out of the way. I've had a situation once where I was at a li
Re:Not an Infraction (Score:4, Insightful)
There isn't any situation I can think of where speeding up will end up saving lives
Getting out of the way. In most cases, a car can accelerate out of the way of a car faster than its brakes can overcome intertia. Even if it can't, I'd much rather an accident where I get T-boned in the trunk than in one of the doors.
nor is that why cars can go faster than posted speed limits
Well, a car that maxed out at 55mph would be laughable in other states where 65 and 75 are common. trying to decide upon a national speed limit would be ridiculous, as it doesn't account for population density or geography/topography. Sure, this argues well for having cars max out at 90, rather than 120 or 140 (higher in some of the high end / exotic models), but a car that maxed out at 75 would be more desirable than one that maxes out at 55, and then we end up with interstate commerce hell...
nor does anybody teach swerving into the left hand (on-coming) lane to avoid an accident.
This particular lesson was covered as follows: "do whatever the hell it takes to avoid an accident". If that includes swerving into the left lane? so be it. Here's a for-instance: residential area, two lane road, a driver isn't looking too closely while backing out of the driveway. Do you retain your lane, or swerve into the left lane to avoid hitting his car in the rear wheel well area? Same for hitting a deer, fallen tree, road construction, idiot texting instead of looking at the road, a situation where the lights aren't synchronized and thus the left side is clear and the person in front of you stopped short...
That's just beyond brain dead
No, assuming that we're only talking about driving in a straight line on a highway, as if it is the only possible scenario where driving skills come into play, is beyond brain dead.
"let me trade this rear end collision with a head on collision, all day long!".
I am certain that the GP wasn't referring to crossing the divider when there was oncoming traffic. To more fully phrase it with the included context, his/her statement was this: "At present, Google cars treat the divider line as sacrosanct, and will not cross it under any circumstances. However, there are edge cases when driving where the best way of avoiding an an accident is to cross the line. Humans know that avoiding an accident is more important than staying in the lane; most humans would look at another human sideways if an accident took place because the driver adhered to lane markers rather than self preservation. This is expected of humans, but not of Google cars."
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In >99% of such situations, the correct decision is to hit the brake, NOT the accelerator.
Dear God, no. No, no, no. You're that guy that slams on his brake at the end of an on ramp because he can't process the situation quickly enough to know when it's appropriate and *preferred* to hit the damn gas pedal and merge at speed rather than stop in the middle of the lane and wait until that steady stream of traffic lets up. Here's a clue for you and zillion other ass hats out there...it's not letting up and your over cautious bull shit just put everyone behind you in a worse situation than they wo
difficult to say, but probably no (Score:2)
It's difficult to say without having the telemetry from every collision.
If the one incident I've seen the data from is the typical case, then hell no. The driver rear-ended a Google car stopped at a stoplight without even slowing down.
On the other hand, if we're talking about merging, then that's possibly no. I don't drive big truck anymore, but let's face it: four wheel drivers just can't figure it out.
Merging is a bit of a difficult case because you can't merge if you haven't matched the speed of traffi
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+1 truth, there are some brutal on ramps in downtown LA.
Accident type is relevant (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA: "They’re usually hit from behind in slow-speed crashes".
If this is in fact the dominant accident mode, I would suggest that this is not such a big deal and will, over the long term, be self-correcting as the insurance rates for idiot non-automated drivers shoot up because they can't get it through their thick skulls not to tailgate other vehicles.
Re:Accident type is relevant (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA: "They’re usually hit from behind in slow-speed crashes".
If this is in fact the dominant accident mode, I would suggest that this is not such a big deal and will, over the long term, be self-correcting as the insurance rates for idiot non-automated drivers shoot up because they can't get it through their thick skulls not to tailgate other vehicles.
So, what's happening that makes tailgaters hit the driverless cars more often than driven cars?
Are the google cars suddenly slamming on the brakes in a way that humans don't generally do?
Re:Accident type is relevant (Score:5, Interesting)
Other articles are usually pretty quick to point out the reason, but this one has an agenda.
The vast majority of accidents involving driverless cars are low speed rear end collisions. Most drivers will not report a 3mph collision with no damage, but google does.
Asimov has the right idea. (Score:2)
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If this is a google car, it should use what it knows about both of us to determine which one of us is most likely to make a meaningful contribution to society and which one of us is mostly likely to click on ads.
Then kill the one who doesn't' click ads.
We'll have to suck it up and learn to drive (Score:2)
Stick to the actual rules (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't make self-driving cars shitty drivers just because everyone else is one.
No, here is what they need to do first (Score:2)
1. Write all the code in Spark or at least Ada or another language with a similar safety record (e.g. Haskell, perhaps Rust). It can be a formally sound and static subset of C++, if it must be, but not just any C or C++.
2. Use only deterministic code, no dynamic memory allocation, fluffy A.I. heuristics or machine learning. I don't care how hard it is. I want real engineering based on real physics with provable security margins, guaranteed response times.
3. Formally validate the code in a theorem prover, as
Question is precedence order (Score:2)
If an autonomous car can completely avoid accidents by taking corrective action that keeps it's behaviour within the law, then it should do.
But there will always be occasions that occur out of the ordinary. Take the obvious example of someone stepping out into the road - if you do nothing, then you are certainly going to crash into the person (and likely kill them).
Slamming on the brakes might cause a car behind to run into you, and it may not even be possible to stop in time.
Swerving may be the only option
Same problem with law enforcment (Score:2)
It is also the same problem with automated law enforcement such as speed traps and red-light cameras.
Normally, cops are supposed to use some judgment before handing tickets, machines don't. A typical example is that you are supposed to make way for emergency vehicles, which sometimes involves breaking the usual rules. For example, if you cross a red light just enough to make way for an ambulance, a human cop won't ticket you as you did what you had to. A camera doesn't care. And it starts becoming a problem
I don't follow this line (Score:2)
their relative unpredictability on the road are nonetheless leading to more accidents than expected.
Isn't the opposite way?, aren't self-driving stricly predictable?, isn't fault of those who don't follow the rules?. They should keep being like that, and people who doesn't follow the laws should be banned from driving, simple as that.
Confession (Score:5, Funny)
I'll admit it: I drive like an old person. Any day I can piss off a millennial in his BMW, is a good day.
Solution is Obvious (Score:3)
The solution to this "problem" is quite obvious.
Highways need to be -all- autonomous vehicles. No manual control at over 50 kph (35 mph).
Driverless cars are exposing a key flaw (Score:5, Funny)
To summarise the summary: people are a problem.
How is this a flaw with the cars? (Score:4, Insightful)
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...and the middle lane.
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In the UK you can be pulled-over if you are driving in the middle lane and there is no one in the outer lane (left-lane in UK, right-lane in US). In France there are special outer-lanes, which are clearly marked for people intending to drive for a single exit, so here the 'middle' lane is permitted for longer distance drives. I am wondering whether we could get a hybrid solution?
Road awareness campaigns would work too.
BTW the rules for these cars should be keep to the speed limit, but observe the traffic fl
Re: the new slow dummies in the left lane (Score:5, Informative)
If you're not overtaking, you have no business being in that lane. That's what the outer lanes are *for*. It's people who don't understand that simple rule that cause accidents. Undertaking is illegal e.g. in the UK for a reason.
Re: the new slow dummies in the left lane (Score:5, Insightful)
It's people who don't understand that simple rule that cause accidents
People who don't understand that the overtaking lane is also not an excuse for speeding nor does it have a requirement that you do 30km/h above the limit is also what causes accidents. In general idiots who think they own the road in every which way cause accidents.
I get that about once a week. Overtaking some speed limited truck takes about 10-15 seconds when I'm driving the limit. Some idiot will come up behind me at a stupid speed and start flashing his lights and honking the horn. They are just as bad as those people who block the lanes for no reason.
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So you're saying the left lane is reserved only for illegal activities?
You're an idiot. The overtaking lane is perfectly valid to use when doing the speed limit, especially when other lanes are travelling below it. If you are driving 150 behind me and I'm doing the speed limit in the left line WHILE OVERTAKING, then my following words can not be stated enough: "Go fuck yourself you idiotic dangerous lunatic, I hope you get rear ended by someone equally stupid."
Re: the new slow dummies in the left lane (Score:4, Informative)
It's not silly. It actually lets you go faster, and more safely with less road congestion. Why? Because slower traffic ends up on the inner lane, going progressively faster to the outer lane. So it's actually not silly at all in heavy traffic. It means slow traffic doesn't impede faster traffic, and it means that the driver can make certain assumptions about the driving conditions, e.g. they won't be overtaken on the inside, which makes lane changes easier and safer. It makes driving on fast roads predicable since you know how the other traffic will behave.
Of course, there are some idiots who don't know how to drive and hog the middle lane, and are universally hated for it; they get pulled over by the police since it's actively dangerous to the other traffic--because it can force people to undertake.
When you look at footage of road accidents in countries without this rule, what's immediately clear is that the driving is far more erratic since it's an unconstrained free-for-all, and that makes accidents more likely, as well as reducing the effective safe speed on the road.
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Or the dummies who are speeding could just slow down and go the speed limit.
Re:the new slow dummies in the left lane (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:the new slow dummies in the left lane (Score:4, Insightful)
So...everyone? The issue here is that people tend to drive as fast or as slow as the road allows, normally it's the common law speed limit. Humans can usually adjust to this, robots with strict rules can't.
That is incorrect. People tend to drive as fast or as slow as enforcement of the speed limit allows. If authorities start enforcing the speed limit, the speed driven will decrease. Since there is no real penalty to speeding, people speed.
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Wrong, multiple studies by civil engineers have shown that designing and building a road and not posting a speed limit and then measuring how fast people drive (after a settle in time) and setting the speed limit at where the 85th percentile drives almost always establishes the same speed limit as what the engineers originally had in mind when designing the road. The only change to this is when conditions changes such as a volume increase because of additional residential areas or businesses being built.
Re:the new slow dummies in the left lane (Score:4, Informative)
You are quoting research that a graduate student of mine actually helped produce (not the original, but the followup in 1997), but you are missing the point. Yes, people will drive at speeds they are comfortable with, that is not in dispute. However, that is assuming there is no enforcement of existing limits. The research shows that if enforcement is factored in, most people will drive within five miles of the speed limit. It further shows, that this leads to a more consistent speed among all drivers on a given stretch of road and as such improves the number of vehicles per mile per hour per given stretch.
You are correct, posting speed limits does not affect overall speed. That is, unless those speed limits are actually enforced. If you aren't going to enforce them, then why post them.
It should be simple to understand that rules without consequences don't change behavior. OTOH, removing consequences tends to encourage the behavior the rule was meant to address, which is where we are today with speed limits.
The reality is that the faster vehicles go, the longer they take to stop or if the driver is distracted the further the vehicle travels until attention is focused. Couple that with the aging population, where reaction time is decreasing, and you have a recipe for disaster. One solution, albeit very costly, is to force people into driving autonomous vehicles. Of course, that will take years before they are ready and in sufficient quantity to make a difference (look at the hybrids, even government subsidies weren't enough to get sufficient people to buy them where they were economical and they were vastly cheaper than autonomous vehicles are expected to be). Or, a simpler solution, available today and proven to work is to enforce the traffic laws.
Again, I agree, just changing the number on the sign won't change peoples speed habits. However, enforcing the number on the sign has been proven to do so.
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If you think keeping up with the flow of traffic and/or occasionally driving in excess of the posted speed limit makes one a despicable person, I hate to imagine how you cope with everyday life surrounded by people you hate.
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Actually, here in Wisconsin the police are not allowed to write a ticket if you are driving within the measured 85th percentile speed (outside of school zones). The speed limits are measured automatically every so often on various stretches of roads by radar machines that report your speed to you along with a sign reminding you of the posted speed limit. This is to encourage people to slow down to the posted speed limit to keep the 85th percentile close to the prior posted limit.
It works really good and I b
Re:the new slow dummies in the left lane (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is a great theory, but the reality is that if the speed limit is set very low on a road for no apparent reason then a lot of drivers won't respect it, and unless you can and will enforce that limit strongly and consistently, that is unlikely to change. Putting the remaining drivers -- those who do want to be responsible and safe -- in a position where they have to choose between breaking the law and driving as safely as possible, is bad law-making.
Re:the new slow dummies in the left lane (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is a great theory, but the reality is that if the speed limit is set very low on a road for no apparent reason
Oh there is a reason, it just has nothing to do with safety.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Originally, the Interstate speeds were set by surveying the speeds of the cars. (I read that Engineers did this survey and on roads without speed limit signs--that us, unregulated. Other sources indicate that this is a common practice for setting speed limits on "new" roads.)
85% of the cars drive at the same (range) and that becomes the speed limit. The original Interstate speed in my state was 70. Kentucky was 75.
During the Carter-oil-embargo, the speed was reduced to 55 "to conserve oil". The USA Con
Re:the new slow dummies in the left lane (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is a great theory, but the reality is that if the speed limit is set very low on a road for no apparent reason
Oh there is a reason, it just has nothing to do with safety.
Or there is a reason, it has to do with safety, or with optimising throughput, or some other valid concern, but that reason is not obvious to every dummy driver on the street. I don't trust every guy who owns a pair of pliers and a power drill to have a go at my dental care. So why would I assume that I know better than the experts [wikipedia.org] which speed limits are optimal for a given set of goals?
Re:the new slow dummies in the left lane (Score:5, Informative)
Oh there is a reason, it just has nothing to do with safety.
Or there is a reason, it has to do with safety, or with optimising throughput, or some other valid concern, but that reason is not obvious to every dummy driver on the street.
The throughput argument bears repeating. Many drivers don't understand this, but sometimes you can get more people through a bottleneck (AND have fewer accidents) if everyone drives more slower at a constant speed [slate.com] than if everyone is trying to drive faster at the same traffic density. This is particularly true when you have a high variability of vehicle speeds, like in a mountainous area where trucks are forced to go slower or in an urban area where frequent incoming and outgoing traffic at exits often travel at different speeds from the rest of the highway.
For example, if you're driving on a highway through an urban area and they lower the rush hour speed limit to 45 mph (some areas now are adopting such dynamic speed limit signs), the idea is that if cars actually go 40-45 mph, the road will actually be able to handle the amount of traffic while also allowing all the people merging on, getting off at exits, changing lanes, etc. at a safe speed.
If, instead, everyone tries to drive 65-70 in the same area, what can happen is that the merging or changing lanes will eventually cause someone to cut someone else off, which causes sudden braking, which then causes some tailgaters behind them to brake suddenly, others follow and overcompensate because they were going too fast and suddenly see much slower cars, and within a few minutes you have a "traffic wave" of stop-and-go traffic backed up for a few miles which might take a half-hour to resolve, where throughput is dramatically reduced. (How many times have you gotten to the end after sitting through 10 minutes of such stop-and-go traffic waves, and there's nothing there -- no accident, no merge, etc.? This is often the kind of thing that happened.)
At a slower speed, the slower car may not have been forced to "cut someone off" in the first place, or if he does, the impact of a bit of braking may not cause such massive changes and overcompensation. Traffic thus recovers faster and throughput is maximized.
Re:the new slow dummies in the left lane (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh there is a reason, it just has nothing to do with safety
Surely this article shows that the speed limit is indeed about safety. If you think that you actually driving at a safe speed and then run into a car that is travelling at the legal limit then obviously you were driving too fast to be able to avoid a hazard on the road. If you travelled slower then you would have more of a chance to see the car, correctly gauge it's speed, and then stop before you ran into it.
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Another way of looking at it is that predictability is an important factor. Almost regardless of speed, someone behaving unexpectedly can cause issues. Human drivers ironically tend to offer clues of their unpredictability, allowing other drivers to flag them for extra attention, while self driving cars probably does a lot less of that (stuff like weaving a bit, acting uncertain, blinking the wrong way etc.).
Of course, if all cars were self driving, the issue would vanish. I suppose it would also lessen as
Re:the new slow dummies in the left lane (Score:5, Informative)
Which is a great theory, but the reality is that if the speed limit is set very low on a road for no apparent reason then a lot of drivers won't respect it, and unless you can and will enforce that limit strongly and consistently, that is unlikely to change. Putting the remaining drivers -- those who do want to be responsible and safe -- in a position where they have to choose between breaking the law and driving as safely as possible, is bad law-making.
Actually, you don't need to enforce it consistently. You get as much compliance, but at a lower cost, if you haphazardly enforce it. If the driver doesn't know when it will be enforced, they will comply. It only takes the possibility of being caught that triggers the behavior.
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Yes, but so what?
If you want to know how these laws can be followed to the letter but robots still commit mass murder, read the Asimov short stories where those laws are taken from.
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which of cause the characters in the stories just never thought off because the assumed that those three rules were perfect.
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> Should these robots be taught to break the law in order to conform with the behavior of their more chaotic human counterparts???
No, but they should be taught to break the law in order to maximize safety. If you need to go off-road to avoid killing someone, you do. If you need to turn right on a red where that's prohibitied because somebody's zooming up behind you, you do it.
And then there are instances where it's better for everyone if you speed a bit to find a place to move over rather than slow dow
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I believe their unpredictability comes from their inability to judge other normal human actions. For example, as mentioned above and in a few other articles I've seen, when driving near sidewalks autonomous vehicles have a hard time determining when a person is merely being an impatient jerk who thinks hanging his toes over the edge of the sidewalk gives him a real head start when the crosswalk light changes or is actually about to step onto the road. In those cases people might slow down (or not) but aut