The War on Driving to Come

[Whitedragon]

"I haven't made a mistake yet, so I never will." Yeah, good luck with that weird logic.

The argument would be computer driven will still crash no matter how safe you make it, and you can only program a computer to account for so many variables, and anything automated can by hijacked. So while they may be able to one day switch the main driving method to automated you will never be able to fully take away control from the person in the car. This also doesn't take into account rural area's and roads where programming routes is nearly impossible.

[melodramocracy]

Especially if we are speaking of the states, where there already is an unhealthy and fetish relationship with the word "freedom"

Being subjugated is where it's at, truly.

[Socialhealer]

literally never happening, isn't a thing, you can't take american's guns you sure as fuck aren't getting their cars.

[melodramocracy]

Driving yourself will become illegal because you won't be able to drive properly next to an automatic vehicle. The automatic vehicle's maneuvers can only be understood by another automatic vehicle, especially if both are going 200 mph.

Another one who hasn't thought this through in the slightest.

[Draco-Onis]

The argument would be computer driven will still crash no matter how safe you make it, and you can only program a computer to account for so many variables, and anything automated can by hijacked. So while they may be able to one day switch the main driving method to automated you will never be able to fully take away control from the person in the car. This also doesn't take into account rural area's and roads where programming routes is nearly impossible.

Let's not pretend that human driving is perfect no matter how flawed the programming is it is way better than that of a regular human when it comes to reaction time. Also the AI recognizes terrain and can adapt of course this technology is in its infancy but by the time it is considered the norm it would be the difference between computers that took entire buildings to our cell phones.

[Armakus]

10/10 would support

[Masark]

I feel like it's more likely there will be a mandatory 'emergency take-over' setting in the car that's designed only to work in preventing collisions and other accidents for people who don't want to switch to self-driving cars and enhanced roads.

That's already happening. Automatic emergency braking will become mandatory for new vehicles starting in 2022.

[Soeroah]

I'd be fine with outlawing driving once the tech is at a point driverless cars work properly. Or at least stop making new driver cares and eventually phase them out.

It'll be a lot easier to determine what causes an accident when most cars are driverless, and unless there's an actual bug - which again should be easy enough to determine - it seems likely to me that most crashes on a mostly-driverless road will be determined to be the human's fault.

So in that sense, I suppose keep people allowed to drive if they want, but on the understanding that they're more likely to bear the blame for any accident they're involved in.

[The Stormbringer]

That's already happening. Automatic emergency braking will become mandatory for new vehicles starting in 2022.

Good.

People complain about the lack of freedom in driving, but guess what? That same freedom is causing tens of thousands of deaths a year. Get over it.

It's a complicated issue, I'll give people that. Where does the line between your freedom and my safety exist? Or my freedom and the safety of those people?

[Z-Man]

The first fatality accident involving an autonomous vehicle is going to be worth billions.

It's going to be open season after that. Every autonomous vehicle is going to be knocked out by swoop and squat attacks as soon as they leave the garage. Owners will be sending their cars into the worst roads they can find, hoping for either suspension damage or on the receiving end of a successful squat. I give it a month before the insurance companies start yanking policies, and the car manufacturers will remote kill the feature to avoid liability.

Siri: "Collision imminent, restoring manual control."

[Masark]

It's going to be open season after that. Every autonomous vehicle is going to be knocked out by swoop and squat attacks as soon as they leave the garage.
...
I give it a month before the insurance companies start yanking policies

How exactly do you plan to get around the vehicles' logging, which will show exactly what actually happened? You'll be working against a record of everything the vehicle saw and did.

They're going to be yanking policies alright. From the people staging the crashes. Who will then be sent to prison for fraud.

[Draco-Onis]

The first fatality accident involving an autonomous vehicle is going to be worth billions.

It's going to be open season after that. Every autonomous vehicle is going to be knocked out by swoop and squat attacks as soon as they leave the garage. Owners will be sending their cars into the worst roads they can find, hoping for either suspension damage or on the receiving end of a successful squat. I give it a month before the insurance companies start yanking policies, and the car manufacturers will remote kill the feature to avoid liability.

Siri: "Collision imminent, restoring manual control."

The legality of it is on the owner of the car unless it is a result of a major software failure even then they will probably have deniability thanks to EULA. The autonomous driving feature is part of the car you can no more sue it then you can sue Honda for a death in a car accident unless they gave you faulty breaks or something.

Also as poster above said the computer keeps logs of everything that goes wrong so kind of hard to lie and make billions.

[Frogguh]

Can't wait for this to become a partisan issue. We'll have a new pointless online pissing match to pour thousands of hours into. I'm guessing one side will be "rights! tyranny!" and the other will be "but the death toll/why can't you just use an autocar?".

But yes, it's probably inevitable. Likely it'll proceed in stages - eg, you can't drive in major cities but you can in the suburbs. Then it'll be no cars in the suburbs but the country gets to keep theirs. I'm already guessing which side of politics each argument will end up on.

In addition to the general road toll, car attacks will likely be one of the catalysts. Big car attacks will create waves of bans in certain areas.

- - - Updated - - -



How many "sensor malfunctions" do humans have? Not to mention brain malfunctions. We're currently struggling to convince people not to text while driving.

In the US, humans kill something like 40,000 people a year in car accidents. And about 5 million are injured. The automated system doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to beat humans... and that's not really a high bar.

I don't know how you trust your kids in a car driven by a human, personally.

So long as the driver is me, I feel they are as safe as can be reasonably achieved in a vehicle. And sure, I've had "malfunctions" - sudden sneeze, stung by a bee, etc that have caused some issues, but a human performing the same job as a machine can self-correct from a malfunction in ways that machines cannot easily do. Not saying that overall the machine can't do the job and possibly even do it better, but I wouldn't have a job if machines were at a level that I'd be comfortable depending upon on the highway.

[Draco-Onis]

So long as the driver is me, I feel they are as safe as can be reasonably achieved in a vehicle. And sure, I've had "malfunctions" - sudden sneeze, stung by a bee, etc that have caused some issues, but a human performing the same job as a machine can self-correct from a malfunction in ways that machines cannot easily do. Not saying that overall the machine can't do the job and possibly even do it better, but I wouldn't have a job if machines were at a level that I'd be comfortable depending upon on the highway.

Human error is responsible for 99% of accident and crashes so the machines don't really have a very high bar to clear

Besides this is a moot point, your generation may not be comfortable with this but at some point people driving will be considered weird.

[Whitedragon]

You seem to be stuck in the early 90’s, join us in 2018 where even rural areas are easily mapped.

Just tells me you never leave the city much. If you where to follow a GPS to my house you will end up at my "neighbors" house who is over 3 miles away, and im not even the most rural of citizens in the US. yes I know it can be hard for you poor super center city folk to grasp, but there are still places where internet and cell service are almost non existent, much less fully mapped out and 100% accurate GPS maps.

[Darsithis]

I don't think any personally-driven vehicles should ever be prohibited. I've never been in an at-fault accident in almost 20 years, why should my driving ability be impugned and license revoked on the basis of human fallibility?

That's not a good reason to allow driving. Accidents are accidents, no matter how skilled you are, one day you will make a mistake. It might take a long time, if you're an attentive driver, but you will fail eventually. We all do.

I've gotten along for years without a car until I was forced to buy one six months ago. The very fact that I was able to buy one, that I had the right to choose (I could have taken public transportation or quit and found a new position elsewhere) is a right that I wouldn't want to give up, but I also see the need to let it go. Tens of thousands die yearly on the road and we waste an absurd amount of fuel idling in traffic that driverless cars would likely negate a good portion of. Is there a loss of privacy? Absolutely. I have no doubt it would make it very easy to keep track of who goes where, not that we don't track that now with trains and planes, but keep in mind that by that point we'd have nearly a half billion people in this country. No one can keep track of that kind of information regularly. Despite the loss of privacy, realistically no one is paying any attention to you at all.

So I am in support of driverless cars for the reasons of safety, speed, and resources.

[Better]

In a hypothetical perfect society driving manually would be banned. Logically it would eliminate things like Drunk Driving, Tired Driving, Speeding or other Traffic Violations, Vehicular Homicide, and Accidents on the road. Removing the human element from hunks of plastic, and metal moving at high speeds is probably better for society as a whole. This would also allow for much higher speed limits in places like interstates, as you've removed the human error factor.

However it would also need to carry with it certain, very important, notices before entering a self-driving vehicle. In particular it would need to fully inform you of what will/would happen if there was a malfunction in a self-driving vehicle. Even if the chance of it harming the passengers was 1/10,000,000 this notice is absolutely vital.


Now in the real world, I think if we ever are able to ban manual driving it would be after a very long battle against people that absolutely refuse to stop driving themselves around, and ultimately most likely will cause a lot of harm in doing so (crashing into self-driving cars, intentionally, or otherwise. Sabotaging them, etc.). Even after the ban you would see people manually driving illegally, again causing harm to the system and making it less safe overall. Maybe after generations of it being banned you'd finally reach the hypothetical society I mentioned above.

[Frogguh]

You are more likely to kill your children than a machine. All your problems have very easy solutions.

What if you own your own car but its self driving? You have a vehicle for emergency assistance, hell 911 might be able to remote control the car to get to a destination if you can make it, otherwise you are still waiting for an emergency vehicle like normal.

Curves, random animals, environmental problems? All can be programmed in and recognized by AI faster and more efficiency.
The real problem will be in convincing people that this is better, most likely we will need to wait for people with mindsets like yours to ultimately pass away for a new generation of people who are not stuck in an inferior mindset.

I wouldnt expect a completely driverless society to be a thing until im dead as well.

If it's designed that I can have a foot on the brake and force it to stop when I want it to, then that would help. Total dependency on it? Nope. We are nowhere even close to that level of dependability. It likely won't be all that unusual for one to simply lock up and have to be reset, most likely by a technician for even more money. The car I have now? I get in it and go, and I don't cause wrecks.

I'm also able to handle unexpected circumstances and correct for mistakes better than machines, if every other industry is anything to go by, unless these vehicles are somehow superior in every way to the top-of-the-line automation in industry. Yes, humans make more mistakes than machines performing the same task, but when the machine does slip up, correcting itself is a much more difficult thing for it to accomplish. Most simply can't, and require human intervention to correct.

So those things can be programmed to do all those tasks, can they? Why haven't they? That's right, it's nowhere near as simple as you make it out to be. The developers are still struggling greatly with getting these things to be able to recognize and react appropriately to all the situations they may encounter on the road, and they are nowhere close to achieving it. No need to even mention adverse weather conditions, which are not exactly uncommon.

It seems to me that yours is a rather blissfully ignorant optimism, putting a ton of faith in something that has yet to deserve it, and then expecting everyone to agree. I'll keep my "inferior" (or, to put it more accurately, reality-based) mindset, thanks very much.

Now, when the technology is proven, I'll likely be at the age where A) the kids aren't kids anymore, B) my eyesight and reflexes are deteriorating, and C) I won't care too much if I get wiped off the map anyway, so sure put in me in one so I can nap along the way. Better to crash while asleep anyway.

[Whitedragon]

Let's not pretend that human driving is perfect no matter how flawed the programming is it is way better than that of a regular human when it comes to reaction time. Also the AI recognizes terrain and can adapt of course this technology is in its infancy but by the time it is considered the norm it would be the difference between computers that took entire buildings to our cell phones.

infant stages maybe but even at its best there will always be hiccups, and as I said there is always the possibility of being just flat out hijacked by someone who can brake into your cars guidance computer. don't tell me it wont happen because they have already done it to some of these self driving cars just to prove a point. Lastly as I said I wouldn't be surprised if self driving becomes the norm at some point but it will most likely be a requirement to have an override function for manual driving in said car.

[Draco-Onis]

infant stages maybe but even at its best there will always be hiccups, and as I said there is always the possibility of being just flat out hijacked by someone who can brake into your cars guidance computer. don't tell me it wont happen because they have already done it to some of these self driving cars just to prove a point. Lastly as I said I wouldn't be surprised if self driving becomes the norm at some point but it will most likely be a requirement to have an override function for manual driving in said car.

Of course there will be hiccups no system is perfect but it's still better than human drivers, I think you are right a manual override function in case of errors or emergencies would probably be implemented.