> Are you really arguing that driving deaths are a major problem that requires intensive effort to solve?

It's obvious to any observer that driving deaths are a major problem, and that an intensive effort to solve this problem is appropriate. We've made tremendous progress over that last 50 years. Let's continue that path.

>It's obvious to any observer that driving deaths are a major problem, and that an intensive effort to solve this problem is appropriate. We've made tremendous progress over that last 50 years. Let's continue that path.

This is disingenuous. Driverless cars are not part of an effort to reduce driving deaths, that's just how they're being sold. It's just as likely that driverless cars will increase driving deaths, until their safety record is refined over a period of many years and lots of testing (the same way it happened with humans).

Driverless cars are being pursued because tech companies see an opportunity to use their machine learning expertise to turn driving into a commodity service that they control and can make billions off. It has nothing to do with driving safety, and if that were the goal (which, again, it is not, the goal is to make money by turning driving into a service and eliminate the cost of labor for drivers), there are a hundred cheaper ways to do it. If increasing driving safety were a goal that society actually cared about, Tracy Morgan would not have been hit by a truck.

No one is talking about that. Poorly-driven vehicles will be with us for decades, because freedom. Everyone knows that.

There is no right to drive like there is a right to own guns.

The authoritarians just hate that one! Some might say it doesn't apply, since the state owns the roads, so it can declare them off-limits to human drivers. That might have worked if we didn't already have billions of dollars worth of extant rolling stock in constant use. Suddenly taking all that would require the state to compensate vehicle owners, which will not happen. Thus, drivers have a right to drive, subject to reasonable regulation.

Humans are quite capable and will always be able to handle things that computers can't in situations they're not designed for. At least until an AI is invented that is indistinguishable from a human mind. There will be mistakes and bugs (just as there are now in software made for cars). But believing that humans who drive while tired, eating cheeseburgers, playing with their phone, texting, not accounting for blind spots and tailgating others are going to be safer in the long run is bordering on religious faith in some kind of fantasy that humans are more than they are.

No one is talking about replacing F1 drivers, we're talking about a sea of idiots that anyone who commutes every day with any awareness would recognize as being a major hazard. I'll take the patchable bugs over the psychos I see every day that put lives at risk with their self-centered hyper aggressive driving that relies on the attentiveness of everyone around them to prevent an accident. There is no software update for people like this–you either wait years for them to grow up or for them to kill someone.

As for me? I'll trust the future to swarms of interconnected, cross-communicating AI cars over a random, haphazard swarm of humans any day of the week. The cars can think and operate together. We just think about ourselves. We can't possibly take all of the data on the road into account as well as connected cars will eventually be able to. I don't know what they can do right this second, but I am very optimistic about what they'll be able to do in the not-too-distant future.

LA is a hell for cars made by urban planners who deliberately made it that way. What problems do you think will be solved by robot cars that shouldn't already be solved by Lyft or Uber (which are functionally identical except for the presence of a human driver)? Cars will never be able to zoom through a downtown metropolis at 60 mph, unless the city is entirely stripped of pedestrians. The problems you highlight are NOT caused by human drivers, they are caused by cars, and autonomous or not, those issues will remain.

I don't have these issues because I live in a dense very walkable city and ride my bike everywhere. This is how we should be thinking: cars simply don't belong in cities, and a robot fleet won't change that.

I agree completely. There is no question——in fact, it's a matter of historical record——that mass transportation, urban layout, etc., were intentionally subverted in Los Angeles by the automobile industry, resulting in the crazy mess we now deal with.

"What problems do you think will be solved by robot cars that shouldn't already be solved by Lyft or Uber (which are functionally identical except for the presence of a human driver)?"

First, there are 9.8 million people living in Los Angeles County. So we'd need to be speaking of an Uber and Lyft ecosystem scaled up sufficiently to service a meaningful fraction of that population, economically, on a daily basis. It seems infeasible.

Second, Los Angeles has some challenging quirks to which human drivers, en masse, are particularly susceptible. For instance, we have very few left-hand turn signals; navigating a left-hand turn at a busy intersection is essentially an ad hoc game of chicken between all participants at that space and time. Some informal "rules" have emerged to navigate such situations, but the social contract breaks down under heavy traffic and its resultant, emotionally compromised drivers. There are also too many traffic lights, which studies have shown to create more congestion than they ostensibly solve for. Very few of these lights are sequenced. As a result, LA drivers are consistently flummoxed by an erratic tempo of starts, stops, and false restarts, forcing the entire "herd" to stumble into each other from the front to the back. And don't even get me started on our downright batshit approach to freeway onramps and offramps. Most important, there simply aren't enough roads, or wide enough roads, to handle the load that LA now brings to bear at every hour of every day -- and building more would involve an exercise of eminent-domain residential and commercial reclamation on a scale unseen in human history.

"Cars will never be able to zoom through a downtown metropolis at 60 mph, unless the city is entirely stripped of pedestrians"

This is a strawman. I don't recall saying that I expected robotic cars to magically make all traffic problems disappear. Rather, I said that they'd do better than we currently do.

"The problems you highlight are NOT caused by human drivers, they are caused by cars, and autonomous or not, those issues will remain."

No, the problems I've highlighted are caused by poor (and in many cases, as we've discussed, deliberately poor) urban planning, made worse by an infrastructure completely inadequate for the scale of the city and its population in 2016. These things impose a cognitive load on LA drivers that is simply too great at the scale LA traffic now brings to bear. The original cause is the layout, and the proximate cause is the humans' individualist navigation of that layout while enmeshed in a giant, uncoordinated swarm.

These are precisely the kinds of conditions I expect a fleet of interconnected, intercommunicative AI cars to do a better job of navigating.

"I don't have these issues because I live in a dense very walkable city and ride my bike everywhere. This is how we should be thinking: cars simply don't belong in cities, and a robot fleet won't change that."

This is handwaving. We can't wipe cities like LA off the map and start over. So we have to make do with the cities we have now. "Cars don't belong in cities" is a nice sentiment, but it's entirely impractical in several of the biggest and most economically important cities in this country.

For whatever it's worth, I'm in wild agreement with you about the unfortunate situation LA is in, and why it's in that situation. And I agree that a car-centric approach is the wrong approach to urban planning. But LA isn't losing the automobile anytime in my lifetime. We have to be realistic about that. So in my mind, the exercise is about making the least of the evil we have to live with.

We can, and must. Human life is going to change dramatically in he next few centuries; we can't allow ourselves to be mired by the errors a few shortsighted planners made in an unfortunate decade. Rebuilding cities to be livable is a clear imperative; we need to seek good long term solutions and not small temporary ones (that, incidentally, come with many other prices attached).