No I'm very serious: we are unable to protect smart TVs. Networked smart cars (because let's be real - Google and co. would want to monetize this with Uber-like services, Ads in cars etc.) are a magnitude more likely to be hacked by both the state actors and rogue individuals (altho I don't see why we make this distinction...both are criminal acts).
The worst that can happen if your smart tv is hacked, is that they can listen and maybe watch you in your living room. If your car is hacked, they can probably kill you and hurt others while they are at it. If this happens on a large scale, it's extremely dangerous.
So while I have no problems with self driving in itself (or with Google for that matter of fact), I have a problem with banning human driving cars on the road without a viable (non-intrusive) alternative.
But, as evidenced by terrorism paranoia, people do care about their personal safety--perhaps excessively and irrationally so. Security in a networked self-driving car won't be treated as an afterthought, if nothing else because of the massive legal liability.
Every year, every major browser and major OS gets cracked in Pwn2Own. The cost of these zero-days is going up thanks to good security practices like sandboxing in Chrome et al., but they still happen. Every. Single. Year. Think about that for a second.
The fact is, we can't write secure software, especially secure networked software. I can't imagine writing secure software for cars using current best practices---let alone imagine car manufacturers doing that. To solve this, we'll need (in addition to everything we're doing now) something along the lines of Rust to prevent these sorts of bugs. And even then, it's likely that the net effect will be similar to sandboxing: the cost of an attack will go up, but not enough to prevent random individuals (let alone larger organizations) from finding zero-day security vulnerabilities on a regular basis.
It's extremely important not to be cavalier about this security risk. The combination of zero-days and self-driving cars is a scary one.
It's the same reason that you pay relatively high car insurance premiums when you are in your teens and twenties.
I think way too many people are viewing self driving vehicles with rose colored glasses. They underestimate the cost and overestimate the utility to the public.
Improving human driving skills collectively is much more difficult. Even if one driver learns from their own mistake, other drivers and the next generation of drivers will still be just as prone as before to make that mistake. Better education can only do so much anyway, since people often don't think rationally and don't necessarily make safety the number one priority (e.g. drunk driving, trying to get to the destination as quickly as possible, or reckless driving for entertainment purposes).
Right. Except that 40 years later computers still crash. The more complex a system the harder it becomes to debug and there is no complex software system without bugs. It's like rocks in a field, you'll never get the last one out even if you think you did.
And that's not a simple thing: it will have to be better than humans in every situation, just being better in some but clearly worse in others will still end up looking bad for self driving cars. People don't deal in statistics, they simply look at the situation and say 'that would never happen to a human' and will keep on driving themselves.
So it's a very fine line to roll this sort of thing out, do it too early and you end up turning off your potential early adopters.
Being such an important feature (not crashing) it shouldn't be ignored. I am also skeptical but we have examples of reliable systems so I believe they can work.
Bank systems crash with great regularity. Source: worked for a bank, customer of a bank.
Industrial systems and anything related to flight is typically much better from a design point of view than your average bit of firmware. Redundancy is built in from the first day and all failure modes are tested in so much as feasible.
Also, and this is very important, such software is kept as simple as possible to reduce the surface area bugs can hide in.
I don't envy people tasked with balancing the need for self-driving car software to be able to handle a sufficiently large number of possibilities to consider eliminating the driver with the need for it to have a small surface area and sufficient degree of tractability to be able to minimise bugs.
It's just not worth the effort in the vast majority of circumstances -- so you get computer crashes.
In the end it is all economics. But I really would like to see some real life stats on how these self driving cars perform over the longer term in less controlled situations and with an honest accounting of the root cause of any issues. Fat chance that will ever happen but that's the sort of rigor that would get me to switch from driving myself to being driven by a pile of software.
That's the good bit about Google being involved: at least they really 'grok' software and reliability engineering. As opposed to your average car manufacturer where software is a dirty word best outsourced to some contractor.
Other computers are more predictable to computers than humans are, especially with automatic communication of acceleration, lane changes, etc.