Except that we have the value of hindsight and presumably an advanced understanding of risk.

Back then it might have been perfectly acceptable to throw a bunch of horses and cars together and risk them crashing into each other.

Today it should be unacceptable to throw automated cars in with human drivers and put the onus on the humans to alter their innate understanding of 100 years of traffic flow.

Your comment is cheeky and annoyingly inapplicable.

Automation will take over very quickly, humans and machines won't share for long.

There's a tipping point where only people who want to drive will still do so which will likely make the insurance costs for those drivers very expensive because they're driving among automated vehicles which increases consequences of bad driving. (Fully automated, machines can talk to each other to avoid collisions).

This increased cost of insurance will encourage more people to switch to automated which will further encourage switching.

That tipping point is probably a relatively small percentage before it starts snowballing. All it takes is to get to a point where automated drivers are safer enough than driver-based that they can be insured significantly cheaper.

It won't take long after 95%+ of people are automated with the remaining 5% causing 90%+ of accidents for manual driving to be banned or shunned as a socially unacceptable risk like smoking.

I predict this will happen within 30 years.

>costs for those drivers very expensive because they're driving among automated vehicles which increases consequences of bad driving.

Or very cheap because the people who self select to drive will be the people who care enough about driving to not do things like text and drive and when they do slip up the machines around them will prevent it from causing problems.

>shunned as a socially unacceptable risk like smoking.

Among the middle and upper class in Bubble Valley maybe. Everywhere else it's more of a "you do you" thing.

Completely agree.

> put the onus on the humans to alter their innate understanding of 100 years of traffic flow

That is wildly overstating the complexity here. A teenager can learn to drive and pass their test with zero prior experience and maybe 10 hours of practice. "Altering" that intuition to account for the quite a bit simpler behavior of automated cars isn't going to be any harder.

This is just ludditism. The simple truth is that automated cars drive more safely, with fewer mistakes and much less velocity changing (i.e. lane switches, passing attempts, "oops" late braking, missed exit swerves...). They are easier to predict and understand, not harder.

> quite a bit simpler behavior of automated cars

Simple behavior is often more predictable, but not always. And it's predictability that matters.

> The simple truth is that automated cars drive more safely, with fewer mistakes and much less velocity changing (i.e. lane switches, passing attempts, "oops" late braking, missed exit swerves...).

> "oops" late braking

I'm not 100% sure what you mean here, so I'll split apart "oops" and "late".

A self-driving car might be less likely to brake late.

But everything I've heard says that a self-driving car is far more likely to "oops" in the form of sudden hard braking. Are you disagreeing? Can you back it up?

> presumably an advanced understanding of risk....Back then it might have been perfectly acceptable to throw a bunch of horses and cars together and risk them crashing into each other.

> Today it should be unacceptable to throw automated cars in with human drivers and put the onus on the humans to alter their innate understanding of 100 years of traffic flow.

No one who drove a car in 1917 is still driving today, and horse behavior had far more than 100 years to become innately understood.

But I think that it's wrong to assume that our modern attitude towards risk is 'advanced'. It's different, for sure. Thousands of people were likely killed or suffered as a result of automobiles mixing with horses. Today, 1.25 million people die annually as a result of automobile accidents - that's more than one person every 30 seconds. And many people also died as a result of taking risks while developing air travel, which is now one of the safest ways to travel. An attitude towards risk which suggests that equivalent risks are unacceptable would not have resulted in the billions of lives that have been improved by and saved by advancements in transportation. The modern economy is completely dependent on automotive transportation, and the world is unimaginably improved because we have cars instead of horses.

If equivalent progress would be made 100 years from now at the cost of thousands of lives lost due to adding automated cars to our existing roads and traffic flows, how could you possibly argue that we should not take this risk?

If you almost rear-end the autonomous car, it's because you are a bad driver. There is no "innate understanding of 100 years of traffic flow", there is just a socially accepted carelessness and recklessness with which people drive that is killing thousands every year, many of them kids. It's pretty much the leading cause of death for teenagers.

I doubt he meant it literally, probably more like he had to slow uncomfortably fast because the self driving car behaved in a somewhat jerky manner. Think about what you might do if you had to slow down in this situation -- you'd try to balance leaving room ahead of you as you did it with not stopping so quickly as to startle the driver behind you. There's a lot of nuance to that, and it wouldn't surprise me if computers weren't very good at it yet.

Britain did at one time have "red flag laws" that mandated that a person precede the car waving a flag to alert people (and horses).

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/road-traffic-history-befo...

Nice QI clip about this too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--8bqcCJ0L4

Agreed. There were 391,000 distracted driving injuries in the US in 2015 [1]. Experiencing some fender benders is worth it, if we can decimate the number of injuries. Let's make this transition asap.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/distracted_driving/in...

That's actually a legit criticism of putting the first cars on a road, and a valid reason to impose some kind of rules on cars to mitigate "spooking" behavior induced in horses, although obviously not as strong as the so-called "red flag" laws.

Seems like it will be trivial to DDOS an autonomous car by just putting a garbage can or two in front of it and behind it. If the vehicle is empty nobody will be able to get out and move or bump them.

Yes, let's impede the traffic flow of the vehicle that sees using cameras that are probably recording all the time. That's a smart plan right there.

The car will escalate to an operator, the operator will call the police.

Pre-programmed spy cars. Ya, that's going to go over great.

Cameras mounted in cars because the populace can't be trusted to respect the vehicle or its operator is already standard in some countries.

If people in the US want to go down that road, it can become standard here too.

Yes yes, the plebs better respect their robot masters.

Not standing in someone's way is them being a master over you?

Uhh, remind me not to be on a sidewalk near you...

By all means, keep pretending robots are people and that I was talking about people.

That's an even weirder position! I would think a robot is less likely to be a master over you. But you're saying that getting out of the way of a person is fine and doesn't make them a master, while getting out of the way of a robot does make them a master?

I'm obviously not talking about robots containing humans.

We should not pretend robots are people under any circumstances. If the robot needs me to move for it to continue on, then it better decide to wait.

Maybe you think it should call in a robo cop;)

This should be obvious, but I'll be more verbose, my original comment was in ref to robots with wheels, possessing possibly >MJ of KE, recording their surroundings and uploading it in real time to whatever the skynet equiv is at the time. It's an awful idea, and you are living in a bubble if you think the general population will accept it in the US. Sure, it will happen in more tightly controlled societies.

People don't collectively object to dash cams, and they let non-robot cars do something very similar.

And there's no need for it to be constantly uploading video to report a lane blockage. Heck, it doesn't need to upload any video to report a lane blockage.

As far as you being in the way: roads are not specifically for humans. A robo car has plenty of right to be there. If you wouldn't stand in the way of a taxi, you shouldn't stand in the way of a robo car.

"roads are not specifically for humans. A robo car has plenty of right to be there"

And there is is. Robots having rights too. As if they are sentient. Next those that don't anthropomorphize machines will be labeled roboist.

Machines are tools. _For_ humans. Nothing more. It's like saying a hammer has rights because I use it.

Making it a autonomous hammer does not change that, in fact it makes it much more important to not pretend it's sentient.

Oh my god you're being so pedantic.

The robo car has no rights, but the person that owns the robo car has roughly the same right to make use of the road whether or not they happen to be seated inside.

Is that wording satisfactory?

Edit: And I mean, it's not because I'm giving robots special treatment. It's colloquial english. I'd say a potted plant has "the right" to be somewhere too.

You are mixing two fundamentally different things. I made it clear I am not referring to robots containing humans. A person wielding a hammer is fundamentally different than a pre-programmed hammer some human unleashed on it's own. I consider the latter a serious threat.

If you don't mean "right" than don't use that word. As is you have redefined it to be practically meaningless.

I'm not convinced you did re-define it. Your edit makes it more clear:

"it's not because I'm giving robots special treatment"

Yes, you really are. You are arguing that since it's owned by someone it has "plenty of right" to use the road. That's wrong. Par with humans is as special as treatment gets.

  F(r) = -F(h)
  ma(r) = -ma(h)
  a(r) = -a(h)

Which a is more important? Should we treat them even remotely the same when one a ends a life and the other a causes a financial loss?

I mean... oops. Sorry for the hammer malfunction. We sent out a patch and fired someone though.

Admit it, the end solution is to just remove humans from having direct control over their KE and direction? Right? Programmers are always smarter aren't we?

I often wonder if the pre-programmed car proponents realize what side they are on in the war on general purpose computing.

> If you don't mean "right" than don't use that word.

If you so desire, I won't use it, sure.

> A person wielding a hammer is fundamentally different than a pre-programmed hammer some human unleashed on it's own. I consider the latter a serious threat.

> Which a is more important? Should we treat them even remotely the same when one a ends a life and the other a causes a financial loss?

It's more complicated than that. You can drive a car remotely, and you can have a robocar with a human in it.

A car with a human in it deserves more protection, but there's no reason it has to have priority toward getting to use lanes. A car en route to pick up a human might as well have the same priority as one delivering a human.

Whether a car is being controlled by computer or human being shouldn't matter at all. Whether it's carrying a human should matter in some ways but not in others. One case where it shouldn't matter is blocking it; neither should be blocked.

"Whether a car is being controlled by computer or human being shouldn't matter at all."

There is human-equivalent software? That's astonishing. Where can I find it? Does it run on ARM?

Edit: Bummer. I called Denso, they were adamant that their human-level code v3.11 is a trade secret.

"A car with a human in it deserves more protection"

We agree. _please_ explain how to accomplish that.

Remember, KE is relative, therefore velocity and mass limits for the pre-programmed machine are not relevant.

Clearly my empty pre-programmed human carrying drone should enjoy the same lanes as a loaded 777. Lets set aside the distraction about remote control which totally ignores the "skin in the physics game" which transportation of life requires.

> There is human-equivalent software?

Did I imply that? I don't see how that's relevant.

> We agree. _please_ explain how to accomplish that.

If you agree with me then why do I have to explain anything?

You're being confusing with all your talk of kinetic energy. Are you trying to imply that robocars inherently make the roads more dangerous? I don't think that's true at all. As an extreme example, even with today's tech you could flood the roads with 20mph robocars and make things safer overall.

> Clearly my empty pre-programmed human carrying drone should enjoy the same lanes as a loaded 777. Lets set aside the distraction about remote control which totally ignores the "skin in the physics game" which transportation of life requires.

If you want to pay the same airport fees, go for it. Seems fair to me.

If you're worried about congestion and road funding when it comes to cars then limit priority to one robocar per person. But when I have exactly one car, my ability to use the roads to drive it to the store shouldn't depend on whether my butt is inside of it.

Why would "skin in the game" be necessary? A taxi with a driver inside can act exactly the same as a taxi without a driver inside.

"Whether a car is being controlled by computer or human being shouldn't matter at all."

"A taxi with a driver inside can act exactly the same as a taxi without a driver inside."

Again, where is this software that enables the pre-programmed taxi to "act exactly the same"?

I assume you are making an actual argument, not "it can drive in a line and stop at a stop sign".

I believe a vehicle akin to the one you're describing ("act exactly the same" is a bit unnecessarily specific, but "drive safely on a road under its own direction from a point A to a point B chosen by a human") is definitely what Waymo is prototyping, and such vehichles have already driven on public roads (with human occupants, but without human occupants operating the control surfaces).

There will never be conventional digital pre-programmed cars that "act exactly the same" or even remotely as "same" as a human driver. What is going to happen, is for a bit, the control writers will blame humans for their failure, followed shortly by the population's understanind and eventual ban in many places on this unworkable idea.

Tightly restricted societies that put "safety" over "freedom" will just end up banning non-elite direct human control of KE>nJ. The repercussions of that mistake have ugly ends.

Is my argument invalid if that software doesn't exist in 2017?

And you could remote control a car today if you wanted to. Nobody inside in that case.

I'm not saying it's a good responsible thing to do, I'm just saying it's possible and a new type of vandalism that hasn't existed before. Your solution doesn't sound like it will scale well. If the police need to get involved for this every time, they're going to be very busy.

> If the police need to get involved for this every time, they're going to be very busy.

Well, they'll need something to do when speed traps become useless and there are far fewer motor vehicle accidents.

I've often thought this - but more in the context of pedestrians in crowded thoroughfares ignoring crosswalks. Sure, the police could be automatically summoned to let this car go through the mass of hundreds of people, but one block over... (Obviously, pedestrian thoroughfares separate from autos would help - but in effect, thats a subway system.)