If a human has to pay attention all the time, then they might as well just be driving.
And one of the advantages of self driving cars will be freedom for the elderly and disabled who already have difficulty driving cars. This is the group, in my opinion, that will benefit the most from self driving cars.
Right now the self driving tech doesn't do anything to communicate with the driver besides just a general warning. However that doesn't have to be the case. Maybe some type of confidence indicator should be added. A simple green, yellow, red warning system could help a driver know when a self driving car might not be as certain in its surroundings.
>If a human has to pay attention all the time, then they might as well just be driving.
I just don't get this mindset. There are different levels of "paying attention" that require different levels of mental energy. The discussion also isn't made with nearly any other driver assist technology. No one suggests that automatic transmissions or cruise control are worthless because the driver still has to pay attention.
>And one of the advantages of self driving cars will be freedom for the elderly and disabled who already have difficulty driving cars. This is the group, in my opinion, that will benefit the most from self driving cars.
I agree with that, but it doesn't mean that other drivers won't benefit as well.
I think this probably fails to understand how quickly it's making decisions, how quickly the situation could change, or how it could even judge it's own confidence. It could quite confidently drive you into a river; it's not likely to do that unless it's pretty sure it's a road.
As self-driving technology gets better, the robot is going to be much better and the failure situations much more rare.
> I just don't get this mindset. There are different levels of "paying attention" that require different levels of mental energy.
If one doesn't have to provide direction or speed, there is literally nothing to keep a human attentive enough to make a difference. You expect someone to passively look at a green/red/yellow indicator for hours at a time while not otherwise engaged with driving? And then when that indicator turns red you expect them to immediately be able to make a useful judgement? I think humans are more than likely to make that situation worse!
> The discussion also isn't made with nearly any other driver assist technology. No one suggests that automatic transmissions or cruise control are worthless because the driver still has to pay attention.
There is a huge difference. If you have cruise control or automatic transmission, the vehicle still doesn't go where it's supposed to without you paying attention. The driver still has to pay attention because they have to pay attention or they don't anywhere. With self driving cars, the driver is now a passenger and doesn't have to pay attention for the vehicle to work.
No self driving car that doesn't have at least level 4 autonomy allows the driver to not pay attention like you are suggesting. The benefit of a cooperative tech is that it takes mental load off the driver. Like I said previously, there are different levels of mental energy that a person can spend on a task. It isn't like the choices are either 100% or 0% of your attention.
Computers can have a perfect 360 degree view and track and categorize every object around them. Humans will be both physically and intellectually outmatched eventually. And humans just aren't that good at driving on average.
Past rates of progress are not indicative of the future. The easy problems have already been solved. Now progress is already slowing down.
In particular the notion that computer vision can reliably track and categorize every object is just laughable. The state of computer vision research is nowhere close to that capability. Errors are frequent, especially under adverse conditions.
In Arizona, Waymo has fully autonomous taxi service you can use right now. https://waymo.com/apply/
Is that a lot of hype? Maybe.