When I lived in Beijing, I took a taxi to and from work daily (from northeast to northwest Beijing on the 4th ring). It is really nice being driven around, you just chill and use your phone (would have taken the subway but being stuffed in with no available seating wasn’t very relaxing). Driving isn’t fun for a lot of people.

In cities where taxis are more ubiquitous, why isn’t level 5 simply replaces the taxi drivers with computers no? Then it’s not really a new paradigm, just that (a) traffic might flow better and (b) places where taxis aren’t cheap and plentiful (most of the USA, much of Western Europe) get to have an experience similar to a middle class lifestyle in a developing country.

There's a difference between driving in traffic jams to get to work and driving on twisty empty back roads. The former is a regrettable experience that is a necessary evil so that you can make a living. The latter is a hobby that lets you control the direction of the roller coaster.

Public roads are not a racetrack, and it's regrettable many people treat it as such. That society for some reason tolerates "spirited" driving, people using the road as their personal rollercoaster, is one of the worst lapses in our collective judgements. It probably grew out of cars starting out as toys for the rich, and the aspirational branding created around it.

Allowing high speed cars anywhere (even on the twisty "empty" roads) is the main reason the public realm is now objectively dangerous.

Driving should have been integrated in the culture as a solemn activity, only reserved to those with impeccable integrity and high moral standing, a true privilege in which the driver assumes responsibility for the lives of others, and accepts accountability commensurate with this duty.

Ending somebodies life, injuring others, causing damage, those are the inevitable by-products of careless driving, of driving for sport.

I'm exaggerating for emphasis. But driving as a hobby should be reserved to the racetrack. Just like shooting guns as a hobby is reserved to the gun range.

The fact that someone likes driving doesn't mean they are careless or going too fast.

"control the direction of the roller coaster" implies otherwise.

You can drive safely and enjoy it.

Recreational driving sounds a lot different from the daily grind or that t5 hour trip on I90 from Seattle to Spokane to see family that you’ve made a hundred times before. Self driving cars would really help with the grind, then maybe we can focus more on recreation with the time we save.

The kinetic energy of a car at 9 m/s (20 mph) is about 15 Wh, depending on its weight. The kinetic energy of a bullet is about 0.2 Wh.

This obviously doesn't quite translate, but the amount of damage you can do with a car is massive, even at that speed. Also consider the weight, eg when rolling over a pedestrian.

The reaction time of a human should prevail before they look both ways to cross the street.

What if the car gets the right of way wrong? What if there's a distracted kid, or the car misses a pedestrian crossing?

I don't think you can set something loose in traffic that relies on everyone else correcting for its mistakes.

I think I agree with you.

My point is, if I see a car coming, I'm not going to cross the street and let it hit me. That's the reason parents teach their kids to look both ways before crossing the street. Some idiot driver, human or otherwise, may not be controlling their vehicle in a predictable manner. At 20mph, as a pedestrian I can make a good decision about crossing the street.

I feel much safer about an empty driverless car at 20mph on local roads than one full of passengers at highway speeds.

(20 mph is entirely made up, it could be higher or lower in relationship to actual human reaction times)

human drivers do that all the time from getting distracted with your handphone, falling asleep in the driving seat, driving while drunk or otherwise impaired. So it is not much different. But AI cars are likely to be better drivers 2-3 years from now than what they are today humans will either be the same or worse.

I wonder if your insurance company will feel the same about your enjoyment, once the technology threshold is crossed well enough and they realize that automated driving is the new rail.

Or, would you be willing to pay higher premiums or even extra tolls and taxes in order to drive yourself?

I think this will eventually be a question that fails over into economics while people are arguing about it. Insurers will be in a good place to influence the future of automated driving.

Humans as a group can't even not drive drunk, still. Individuals are not predictable either. Our taste for control will have to be worked around. (Hopefully in ways that allow us more time to...for example drive in VR, on a better course, with an even more stimulating feeling of presence, while we are driven around...)

> Or, would you be willing to pay higher premiums or even extra tolls and taxes in order to drive yourself?

Most people are willing to pay for things they enjoy.

It's also possible that a human driven car could use its autonomous driving system as a safety system to intervene if it anticipates a crash.

Large part of the blame imo is the ridiculous fact that no governing body nor any car manufacturer came up with things like:

DUI test else engine does not start.

Speed limit as per road and weather conditions no car needs to do 70mph in the city or 150 mph anywhere.

Alertness check and monitoring , if not alert, car stops and that's it.

I'd pay. But I highly doubt that any autonomous vehicles will prove to be as efficient and as safe anytime soon. I'd wager they could be xor but not both in the next 20 years.

Slow moving traffic on highway is not very fun though. I prefer my car to manage that for me.

Replying to self to be more direct.

Cars sit idle 80-90% of their useful life. As an auto manufacturer I don't need to achieve L{n} autonomous to make money, I just need wheels moving not parked.

Wheels moving at 20mph on local roads, in-between paid trips with human drivers, is a huge market and with a lower risk profile than L4 or L5 autonomous. The fat margins here are in making idle capital more productive.

Is that actually so?

In my understanding, cars that drive more break faster, mileage being the dominant factor, not age.

So whether you have 10 cars serving 10 people, breaking after 30 years, or one car serving 10 people where you have to buy a new one every 3 years - seems about the same.

In the former model, car makers even have the opportunity to get people to buy new cars before they'd technically have to, which sounds like more money to me.

For society at large, the latter model seems better.

Not sure why you think this, empty cars really do require L4 if not L5, and if you've got actual L4 driving, taxis and freight are much bigger markets than renting cars in cities.

At what speed? Is there a distinction between these L4 and L5 levels and speed? Is a L3 at idle speed equivalent to an L5 at highway speed?

If all it took to take an L2 AI and make it L5 were reducing top speed, you'd see a lot more L5 AIs around.

The biggest problem with most self-driving cars is that they are easily fooled by various images, since they have extremely simplistic image classifiers to work with, rather than hugely specialized mamallian visual cortexes. Speed of processing is one aspect, but not nearly the only one. The Tesla that ran over that cyclist crossing that street at night wasn't missing reaction time, it simply didn't recognize the cyclist as an obstacle for whatever reason.

Now as far as I understand, lidar mostly fixes these false negatives (in good weather conditions), but at the cost of more false positives - and here speed could be a bigger help.

Even so, L4 and L5 would require planning skills and understanding of other traffic participants and road conditions that are still beyond us, at any speed. Note that the CEO of Waymo has plainly stated that L5 is not achievable with current sensor technologies.

Perhaps at some extreme low speeds (probably closer to human walking speed than 20mph) L2 could work as L3, but I think that's about it.

It’s actually higher than 90%

Nuro has a similar mentality, but applied to unmanned deliveries.