Meet the Founder Trying to Start the Self-Driving Car Revolution

Re:Meet the Founder Trying to Start the Self-Driving Car Rev... by nl on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @12:29AM (#8995469)

When can we have an intelligent discussion about what licenses for self driving cars would look like?

We license drivers now. It seems clear that software should have to pass at least the same bar.

Unfortunately everytime it is raised it ends up being a discussion on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of regulation.

My view is that Google's version of a self driving car may be perfect, but I'm unconvinced that "vendor modifications" (to steal a term from the Android world) will always be as well-coded.

What would an appropriate regulation/certification/licensing regime look like? How are updates handled? Are users allowed to modify the software themselves (with or without re-certifying?)

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Re:Meet the Founder Trying to Start the Self-Driving Car Rev... by YorkianTones on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @02:55AM (#8995777)

Even Google's version will have risks and I expect will make mistakes in early iterations. Having a max speed of 25 MPH and limiting deployment will reduce some of this risk, but AI is hard and the environment is very open and will constantly include novel states the agent has to make sense of. Personally I'm concerned the initial Google design doesn't include a steering wheel for manual override - seems overconfident to me even for normal scenarios let alone degenerate ones (weather, internet connectivity, GPS malfunction, construction, bad maps, road damage, etc.).

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