You can already stop traffic by doing this. Why not give it a go? ;)

On a serious note: I'm sure strolling into highway traffic will be approximately as legal as it is presently.

Not to mention that with the self-driving cars working as a functional panopticon, doing this and getting away with it for lengths of time is unlikely.

Even ignoring the privacy-scary scenarios of the car auto-emailing the cops to say "Dear local PD, this guy just jaywalked and halted traffic on Oak Ln, here's my [sensor gestalt] to prove it and a [photo of the offender]", it'd be pretty trivial for anyone owning a fleet of these machines who was tired of jaywalkers slowing down their commute to dump data on jaywalk-stops in the aggregate, giving cops all the numbers they need to target enforcement.

All joking aside, that's exactly how traffic works in Portland.

Also belgium and germany. Getting too close to the street/sidewalk interface will often cause cars to stop even if you have no intension whatsoever of crossing.

I'm Belgian and now living in Norway, it's even "worse" here. It's really one of the first things you notice when being here.

Being a few meters off from a crosswalk cars will stop while they would easily be able to drive on before you (Which they would do in Belgium).

How many people on foot and bike are killed and maimed in Portland every year? It's not zero.

Automatically != instantaneously. You'd have to make sure the car is far away enough that speed(car)^2/distance(you, car) < friction(rubber, pavement)*g.

You can't play blindfolded frogger.

EDIT: "friction" is a better function name than "mu", even though we all feel nostalgic for high school physics.

Yep!

Latency and Inertia still exist with autocars. Anyone wishing to challenge physics may as well be awarded a Darwin Award.

It's more complicated, since cars can steer, but it's still approx. function of speed^2/distance, but a lot more permissive. And then there's emergency coordination among vehicles to prevent the crash among the vehicles themselves too.

I can't possibly work that out. The only answer is self-driving segways!

There is a table saw that stops the blade the instant it senses the capacitance of a finger. It completely ruins the saw but saves the finger. Something like that could work here if the car could see the pedestrian far enough in advance to stay within parameters. Ruins the road and the car not the pedestrian.

Those jam an aluminum block into the blade. I'm not sure what the equivalent would be for a car. Perhaps you could line the bottom of the car with rubber and then blow the wheels off. But there's plenty of problems with varying road surface and conditions and having a system that's never used.

But a decent brake system and tires can do 1G, which is pretty good. I suppose you could go to maybe 5G for a true emergency brake system (which would be pretty rough on the occupants, eyeballs-out), but it hardly seems worth the cost (in money, weight, maintenance, accidental triggering, etc.) compared to good sensors and the existing braking systems.

Yeah, and don't forget that the car has people in it too :-)

While you can instantaneously stop a saw blade to save a finger, stopping a car 'quickly' will likely move the potential problem to one of ensuring the safety of the passengers...

I think the equivalent of jamming a block of solid aluminium into a spinning blade would involve some kind of anchoring.

It would ruin the car and likely damage the road but as long as the passengers can be protected from the rapid deceleration, it just might save a life.

OTOH you could just wrap the entire car in airbags and protect pedestrians the same way you protect the passengers. Not sure how practical or useful that would be, though.

If you stop the car instantly that's equivalent to a crash for the car occupants.

It is in fact a pretty jerkish thing to do.

Wow, that's super neat, i'd never heard of it. Seems like something that should be absolutely mandatory for all factories equipped with such devices! Go technology!

Here's a demonstration, it's very fluffy but it gets the point across. https://youtu.be/eiYoBbEZwlk

Think about the physics. There's a _whole_ lot more energy in a moving car than in a saw blade. The car is also being operated in physical circumstances that vary wildly (wet road surfaces, high wind, being struck by other cars) that don't happen in the comfortable little micro-universe of a spinning saw blade.

You are thinking of http://sawstop.com/why-sawstop/the-technology. The problem with your comparison is that cars already have brakes. Driverless cars would improve reaction time, but can't do anything to affect stopping time. You would need to activate some additional braking system.

<snark>I also don't see how a car could dive below the roadway instantly. Roads don't have car-sized holes in them. Usually.</snark>

Less ironically, I'm looking forward to pushing a button on the dashboard of my ambulance that automatically preempts the road ahead.

Srsly, it amazes me when ppl don't get out of the way for emergency vehicles.

IMHO one random day out of the year, you should be equipped with heavy machine guns and allowed to blast anyone in your way. A simple solution for a simple problem.

Yeah, but then we just need more ambulances to deal with those folks, and so on... I suspect it would ramp up in polynomial fashion...

As a pedestrian I think the thinking generally is "if the ambulance runs me over, at least there's already an ambulance around to patch me up".

As a driver... well, I guess they're just being selfish idiots.

While that's true... here's hoping we weren't on the way to someone who needed an ambulance 5 minutes ago...

You could just go to Germany ;P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02Ak1eIyj3M

While it is impressive that they stayed out of the way, I suspect the vehicle that blazed that trail had a slightly slower go of it...

No, that'd be awesome. If I could walk or bike everywhere safely I wouldn't need a car.

It might eventually just look like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlyOom0bwwY

When visiting Vietnam, I was told to look straight ahead, and move at a consistent and predictable pace. The drivers are used to moving around pedestrians. Its a wild sensation.

Multi agent research looks like this :

https://youtu.be/5lz_HnOLBW4?t=166

This could be a big deal actually. Will pedestrian and human driver's behavior change if there is the expectation that the self-driving cars are going react incredibly quickly and reliably? It's hard to imagine everything just stays the same everywhere and as self-driving cars become more and more common.

Given that all the traffic will record you doing so, I don't imagine that this will be a huge problem in practice.

Might need to tighten up the jaywalking rules a bit, but nothing major.

There are plenty of places people do this already. For example, this is common behaviour in Manhattan.

A long long ago a science fiction story with self-driving cars had that scenario. Everyone jaywalked all the time because it was perfectly safe.

I imagine there will be pissed passengers in the car who are sitting stopped for far too long because some jackass things he's above traffic laws. I suspect the self-driving car will also usher the age of people getting beat up for fucking with self-driving cars.

There's a million social elements here we haven't explored. Imagine driving through a ghetto and lots of people rush over to your car to rob you (or worse). Your car will happily brake for them, when a human would have recognized the situation and accelerated and veered off to avoid them. Or weird edges cases like garbage on the road or somesuch and the car not being able to outmaneuver it because it may be illegal, but a human with a more lax acceptance of traffic laws will veer into the right lane close to another car to avoid it.

Or just the daily grind of speed limits. On the expressways I drive the posted speed is 65-70 yet most everyone does 80-85. Doing a steady 60-65mph because of how laws were written to get speeding ticket revenue might be annoying. Especially if you're the only non-human driven car and everyone is speeding past you and honking because you're not going the speed of traffic.

You should forward this post to your psychoanalyst. It's a rich, concentrated dose of mental pathology for his consideration, or maybe it's just the ramblings of an old fart looking back on a sixth of his life spent commuting. The cool kids aren't staring out the window searching for bums to beat up. (besides how would they stop the car or get the door open?) The cool kids are playing a game on the shared table in the middle of the car (the front seats face to the rear, you know) or they're working on their phablet or they're videoconferencing with their coworkers in other robocars.

And if there were no self-important driver to get pissed off, would "jaywalking" even be a thing? If the first automobile drivers had been poor folks with little political power (haha yeah right), "jaywalking" would never have been made a crime in the first place. Some streets will have heavy pedestrian traffic; the rational robot routes around them to lower-traffic streets.

I find your post somewhat detuned from reality. For instance, jaywalking is rarely a crime. Also, jaywalking becoming a thing was precisely related to cars becoming federated to the "poor folks with little political power" because in many communities, there is heavy car traffic that was prioritized over walking due to damn near everyone having at least one car.

Some retuning would seem to be in order:

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history

All of this happened by the mid-1920s. As of 1925, the number of cars per household in USA was 0.6. (It would later peak in the 1980s at 2.2.)

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Transportation_Deployment_Caseb...

Is your hypothesis that the poor folks got cars first?

Are you talking about a vernor vinge story? I can't remember the name.

Rainbows End by Vinge, 2007 or so. They didn't stop, they just avoided you.

There's a scene in The Mote in God's Eye, just like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God%27s_Eye

I'm looking forward to when all of the self-driving cars will be so good at avoiding accidents that you can just take a manually-driven car and blast down the center of the road at 10-20 mph over the speed limit and watch all of the self-driven cars just move out of your way.

Yep!

... until the smart-grid notices the disturbance in regular traffic flow and auto-notifies the authorities that there's something weird going on on Oak Ln. every Monday morning during rush hour... ;)

In all seriousness though, what would happen in this case? Do self-driving cars have emergency stop procedures? And how safe are they? This is still a serious concern about self-driving cars for me. Especially since digital image recognition still isn't that great. What if the car sees a tumbleweed that it mistakes for a boulder and puts it into emergency stop mode?

> Do self-driving cars have emergency stop procedures?

Yes, of course! Just staying on a road is a piece of cake. Most of the research for self-driving cars is dealing with unexpected cars and pedestrians.

> And how safe are they?

According to the article, 1.7m miles driven without at at-fault accident. Self-driving cars drive very conservatively.

> What if the car sees a tumbleweed that it mistakes for a boulder and puts it into emergency stop mode?

Probably the same thing that happens when humans make visual mistakes: it would slow down and stop.

Of course, the self-driving car is looking at the tumbleweed in the visible spectrum, using LIDAR, maybe IR and probably some other sensors. We just have our squishy eyeballs.

I guess what I'm asking is are the emergency stop procedures safe? If you're going 75mph, how much distance does it need to stop without rolling or harming the passengers?

> Especially since digital image recognition still isn't that great.

I believe digital image recognition is better than human, and a lot faster to boot (hah!).

You should take a look at this: http://fastml.com/what-you-wanted-to-know-about-ai/. Digital image recognition isn't that good

I read over it, but there are a couple of problems with that. Firstly, I never said that computers understand the images, just that the recognition is better than human. When they get it wrong, they do tend to get it wrong in ways that look ludicrous to people. Secondly, Stanford didn't win the 2014 ImageNet challenge: GoogLeNet did.

However, I was still wrong. Have a look at the summary paper from ImageNet: http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0575

Page 31 states: "Annotator A1 evaluated a total of 1500 test set images. The GoogLeNet classification error on this sample was estimated to be 6.8% (recall that the error on full test set of 100,000 images is 6.7%, as shown in Table 7). The human error was estimated to be 5.1%."

There are some bits there where GoogLeNet did better than human, but it was usually on specific classifications (what breed of dog is that, for example). Generally, a human is slightly better.

It's worth noting, however, that the error rate was halved from 2013's winners. I reckon the 2015 error rate will beat human, and in following years there will just be no contest. Just like chess programs have gone far beyond human capabilities.

And, of course, with cars we're talking about having multiple images plus depth perception, which makes it a lot easier for the machine.