I think a lot of people are misreading this. Right now one of the rules to pass a crash test is that there is a steering wheel. This didn't used to be controversial, but now it is. The rules were written in the 70s and just assumed there would always be a drivers seat.
The only thing here is that the government rewrote the rules to no longer assume those things. It's not saying those things aren't necessary, just not required. If the car can meet all the safety standards without it, then that's fine.
It would be like saying today that you can't have a computer without an on/off switch because in the 70s every computer had a physical switch.
As soon as I typed that I knew someone would reply with this. :). I agree it would be nice and I sometimes miss physical switches, but imagine how clunky a Raspberry Pi would be with a physical switch.
And besides, I almost never used the switch on the computer anyway. I was always told to put it into a power strip and use that, because it was a lot cheaper to replace the power strip than the broken power switch on the PC!
I recently disconnected the capacitive power button on my desktop thanks to my stupid cat repeatedly turning off my computer.
Instead, I've turned on the feature in the BIOS to boot up when power is applied. Now, to turn on my desktop, I just flip the power switch on the back. Feels satisfyingly retro.
If you're on Windows: one habit I've developed is to always keep an unsaved notepad.exe open. When my cat hits the power button (not if), Windows will always stall and ask if I want to save the notepad first; at that point, you can press cancel to cancel the whole shutdown process. :)
Single use instant off capacitive power buttons is the stupidest design for a power switch I've ever seen. It's on the Xbox One (I think?) as well. A cat walking past or someone messing around with unrelated AV equipment accidentally brushing up against it are NOT valid use modes for a device that is running live with a lot of state that evaporates when you turn it off and takes more than 1s to restart. Dumb.
Think about having a switch on a laptop. And if the switch doesn't just kill power (which it shouldn't to safely shut down), then it shouldn't be a switch it might be better as a button.
I would prefer it to Windows saying, "Hey, I see you want to turn off this, ahem mobile, computer of yours. I'd like to comply, but you see, I have all these updates I'm 'bout to install for you so... yeah... Oh and don't even think of putting it in your bag because it's a Dell and they void your warranty if'n you do that. Mmmkay?
But doesn't the long press actually do that? Kills the power, if you really intend to do that.
The warranty thing is an entire Pandora box of discussion in itself
You want a switch that also kills power without software or firmware.
I had a Dell that once got stuck and the usual long press of the power button was not switching it off (probably it was sw/fw controlled). I had to take it apart and disconnect the battery, otherwise I would have lost my working day waiting for it to die.
Just like a sibling comment says I also haven't ever seen a case where a long press didn't turn a laptop off but i agree maybe a pin push button for hard restart might make sense in such cases.
We have some Lenovo ThinkPad X1 laptops that disobey the long-press. They get stuck in a state where they are turned on but appear off and nothing works. The only way to get them out of that state is the reset hole. Supposedly it's a motherboard fault, but they've replaced the motherboards repeatedly and it still happens.
It’s not 100% clear in the article, but it reads like this change is scoped to crash safety. The scope of those regs is the physical protection of the passengers in a crash, not all aspects of safety related to self-driving cars. So, not a big deal.
Actually, removing the steering wheel is probably a crash safety gain. Manufacturers had to invent a way to retract the steering wheel in crashes since it caused so many torso injuries. Steering wheel injuries were also the spur to invent and deploy the first airbags.
Another analogy is that in some countries, all cars had to pass an emissions test to be road safe. I knew someone who imported a Tesla into their country back in 2015 or so and the licensing office would not give them a license plate because they could not get a smoke test done on it.
I assume such countries changed the laws to remove that requirement once EVs were no longer a novelty.
This is problematic for a number of reasons. The most important in my mind is that the risk of the vehicle being hacked and carjacked remotely is always present.
With the presence of an automation kill-switch and manual human controls the driver can always take back control.
Without those, the driver is at the mercy of the hacker.
Vehicle automation falls under the SCADA sub-domain of cyber-security. SCADA stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, and the cyber-security in SCADA systems is light-years behind. Pro-tip: going into cyber and want a good certification (if such a thing exists)..then get CISSP-SCADA.
>This is problematic for a number of reasons. The most important in my mind is that the risk of the vehicle being hacked and carjacked remotely is always present.
Which raises the question: "Why would we engineer vehicles to accept external network connections?"
Any communication to/from a vehicle should only be initiated by the vehicle itself. There's no reasonable criteria under which a vehicle should have its systems available to external sources.
Not accepting connections is not enough to be protected on the internet. A connection is just a special case of an incoming packet, any incoming packet is potentially malicious, even if the source IP:Port are ones you initiated a connection with. For example, most web-based malware is downloaded from connections you initiated.
Clearly there is no requirement because plenty of cars don't connect to the internet.
There are plenty of reasons. Whether or not they are good depends on your opinion, but for me at least good reasons include:
* Triggering my home alarm if someone interferes with the car while it's parked in my driveway.
* Remote tracking/disabling if stolen. Not actually that useful directly but if most cars have this then fewer people will steal them.
* Automatically notifying emergency services in the event of an accident (you could argue this doesn't need internet, but 5G is IP based).
* Being able to get OTA software updates.
* Being able to listen to Spotify and use Google Maps for navigation.
* "Smart insurance". Not everyone's cup of tea, but regular insurance for me is £100+/month, so being able to cut this by 50% by remotely verifying that I drive like an old lady is a pretty good deal to me.
My car is old enough not to have an internet uplink, so instead I have an aftermarket head unit and an OBS-II 4G dongle thing. Obviously it doesn't do all of the above, but it's useful nonetheless.
Well like I said, you could disagree whether they are good reasons but to me they are good reasons.
> An analog radio can do exactly that.
An analogue radio can do anything that an internet connection or digital radio does, but it's sort of redundant to reimplement all the functionality that modern IP gives you just because you don't like the internet.
In particular, my alarm doesn't have any programmable analogue radio, so I'd presumably need some sort of module to interface with my alarm or to change my alarm for one that supports the analogue radio that the car alarm uses. With the internet-based approach, I have a little script that reads my car's API and triggers my home's alarm with its API.
I can also do things like sending me a push notification on my phone if something happens to my car when it's parked in a public car park.
Also, analogue radios aren't necessarily safe either. In most cases, digital technology has better encryption as it's easier to implement. In the UK, signal amplification attacks are becoming an increasingly common way to steal cars, which obviously wouldn't be possible using an internet-backhaul. Digital also tends to use less power and is less prone to interference.
> no software that actually controls the operation of a vehicle should be remotely accessible -- to anyone.
Remote disabling of cars in operation is obviously not good. However, MOST cars implement lockouts by having it so if you turn them off they can't be turned on again, which is a lot safer - and works more like an immobiliser which is a well proven technology. Both this and immobilisers sometimes have faults, but it's probably one of the least likely things to cause a fatal accident on a car.
> But why should something like that be linked to the driving/operation software?
Well I wasn't arguing strictly for linking to driving software, just reasons to connect a car to the internet. But I think the reason these systems have a connection to the operational software is to detect what's actually happened to the car - has the airbag gone off, what was the speed of the impact, what do the sensors say, etc. I don't believe there is any intent that they can control the car, but as soon as you link anything digitally there's always the possibility.
> That's the worst idea.
For most people, it's a great thing. I'm not sure there's ever been an attack caused by a remote update system in a car, but at least in computers, remote auto-update has been one of the best things for security and stability in the last few decades. There are a ton of theoretical issues with it, but in practice the benefits outweigh them.
Imagine your car's fly-by-wire software is discovered to have an unintentional acceleration bug. Remote updates means everyone's car is patched immediately. Traditional updates mean maybe if you bother taking it in for your annual service to an official dealer, it might get patched if they remember. You might be one of the 0.001% who would put it on a USB pen and patch it yourself or obey a recall, but almost nobody else would bother.
>An analogue radio can do anything that an internet connection or digital radio does, but it's sort of redundant to reimplement all the functionality that modern IP gives you just because you don't like the internet.
Who says I don't like the Internet?
Quite the opposite, in fact. But not all communication should be done via that network of inter-connected networks.
No wireless (and in some cases, even wired) communication can ever be completely secure.
When there's a device (in this case a vehicle) that can cause injury, death, destruction and/or other mayhem, taking steps to ensure that it can't be controlled remotely, as long as humans are in the mix, is a necessity not a burden.
You may be happy to put your life in the hands of a script kiddie maliciously updating your vehicle's operating software, but I'm not.
Sure, there are many conveniences associated with allowing remote access to vehicles. But when I get behind the wheel (or potentially in a passenger seat of a self-driving vehicle), my top priority is not to die.
Allowing arbitrary connections to a device that can kill me contradicts that priority.
None of the things you described have to be connected to the car (which is to say, the engine, wheels, and parts that prevent it from going into a ditch). The infotainment system is not "the car", lojack is not "the car" GPS, spotify, smart insurance: not the car. There's nothing requiring those things to interface with the car, even if they are housed in the car.
My cell phone can do most of those things in my current car, and also has 0 ability to steer me off a cliff.
It makes more sense for self-driving cars. If they get confused and just stop or pull over, you can have a technician remote in and drive it back to a depot or just get it unstuck.
If you're running them as a taxi service (which I think all the major self-driving companies except Tesla are), you need a way to get stats on the fleet and to direct a car to go pick someone up.
As of now, taxi services seem to be the focus of the self-driving industry because the LIDAR hardware (among a couple other things) is too pricey for consumers to justify owning. That's going to require some way to communicate with the cars. Cellular data seems a reasonable way to do that. I don't see a remarkable advantage over building their own boutique network of transmitters just to say they aren't technically on the internet.
The answer is patches. The more complex and "smart" something gets the more patches you need. And since you dont want to go to the mechanic every time, firmware over the air it is.
>The answer is patches. The more complex and "smart" something gets the more patches you need. And since you dont want to go to the mechanic every time, firmware over the air it is.
Maybe in your vehicle. But certainly never in mine.
Any vehicle whose software can be remotely modified is one I'll never buy.
A bug that affects your car that don’t get patched timely is also a disaster waiting to happen. Clearly it’s a risk model that you are willing to accept. I am not.
I absolutely agree, however that likely means no self driving car for either of us for the given reason. Unless you are planing on weekly trips to the mechanic?
>Unless you are planing on weekly trips to the mechanic?
What? To install nightly builds? I think not.
I wouldn't put software into production (or even beta) that required weekly updates. And that's just for software to make a website or other app go, with no risk of injury or death.
Why would anyone want to be driven around in a vehicle by software that's so buggy it needs weekly updates?
How often do you update the firmware in production systems? And a commercial self-driving car definitely needs to be production quality, no?
I think you massively overestimate the code quality in automotive. Weekly might be a hyperbole, but from what i gathered from friends in the industry, the situation is as abysmal as everywhere else. I dont have any hopes that this will somehow get better with more complex software. Would love to be wrong here though
Oh, don't get me wrong, I agree with that! I was just pointing out that not accepting connections is not some one weird trick to connect to the internet without risking security!
We absolutely want to remotely control cars at some point, how else will you send a self-driving taxi to a customers or "ask" a car to comeback to the garage for a recall on the underlying hardware or for general maintenance?
>We absolutely want to remotely control cars at some point, how else will you send a self-driving taxi to a customers or "ask" a car to comeback to the garage for a recall on the underlying hardware or for general maintenance?
Who is this "we"? You might, but I don't.
That's a disaster waiting to happen.
What's more, under the circumstances you describe, there's no reason such vehicles need to be internet accessible. Or have we forgotten that communication doesn't require the internet?
> What's more, under the circumstances you describe, there's no reason such vehicles need to be internet accessible. Or have we forgotten that communication doesn't require the internet?
What kind of remote communication these days doesn't require the internet?
Text messages?
Special short range base stations with 56k modems?
>What kind of remote communication these days doesn't require the internet?
Pretty much any low power radio application (CB/HAM radio, key fobs, walkie talkies, POTS lines and dozens more), or higher power (although those require FCC licenses) don't require the internet.
Besides, I'm referring to the software that makes the vehicle operate. That software/system should never be exposed to remote sources. Otherwise, you're pretty much begging to be locked in your car and taken on a joyride which ends with you rolling off a cliff.
Your car is not going to have a Ham license, and I already mentioned POTS; do you really think having your car sit close to a special phone-based communication station is the answer? Key fobs and walkie talkies and LoRaWAN do not have enough range to fully enable this kind of use.
> Otherwise, you're pretty much begging to be locked in your car and taken on a joyride which ends with you rolling off a cliff.
If hacks while driving are your concern, you could have the car isolate from the internet when the key is inside it and/or someone hits a stop button. If hacks before driving are your concern, I don't think any of your suggested radio applications are safe either. And I don't really see why half of them are better than an internet connection in the first place.
>I don't think any of your suggested radio applications are safe either. And I don't really see why half of them are better than an internet connection in the first place.
The difference is that there aren't 25,000 (conservative estimate) people looking to hack/scam/destroy stuff on local radio channels.
Which means that someone would need to target me specificly, not run across the poor/no security on the internet link from my car while scanning the 'net.
Besides, the car proper (ICE/electric motor, steering, brakes, etc.) and the software that runs it shouldn't be accesible by anyone unless they have both physical access to the car and a reasonable amount of security (key fob, password, etc.) to be allowed to muck around with the car's operating software.
Infotainment systems, sure. But those need to be on separate, air-gapped hardware.
A valid opinion, but not what I'm trying to argue for/against. I'm saying that if that remote access is your goal anyway, internet vs. not-internet doesn't feel like it has a big safety impact.
That can be implemented by the vehicle initiating a connection and asking "where should I go now?".
But any connection poses vulnerability - for example, security certificates to be sure you're talking to the right person become obsolete over time as processing power gets cheaper, and an update can fail and brick the car.
>But any connection poses vulnerability - for example, security certificates to be sure you're talking to the right person become obsolete over time as processing power gets cheaper, and an update can fail and brick the car.
Exactly. Which is why vehicles (like most other IOT devices) shouldn't connect to the Internet at all.
Please define a scenario where internet access would be required (i.e., not replaceable with other, less vulnerable communications mechanisms) for a self-driving vehicle.
Have it poll once a minute and ask for instructions with a display in the car that says "instructed to go to X, accept?" and then have it auto accept after another minute.
Sure that means maybe waiting two minutes for the car to move, but that's not a huge deal, especially if you know that happens and request it two minutes in advance, but it gives anyone in the car the chance to cancel the request if it's invalid.
Something controls the software that would ask for instructions, and that could be hacked. I'd also suggest a default of auto-reject after a minute, not auto-accept.
When people think about attack surfaces in devices they often think about the things making repeated connections out. The thing is, every piece of reachable mutable code in the device is an attack surface, not just the software making connections.
You may have heard of ATM car collectors that attach to real ATMs, or people that have hacked an ATM to collect cards. Your smart car connects to a number of systems throughout its life: your dealer's diagnostics, every time you charge, every time you play music through the bluetooth connection on your phone. Each one of these is a potential attack vector.
Let's say one of these things is using JAVA, and somehow does not have an updated log4j [1]. Now that thing can be used to compromise other subsystems of your car. And these attack vectors do not have the antivirus and other protections your desktop computer or laptop do.
As bizarre and backward as it sounds, I think the best bet is burned immutable firmware on a physical module that can be easily swapped out by an authorized dealer (or with a key of some sort to allow people to service their own cars). This would reduce the vulnerability quite a bit, though not eliminate it. It also would eliminate over the air firmware updates, which are insane in my opinion. It's kind of how if you want a more secure computer you burn a live CD with a minimal hardened distro of linux, rip out the hard drive, make sure you have a fast CD, and have the computer boot to CD. This is part of what I used to do for a DMZ PC. There's always a risk your firmware will be hacked, but that is harder, and can be checked on startup depending on what you have on the system [2].
> I'd argue no vehicle should be on the road sans occupant to be honest.
So someone napping in the passenger seat is fine, but empty isn't? Why?
> Especially if it's being summoned for some sort of service.
Especially? When it's doing some sort of service is when it's the most ridiculous to have someone hanging around doing nothing.
If you don't want a summon button, just say so. Don't say summon should need a passenger.
> You think that it's totally okay to have a vehicle titled to you auto -accept a request that could be coming from any moron out there?
I didn't say that.
I don't think even a ride share would go to anyone, but I wasn't even suggesting that, I was talking about any kind of summon at all, so by default that would be the owner.
Replacing accept-incoming-connections with polling just changes the threat story from "An outside attacker can compromise the machine" to "An outside attacker can compromise the machine every sixty seconds."
Not really, because the server where the request is pulled from would have to be compromised, and it's a lot easier to secure a single remote server than every individual car. It's also a lot easier to monitor a single server for intrusions.
Sure, that single server becomes a juicy target, but that's where the defense in depth comes in, where the car still doesn't execute the command until the user accepts it.
>This is a weird, awkward solution to a problem which is far better solved cryptographically (eg, by paired SSL certs).
Sure, client/server certificates are great. But as soon as there's a BGP hiccup/attack, a fire at the relevant data center, a moron with a backhoe, among other eventualities, you're screwed.
Autonomous vehicles (as well as those with drivers) need to be, as the name says, autonomous. Not dependent on some online resource.
I'll say it again: Vehicles should not be dependent/accessible/updateable over the Internet. Full stop.
Then how will they know about changes to road conditions?
They could know about it the way humans do: get stuck in traffic or stuck at a road closure and just burn time waiting for the issue to correct itself.
But wireless radio communications allows us to do so much better.
Make it beep loudly for 60 seconds? Add a function that puts the car into auto-deny mode that you can turn on when you sleep (or whenever you're in the car). There are many ways to solve this problem.
The point is that the car won't just take remote instructions but will gather them and allow the occupants the chance to override them.
While I agree with you, so many new cars offer remote start/remote engine heating block initiation or even the ability to summon your vehicle from a parking garage and have it drive toward the exit. Many consumers will not purchase cars without these new features, all of which require an external server to issue commands to a vehicle. Definitely a huge security risk, especially with lack of manual controls.
Where are the “low-chip-count” new cars with VFD radio displays, dials, traditional keys, no screens and especially no cellular modem?
Remote start has been available for nearly 40 years. Pre-heating engines has been going on for nearly a century. Neither of these requires a computer, let alone contacting a remote server.
You state the security risks of connected vehicles, so I’m not sure why you lead with these incorrect statements.
Agreed on all but remote start. Maybe it's different on fancier vehicles (I have a '13 Mustang), but it's usually just a radio that starts the engine and nothing more. Hardly a security risk.
Think of all the attention you could monetize with a captive audience in a self-driving car. I fully expect it to be exploited by ad companies. And subsequently by hackers.
Having spent half a decade working in Oil & Gas flow control systems directly, I can confirm that 10 years ago when I left that industry, cyber security was still not even a consideration. Light years behind wasn't an accurate statement - non-existent was more accurate.
Admittedly computer systems have come a long way in ten years, but given the attitudes and technical expertise of a lot of the people I worked alongside, I would say there's a reasonable chance the needle hasn't moved very far.
They're excruciatingly good at getting oil out of the ground and getting it to market, but they're not going to be winning capture the flag at Defcon or Blackhat any time soon...
Not a counterpoint but supplemental. Waymo and Cruise have been pouring a lot more initial effort into cybersecurity and they are just barely in production.
> With the presence of an automation kill-switch and manual human controls the driver can always take back control
Isn’t this envisioning a car with no passengers who can drive? Agree there needs to be a physical fallback. But fallback to a parallel system running on ROM might be the safer option.
The vehicle this article is talking about is already designed this way. Most systems operate entirely read-only after boot and there are independent fallback systems for critical components.
well kind of. Since elons been toying around with the Yoke, Tesla's been working with a steering wheel that has no real relation to a physical mechanism and will be software based. This would still allow for haptic feedback and will make the e'Yoke' usable, but you never having to turn your wheel past 45* for full turn radius.
I think any automated vehicle, no matter how advanced, should always have a big red button to make it stop whatever it's doing. Kind of like the emergency brake on a passenger train.
I'm pretty sure this was an episode on HBO's Silicon Valley. The character's Tesla drove itself onto a container ship with the driver stuck inside, unable to get out of the car.
If you hit the big red button going 65mph on the center lane of a crowded highway, it could be bad. Especially if the tech starts to feel safe enough that cars can travel close enough to use the draft from cars ahead.
I think an emergency brake works for trains because they’re isolated.
Could be an absurd idea, but could require a licensed driver with experience taking over the wheel instead to steer the car with human logic, instead of trusting the failing AI to park it
I'd like to imagine we'd have "manual override" controls like I, Robot (2004) showed: https://youtube.com/shorts/46-EGyn7rwc As implied in the clip, after a few years of self-driving cars, most passengers won't know how to drive well enough for it to be safe and other autonomous vehicles might not coordinate well with a manual driver.
A "pull over" button could work, but still relies on the automated driving capabilities.
A third option would be to dial an "expert driver" who takes remote control of the car to get you to safety, bypassing both the automated driver and the passengers' inability to drive. Lack of connectivity could be an issue, and it opens the door wider for hackers (already an issue though). However I have to imagine that in-transit connectivity will be increasing dramatically once people want to work or watch Netflix during their commute.
A sufficiently autonomous vehicle might just ignore you. Are pedal brakes in passenger driven vehicles reliant on computer at all, what about electrical transmission?
So if it was already in the midst of slowing down to pull over safely, pushing this big red button would do what, stop it suddenly in the middle of the road?
If your vehicle is heading relentlessly toward a group of schoolchildren it would be nice to have a way to override it. Either that or no windows so you won't be haunted by it every night of your life.
I'm not sure if I'm optimistic about autonomous vehicles or just very pessimistic about human drivers. I have no confidence that the next driver making a left turn while I'm crossing the road won't kill me. I'm much more comfortable with a computer that is programmed to avoid killing me, even if the software may have the occasional bug, than with a human who may or may not prioritize my life over whatever else it is they have going on that day.
The nice thing about self-driving cars is that when fatal errors are found, the software can be updated so the car will never make that mistake again.
We can't do that with humans; instead, we have probabilities and known badly-designed roads that incentivize (or don't disincentivize) driving in a way likelier to cause death. The only way to fix those issues at scale is redesign the roads, often for less efficient traffic throughput.
Literally, when my dad taught me to drive, the first thing he told me was: 'Every other driver on the road is an idiot and a murderer. Act accordingly.'
I'm wondering why pedestrian accident prevention isn't standard equipment already. We have sensors all over, adaptive cruise...everything is in place except the junior-developer grade software routine to stop instead of hitting shit. Shows where the priorities are.
Are you saying that they don't work hard to avoid having their cars hit pedestrians? Really?
And no, this isn't "junior-developer grade software routine." They also don't want the car slamming on its brakes in the middle of traffic because a plastic bag blew by in front of the car.
Please, tell me about all the cars right now that avoid hitting pedestrians and bicycles and wheel chairs. If impact immenent (7th grade algebra) then stop.
What's your point? You're saying you could apply 7th grade algebra to this problem and make these cars considerably safer, but that the people working on it now just don't bother? Because they're evil? Or what?
Coming in late, but I think you're misunderstanding the suggestion, which was to make pedestrian avoidance standard equipment on all new cars, not just autonomous vehicles.
Today I'm not sure which I have more confidence in. However long term I'm confident that we can eliminate enough bugs that the autonomous vehicle is better. Once statistics start to come out (real ones that account for all factors, not potentially biases ones from the company making the cars) I'll be looking for the time when we ban non-autonomous cars.
> I'm much more comfortable with a computer that is programmed to avoid killing me
I think the real concern that the car is actually programmed explicitly to kill you if it has to, to ensure it's own safety or the safety of it's riders or something.
I think a human is far more likely than a car to have a self-protection tendency.
If a car is programmed that way, how does that benefit the car company (or the programmer)? It's just a different family that sues them if someone dies that didn't have to die. Are you thinking they could advertise it as "prioritizes your life more than random other people!" That's just begging for a lawsuit.
And they especially wouldn't program the car to protect itself above a human life. Why would you think it would? The car is not nearly valuable enough to outweigh the cost of a lawsuit.
A human is less likely to mistake a garbage can for an oncoming car and then make the choice to run me over out of self preservation, though.
Comparing a car programmed for self preservation versus a human seeking their self preservation only really makes sense if the car and human are both equally capable of assessing threats.
At the moment I don't think cars are at the same level. Maybe I'm wrong. Humans are fallible too of course.
You are mixing competence with agenda. Which is it? If you are concerned it is not as competent as a human, fine, that's defensible.
But that's not what you said. You said you were concerned about its agenda, that it would be intentionally prioritize the lives of its passengers over other lives (and even suggested it would prioritize the preservation of the vehicle itself more highly)
you said....
>I think the real concern that the car is actually programmed explicitly to kill you if it has to, to ensure it's own safety or the safety of it's riders or something.
My comment was about that....the "agenda" issue, which is 100% what your comment was about.
To be clear (if I wasn't in a previous message)
There is NO incentive for it to be explicitly programmed to do that, since the company could be equally sued by pedestrians as it could by passengers.
There IS incentive for a human to behave that way, since natural selection built a self protection motivation deeply into the human brain.
There is also very strong incentive AGAINST prioritizing protection of the vehicle itself over any human -- passenger or not. For both human drivers and driving software programmers.
Anyway, you seem to be changing your argument to one of competence, which to me is a completely different discussion. (I think self driving cars are better at some things and humans are better at other things, but eventually cars will be better -- or at least equal -- for the vast majority)
Humans do this as well. Many bus drivers may be told to not stop even if a car gets directly in their way, so as to avoid killing all of the children inside - especially so when at heights.
What kind of cars are we talking about? A second grader is aged 7-8. Let's round that up to 8 years to include 9 months of gestation. A model Y starts at $55k. For them to be equal in cost to "replace", the child would need to cost more than $6,875/year to raise. Can you hire a full time nanny for that price? My guess is that the amount of resources/money invested into a child at that age is in the hundreds of thousands.
No way. They only seem cheaper because of people doing free labor to produce their own children. Even just the cost to get someone else to produce a newborn for you is almost enough to buy a Bentley.
Not all of us laugh. My first grandchild is going to be named for a childhood friend of my daughter, who was killed by a car. My daughter still hurts, 15 years later.
I hope she reconsiders naming her daughter for the girl who died tragically.
My sister was named for a cousin that, as a baby, fell out a window to her death, a decade or so before my sister was born. When my sister was a couple weeks old, my parents realized that they didn't want to think of that tragic story every time they said my sister's name. So they changed her name to one without the emotional baggage.
There are other ways to honor someone's memory, that don't affect your relationship with your new child.
That is indeed sad and it’s true there’s always someone carrying trauma about something. That’s life. But it goes on. That’s why sometimes I say “kill all the apaches” and don’t even think twice about the fact that many Native American tribesmen were killed in the conquest of this nation.
I think it’s sensible not to optimize to the person with the most trauma.
There will always be a big red disconnect button in all of these vehicles. Though using it is probably more likely to cause an accident than not using it.
“Self driving” means that it is far more likely for a human driver to override the car in panic and hit the children than it is for the car to hit the children autonomously.
IF the car does hit the children even while driving autonomously the driver will be held responsible regardless of overrides. If someone dies, someone is going to jail until the justice system works through it.
Did you read the article? There is literally no steering wheel in an autonomous car. There is no "driver", only passengers. Even then, the car could drive itself without any passengers.
Presumably you mean "no responsibility for the owner", and the responsibility should be borne by the manufacturer. I'm not sure if that's the right set of incentives for society, though.
If the owner is responsible for any deaths caused by their car, the owner will have an incentive to choose a car that has a good safety record, and to keep that car in proper working order.
Conversely, if a corporation is responsible, they can only be punished with fines for causing a fatal accident, and those fines will be considered a cost of doing business. Also, the corporation will have a lot more money to invest in lobbying for laws (and judges) to make those fines as small as possible.
Well, I meant “no responsibility for the passengers”.
The owner should have some limited liability as you say, but primarily liability should be with the manufacturer. The way I view it AVs should have similar liability as an elevator. The manufacturer and the maintainer should have liability, but never the passengers.
Ideally, the manufacturer keeps enough sensors on the thing such that the car doesn’t move without the proper maintenance. But at that point is it truly ownership?
My preference is to just have many services competing that make them relatively cheap.
I was at a crosswalk and saw a car with the big cameras on top coming
Normally I walk and have confidence the human will stop and not want the consequences, or I at least make eye contact with the human driver for reassurance they will stop
This time I ran, mumbling “self driving car fuck that”
Eye contact is also a major component of driving a motorcycle safely.
When at an intersection, you know another car sees you by looking through their windshield and judging whether the person is distracted or if they're aware of your presence.
It would really benefit motorcyclists, pedestrians, and other drivers if there were some mechanism for self-driving cars to visually and outwardly acknowledge your presence.
How often do you wave or signal other drivers with your hands when you both arrive at a stop sign at the same time? What's the replacement for this in a world where half of cars don't have a driver?
Avid bicyclist here. If I'm approaching an intersection with the possibility of conflicting with a motor vehicle even though I have clear right of way I stare at the driver's eyes. If he's not looking at me, I prepare for evasive action or possible emergency braking. Same for me going along my way and an oncoming MV turning left in front of/into me. I get a close call every year or two. I am very rude and they always are surprised I am angry...
No eyes no trust. Full automation is going to elevate the precedence of fallible motor vehicles over people with every right to the road even more. Great.
I want to respond to this because I have encountered the same thing, multiple times, during my 40 years of cycling.
The implied "locked eyes therefor I am safe" is NOT a thing. I apologize to the inexperienced if I implied that. You got to watch the whole process. But in the distribution of the MV danger types, not paying attention at all is much higher IMHO.
Everyone knows this? I had this happen on my own street that I live on with a neighbor two houses down. Yeah, I was rude.
I was taught never to trust eye contact either. They could be looking past you and motorcycle profiles are very low. I'm looking for a stationary front wheel hub. Any movement merits a reaction.
Having an indicator that the car "sees" you would be very interesting.
This is obviously the real biggest issue facing AV companies. Technology will get there; social acceptance is a bigger hurdle. You have to trust that the machine is at least as likely to stop for you as a human, and that will take a long time for everyone.
I had been beyond the "acceptance" idea, before the cars actually were rolled out, because I believed they would they would be better than humans. I was pretty excited about Lidar. I liked the idea that environmental mix up or collision would be autoupdated to other cars so that they would perform better in the condition, crowd fixing edge cases extremely quickly. But pretty much none of that has happened and the current implementation is a total wtf.
Many cars with self-driving capability do not use Lidar, I can't tell which ones do, the very prominent Teslas do not, and they've have hit people in obviously avoidable circumstances that have nothing to do with "being too predictable in a human world", just total fuckups, and I've seen videos of what the Tesla cars see compared to what they do, and I'm not satisfied with them.
So for most they may have to build trust, for me they have to rebuild trust, because all the companies have pretty much gone the nightmare route making us all cannon fodder.
I was thinking about that recently, that there needs to be some kind of “I see you” system. Maybe an external light that tracks you or something. Anything that can help me as a pedestrian understand what its internal state is.
Reminds me of a mail delivery robot at an office that had a feature like that. They had to tweak it because it was freaking out visitors by staring at them during elevator rides.
How hard would it be for all vehicles to broadcast an ID, a location and a velocity and reply with confirmations when one vehicle sees and "hears" another one?
I'm sure this is location specific, but I don't trust human drivers to stop until they're already hitting the brake, even if I make eye contact with them. I'd feel a lot more confident stepping out in front of a self-driving car.
Agreed in theory, however in practice in SF with all the self driving cars I've had the opposite experience IRL. The self-driving cars provide more buffer (slowing down earlier) for pedestrians than human drivers and I trust them more already.
Where's that video of the guy's dash cam showing what full autonomous driving in a Tesla is currently like, the one where it keeps trying to drive him head first in to other vehicles.
I'm hoping this is just intended for on-campus shuttles or something.
Tesla is not representative of the state-of-the-art in the industry.
In fact, many of the other companies in the space are looking down their nose at Tesla's experiment because Musk thinks he can do the trick without LIDAR. He might not be wrong (humans do it without LIDAR), but it's a hell of a gamble that results in a sensor bundle quite different from the sensory tapestry other self-driving vehicles can take advantage of.
Couple that with the fact that other companies are employing professional drivers to test their hardware on public roads while Musk is crowdsourcing it to anyone rich enough to buy one of his cars, and one can get the sense why those who are actually concerned about driver and pedestrian safety are real nervous about Musk's foray into this space.
It's a great example of how companies with money can lobby to get things that don't matter changed, while ordinary citizens can't get the government to fix broken regulations that are having an actual impact on our lives.
I would go further - if the vehicle is autonomous, it should be illegal for it to have a steering wheel.
The idea that you can make a deadly self-driving car, and then jail the driver because he could not react in 0.2 seconds when your car suddenly swerved is the greatest handover of money and power to corporations since the times of slavery.
So make the choice clear - either tha car has controls, or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, there will be no temptation to blame the passenger
I am tempted to agree about the steering wheel, but then I think of all of the situations where being able to take manual control would be really nice - like when towing a camper, or backing a boat down a ramp, or handing over to valet parking.
I think this is forcing a false dichotomy between having a steering wheel and driver liability for failures in the autonomous driving system. I think we can have a world with steering wheels and manufacturer responsibility... we just might not get there for a while.
Even with very good automation, it seems an incredibly high bar that you can automate literally everything. I guess you can maybe imagine voice control as a replacement but...
But to the parent comment, it seems insane to me that a consumer would accept full liability for some company's software as they would for their own driving. It seems obvious to me that the manufacturer is liable. If my taxi driver gets in an accident I'm certainly not at fault.
This is silly. I want a self-driving car that drives me 95% of the way to the mountains, but allows me to take control on the dirt road that is the last 1-3 miles to the trailhead.
That's an overreaction, the simpler solution is to outlaw anything less than level 4 self-driving (or at least ban level 3 and only allow level 1 and 2 stuff until 4 is achieved), and make the liability on the auto manufacturer clear in the law.
If it doesn't have a steering wheel then no one will buy it. It's too weird and different and will be a major obstacle to adoption. So yeah, corporate wants it to have a steering wheel for numerous reasons...including the one you cite.
If there was a low-end car that could drive my kids to/from school without a licensed driver present, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
So would any other parent who has the money, and regularly has a conflict between where work would like them to be, and where they need to be for their children's school. (Yes, I'm familiar with and have used rideshare. Uber's liability won't cover taking kids, HopSkipDrive will, but they cost a lot more and every so often you get the situation where they don't find a driver. The convenience of, "Don't have to worry about it" would be worth a lot to me, and would give the children a lot of freedom.
The owner is going to be liable, regardless of who is in control. Just like if someone else is driving your car and causes an accident, you (the owner) are the one who will pay.
You will not be criminally liable for what another driver does in your car (unless perhaps you agreed to let him drive knowing he was drunk or something like that) but you (as owner of the vehicle that caused the damage or injury) will be financially liable. You will be sued. Your insurance will pay.
> unless perhaps you agreed to let him drive knowing he was drunk or something like that
To provide some extra context, it's also possible to be criminally liable for what another driver does after leaving your car if they commit a crime that you had foreknowledge of. Here is one tragic example of a case where this happened:
The driver should know the capabilities of the car. If he doesn't, then he shouldn't drive it. If he isn't 100% sure that autonomous driving system will work as expected, then he should never enable that system.
The first sentence of this article has an interesting reading:
"U.S. regulators on Thursday issued final rules eliminating the need for automated vehicle manufacturers to equip fully autonomous vehicles with manual driving controls to meet crash standards."
It does sound like "U.S. regulators are removing regulations.", which does look like they are acting against themselves..
Regulators are responsible for maintaining sets of rules that are just as comprehensive as they need to be and no more. Part of the job description is updating or removing old rules, just like part of it is creating new ones.
Maybe you misread it, and/or maybe I miswrote it, and/or maybe both. But I meant about the phrasing and my understanding of it, not about the actual job of a regulator.
There could be dedicated lanes assigned to the autonomous cars and platooning-protocols that ensure that the cars use their automatic capabilities only on relatively safe highways, only queued between other autonomic vehicles.
Should be a more predictable environment and thereby safer
Look, I'm generally on the bull-ish side of autonomous driving, but this is almost akin to the feds passing laws on science fiction. Section 180.99 part alpha: "Minimum size of a Ringworld is mercury orbit around a red dwarf"
I guess we can always drive with a USB-plugin gamepad if there's a glitch or a central system outage?
This would actually represent progress if they eliminated the requirement for side mirrors, which from what I've read of good aerodynamic designs is responsible for as much drag as the body of the car.
> if they eliminated the requirement for side mirrors
Of course fully automated vehicles will look nothing like typical cars. There's this really common tendency to think way too small, to confuse the current prototypes with a final product.
The mid-term future for SDVs looks more or less like a train compartment on wheels.
Yes, autonomous public vehicles seem likely - like a Flexi-bus - but people like to travel without random members of the public, private hire of small vehicles will definitely be a thing unless the public get priced out of it.
There are currently self-driving vehicles operating on public roads with no safety driver. That tech exists now. It may have many severe limitations (precision mapping, weather, construction areas, etc), but it does exist. Reducing those limitations may be a long term project but it is already clear that self driving vehicles could be deployed today without human controls as long as the scope of deployment matches those limitations.
This rules allows car manufacturers to work on new fully automous cars without controls that are designed to function as campus shuttles or taxis in a limited scope. There is still a lot of work to be done regulating the use self driving vehicles, but this removes a safety regulation hurdle that is stopping states and car makers from experimenting with different approaches.
Most cars still have some aspect of mechanical coupling between the steering wheel and the front wheels in case of electrical failure. There are some cars that have had "steer by wire", but it's still very uncommon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_by_wire#Steer_by_wire
I think it's notable that Steer by Wire on Infiniti Q50 was a reverted change: users apparently wanted anti-torques and vibrations from steering as a cue/driving input.
I would not own a car that was steer-by-wire because of the risk of electrical failure.
I've had electrical failure in a car before. The alternator died and wouldn't produce enough power at under 2000 rpm. My stereo and lights were flickering and engine was sputtering. In a steer-by-wire system, I'd have lost my steering. I'm just glad I was driving a stick shift, giving me more control over engine speeds so I was able to make it home and not have to get a tow.
This feels like getting the cart before the horse. As far as I’m aware (and as has been proven by car companies’ continuing inability to produce a safely self driving vehicle) there’s no standard test for what counts as an ”automated driving system (ADS) vehicle” capable of safely navigating public roads.
Regulators shouldn’t just take for profit companies’ word that a vehicle is automated. There should be a standard battery of tests which a vehicle must pass to be considered automated.
Allowing companies to get rid of controls just because they pinky swear the vehicle can handle driving safely in all foreseeable conditions is a sure way to end up with needless death and injury due to the same dynamics that were written in the book Unsafe at any Speed.
The safety and regulatory framework should exist before the activity is allowed rather than waiting until the inevitable deaths and injuries and relying on the families of the deceased to petition congress.
After removing the steering wheel and making the car fully autonomous, I bet you'll have to pay a subscription for it to drive. And a subscription for a cellular service.
this sounds like a snarky remark, but a hybrid public transportation mode where an autonomous van can pick up people at their convenience is exactly desirable, more than the public bus or train today. Less walking, less waiting, on demand connection.
Looking forward to the future of having to leave 40 mins earlier so I can mark multiple vehicles as "need cleaning" before having one arrive that won't give me hepatitis.
I absolutely understand the distaste, but you'll have to compare that against your current "subscription" of insurance fees. Hopefully they either go down or go away.
You always want a physical failsafe control (i.e. big red button for emergency stop)... it's not clear if nhtsa requires that or not.
The practicality of manually driving is not going away. Just this week my neighbor was driving up and down his driveway to transport some heavy packages received.
Reading between the lines here this just makes me think that the regulator has become captured by the industry.
This is like removing human control on an autonomous Russian roulette revolver that shoots to the side if it detects a person in front of the barrel, then praying for the best.
This regulation is saying that if you did build an autonomous Russian roulette revolver, there's no requirement to outfit it with a pistol grip and a trigger.
If there is a fully driverless (not driving itself with a human still in it) truck - as companies tell us is their goal - it does not increase or decrease safety to have or not have a seat and a steering wheel in it.
The argument here is that building an autonomous Russian roulette revolver is a stupid thing to do, which is orthogonal.
I have some experience in navigating NHTSA when bringing new automotive tech to market. The following reflects my experience.
When working on cutting edge tech that have associated hazards (cars hurt people) what companies want is a clear set of standards to meet, as this goes a long way to showing due-diligence when things go wrong and lawsuits start showing up. But with new tech there are no standards, no generally accepted way of doing things. So how do you know if the system is capable/safe-enough to deploy in volume on our roads? How do you know you've done enough due diligence to confidently launch new tech without putting your company at financial risk? Let's face it, a big enough software bug (and associated liability) could potentially put Tesla completely out of business. When dealing with hazardous new tech, the threat of recalls and lawsuits weighs heavily on a company's decision making process.
When it comes to new tech, NHTSA is in no position to answer these questions. And they know it. If they knew better then they'd be the ones driving innovation. As it stands under capitalism the innovators are all working for private companies hoping for the big pay out. Knowing this, it would be counterproductive for NHTSA to say "we know better than to let a self driving car on the road". They don't know better and they don't want to get in the way of innovation.
So instead NHTSAs job is to setup a regulatory framework and set of rules to help these companies bring tech to market, while helping identify/limit bad actors. When lessons are learned (ex. ABS systems provide a clear benefit, and should generally do X Y and Z) these lessons get integrated back into the regulations as a guide to all players in the space. The regulations and standards improve over time as more-and-more millions-of-miles are driven and the tech/algorithms mature.
In my experience, NHTSAs attitude seems to be best summarized as: Innovation is good for America and the last thing we want to do is stop you from developing cool new things. But we have no idea what your new tech should/shouldn't do. The risk is all on you, your company ultimately bears the legal responsibility for your products. You'll have to determine if your product is ready for market all on your own -- and failure carries a high price tag. Now... if/when the tech matures, and the industry seems to generally agree that "new tech X" should include "X Y and Z" as part of the safety/risk equation, then we'll add that to the regulatory framework. But until the tech matures and the clear path forward is known we don't want to stifle innovation.
This is about the best you can do in this situation. ADAS is new, and no one knows where we'll end up. No one, including you and me, knows if these systems can be deployed safely. Personally I don't trust ADAS systems, and believe the financial risk would be too high to risk my company. But what do I know?
It seems that the message being sent here is: "We're ready to start dealing with cars that don't have human controls. Best of luck to all those who dare play in the space."
Driving is already a Russian roulette right? If autonomous vehicles are safer than human drivers as advertised the barrel would just have more capacity.
Anyone claiming they are safer now.. vs what? Getting into a Tesla, turning on fsd and taking a snooze? Wonder how many millions of miles that would last without a fatality or car wreck. A lot less than 1 million I wager.
Sure, the fact that people choose the more appealing option doesn't mean there wasn't a choice. That's just what people do when they have multiple options: they choose the one that's best according to whatever their criteria are. And many people might make a similar choice to reclaim multiple hours per day of driving time to do other things (like sleep, work, relax, etc.) while their car drives itself.
Yet for many people, where they live isnt a choice, or their method of transport. Most of the US undeniably has poor public transport, and the only realistic means of travel for a day to day work schedule is via automobile.
The choice is to stay at home, where you are very unlikely to get in a car accident, or to drive a car, which greatly increased the risk of accident and death.
>The choice is to stay at home, where you are very unlikely to get in a car accident, or to drive a car, which greatly increased the risk of accident and death.
Absolutely. At least until you're fired from your job because you don't show up. Then you'll (depending on where you live) a few months to maintain that "choice" before the landlord throws you out on your ass because you "chose" not to go to work.
Statistical equivalence is one thing, but the risk will shift within the population. Let’s set the bar a bit higher than above average? The average driver is a dumbass. autonomous vehicles should be expected to consistently make better decisions than the best drivers, not just the average ones.
You wrote correctly "should". Today they can't even compete with the average driver, regardless of what the companies tell us that try to benefit from them.
I would be perfectly happy if we had automatic drivers that were as good as the average human driver, since I already integrated and accepted that risk and accept it every time I drive. Why raise the bar for a new technology if that risks preventing it from being widely deployed and relentlessly improved?
It was a bit tongue-in-cheek - the median driver has precisely zero accidents in any given year.
I don't really know how to think about it. Accident rate, on a per-mile basis, falls out of some combination of "hardness of the driving problem" (freeways have many fewer accidents than city streets, I think) as well as propensity to take risks (driving at night; in bad weather; at higher speeds; while distracted) as well as driving skill.
What, by definition, people will accept is an accident rate similar to that for professional drivers; e.g. taxi/rideshare/livery. According to a report by Uber, that's about half the number of fatal accidents on a VMT basis versus the general population in their case.
I believe the median driver has N/M accidents a year, where N is the number of accidents, and M is the number of people, right? Well, no, I that's true of the mean, but not the median.
Presumably, if a specific person is a very good driver, entering an automated vehicle that is merely better than average driver, with no controls to interject, results in a net reduction of safety for this individual.
More specifically, what IF or rather WHEN there is an incident that could've been prevented by human interjection, but wasn't?
Other aspect is, why are we only ever discussing these separately? What is the safety of a automation-assisted human? Can we get to the point where safety is better than either system alone?
We will. For consumers like you there will be a $100k option to increase safety by adding sensors/compute power or something else on top of a base model. But the ultimate game here is to free people from the need to drive cars for a living or pay someone to do so. This will also open a lot of other optimisations to human life, which exist now due to cost of human labor. If human stays in the car - this mission is failed.
+
It's not like if you are the most careful driver you are safe - if a drunk no-licensed jerk aims for your car - you are dead due to his lack of driving ability, not yours.
> Presumably, if a specific person is a very good driver, entering an automated vehicle that is merely better than average driver, with no controls to interject, results in a net reduction of safety for this individual.
But for far more individuals there will be a net increase in safety, moreover, since traffic accidents don't only imperil drivers, pedestrians and safe drivers will also experience an increase in safety due to average drivers using just-above-average automation.
> What is the safety of a automation-assisted human?
That's where we're at today with systems like Tesla's Autopilot.
Reduction of average statistical risk is what really matters and will be what is primarily responsible for driving down real world fatalities and life altering injuries.
I for one am not going to stand back and let fear of new technology and unfounded preference for human driven action over automation stand in the way of making a statistical impact on reducing the 1.35 million auto fatalities that happen globally every year. To propose that possibly reducing that number to 1.30 million is not good enough and we have to hold back rollout until the tech is better than the "best driver" is disgustingly sociopathic.
It’s easy to say that from a statistical standpoint. I’m sure if you were a victim in one of these less-likely accidents at the hands of faulty autonomous tech you would not be so adamant. Forcing this technology onto people sounds a lot like fascism.
Just don't stand in the way of people who choose to use self driving cars because you're more afraid of it that of extremely lethal and incompetent human drivers.
Self driving cars will be as safe as the level of criminal liability faced by the makers.
Regulatory capture means it wont be high and the potential profits to be realized from first mover advantage here means there will be a significant incentive to "move fast and break things".
So to speak.
I'd feel safe if an executive who OKs a software update that kills someone risks significant jail time. If that means no self driving cars for 20 more years then I am totally fine with that. That would simply mean that they werent safer as promised.
I agree that there is a significant monetary incentive to "move fast and kill people". In the end, paying out a few $MM to random families is financially minimal compared to the $BBB that are up for grabs. We will never really have executives going to jail for things like this. We've built a system of profits > anything else.
Not really; the fact is that sharp objects and heavy objects moving at speed are both inherently hazardous because of the basic nature of the physical world, but those same attributes make them extremely useful.
I don't object at all to holding manufacturers accountable for defective products; but it makes no sense to say "if your product is involved in an accident, you go to jail", which was the premise of the comment to which I responded.
Ordinary cars are testable, we understands quality of merials, corrosion, etc.
When it comes to AI droving, noone has a fucking clue what it will do in next 50 milliseconds. Teslas literally mis-classified a semi trailer for an underpass
> I'd feel safe if an executive who OKs a software update that kills someone risks significant jail time. If that means no self driving cars for 20 more years then I am totally fine with that.
The status quo is 139 people dying every day in the US in traffic accidents.
If we replaced all cars with self-driving ones, an executive could approve a software update every single day that kills only 100 and it could very well still be a net benefit to society.
These discussions always seem to implicitly presume that we're currently at zero deaths. We're not--we just don't hear about them. Every year we delay self driving cars is more people dying, not fewer.
>These discussions always seem to implicitly presume that we're currently at zero deaths.
I never presumed that and never would.
I do presume that if we watered down criminal liability for reckless driving then we'd get way, way more than 139.
The current regulatory framework surrounding self driving cars is rather like making drink driving subject to a $30 fine. I would be surprised if it starts out safer than humans.
1. isn't a steering wheel the only plausible failsafe control for somebody supervising these experimental machines? Not sure what other control interface would be better in life-or-death instants/moments, plus any driver can carry over their preexisting skills in that situation. If better emergency controls than steering wheels exist, fine, I guess.
2. Isn't the question not
safety(autonomous vehicle) > safety(human driver)
but rather
safety(autonomous vehicle + human control fail-safe) > safety(autonomous vehicle alone)
Just don't understand why, on the face of it, the law is being changed in a way that I guess to me personally implies trials without common-sense-interface human intervention controls is legal?
It would be actually be better for the car to drive itself to the repo man, if you miss payments on it / are refusing to pay your debts to the government.
Casualties per miles driven is a terrible stat for current self-driving technology because as it stands, it forces drivers to take over in the most dangerous situations. And you can't generalize for all miles in cars capable of self-driving because the population who own cars like that are not representative of the average. It's a very tricky thing to accurately measure whether it's safer for an individual to drive themselves or let the car do it for them.
Absolutely! In a heartbeat. Because I know it's a tool to enhance my driving, not replace me, and I still need to pay attention.
I already have an add-on for my car that gives me level 3 on the freeway (no hands on the wheel needed). I still keep my hand on the wheel though and I still pay attention, but it definitely helps because I don't have to use brain power staying in the lane or maintaining speed. I can give 100% of my brain power to looking for danger.
Ah, today, probably not. But if it was proven safe enough to not need one, sure. I'd look at the safety data and decide.
But the point is, no manufacturer would sell one without a wheel either because they know it wouldn't sell. This is just a change to not require one to pass safety tests. The car still has to actually pass the safety tests though.
This was part of the plan for the market. Remove human drivers & owner operators to have tighter control over the markets. The appearance of safety using coarse statistical samples (is is really safer?) is pretense for the real reasons.
I get what you're saying, but the Russian roulette analogy is a kind of straw man. Do you agree? Or is it that you think that we shouldn't allow potentially dangerous technologies to perform without human supervision?
It's always been like this, I've seen enough industry insiders write their own laws at the local government level, just a bigger game at the national level :P
I could imagine a bus on a fixed route not having controls. This doesn't have to apply universally...
There could definitely be a number of use-cases beyond taxis/individual cars. This is why top-tier regulations like this need to be broad. You can refine it at the vehicle category level.
This is a great step forward, autonomous driving only needs to be better than the average human.
The average human is often too busy texting, or eating to pay attention.
Humans do very stupid things in cars, it's a part of why I won't really consider living anywhere where I have to own one. Holy crap, you'll see people literally just rear-end each other at stoplights because you want to keep itching closer.
One of the most common complaints about automated cars is they go The speed limit, I recall once I was literally at the exact speed limit for the highway and I flicked on the cruise control. Immediately a driver behind me started honking and flicking me off.
Like holy shit I'm not from around here. I'm not going to risk getting pulled over because you're 5 minutes late to brunch or something.
The average human is such a horrible driver. I don't think Tesla bots can do much worse. The times the Tesla AI fails are very rare and far between, the times some idiot human decides they're going to rear end someone, or change lanes to late are very common.
If we think we have class antagonism and rural vs. urban antagonism now, wait until self-driving trucks decimate trucking as an industry. It's one of the largest well-paying employers of "blue collar" people. We are still a ways off but it's definitely coming.
We have to do something about inequality or we will have totalitarianism. It will either be in the form of a totalitarian fascist or communist revolution, or a totalitarian police state to prevent such a revolution.
One of my favorite youtubers did an hour long video on the trucker convoy from California to DC and it was a peak into another world. The thing I thought about after watching it was wondering what it looks like when that group has mass unemployment in 10 years.
Truck driving employs 1% of the US population and if those jobs are lost to automation, there's no chance of them coming back like they did throughout other recessions. It won't just be the drivers, it'll be their friends, families and children that will be unemployed, unhappy, and very motivated.
I'm going to submit that some of these COVID protests are not COVID protests. They are inequality protests, but seriously talking about inequality has been pushed out of the Overton window across much of the American political landscape. As a result the anger "sublimates" out about other issues.
The right does a good job guiding the anger of the working class toward issues that have nothing to do with inequality like COVID, race, immigrants, trans people, etc. Meanwhile the left offers up a totally out of touch message that doesn't resonate at all, or offers them welfare without understanding that these people consider welfare to be something to be ashamed about. They want productive work.
You know... we have a housing crisis in this country. A lot of these people could find work building adequate housing for the US population, but that would threaten high real estate valuations...
We also have a lot of infrastructure that needs building, but we may have to wait for the generation that was brainwashed to believe that infrastructure (except more roads) is communism to retire.
There are plenty of jobs but we won't create them. We'd better get on it.
I have a suspicion that housing will stop being a crisis due to a combination of:
1) the main expense is the land, the houses themselves are cheap, so anything that causes existing-but-undesirable houses to now be in a commuter zone increases useful supply
2) self-driving vehicles will allow people to commute while asleep or doing their hobbies (this is a terrible idea with current tech, people already get in trouble for doing both in existing self-driving cars)
3) remote working (we already have a lot of digital entertainment and socialising)
If I’m wrong, I expect it to be because all this makes meatspace location into an even bigger status symbol than it is already.
> self-driving vehicles will allow people to commute while asleep or doing their hobbies
This doesn't eliminate the traffic issues and energy consumption associated with long commutes. Self-driving cars are a substitute for the efficiency benefits of density.
If anything, the expansion of remote work has just pushed the housing crisis into more housing markets.
> pushed the housing crisis into more housing markets.
FWIW I prefer density but isn’t this good? The reality of yesterday was too few zip codes with too much demand and not enough good will to increase supply.
Instead we now have a lot more zip codes that can make decentralized decisions about building more housing. Hopefully they vote for more development and use it as a way to stimulate jobs in their local construction industry.
The new zipcodes face the same economic incentives to restrict supply. Property owners want to see their holdings increase in value and generally have more political power. I don't see any reason why the new hot markets are going to do anything different from the old hot markets. Perhaps some will, but renters and potential homeowners will get priced out of more markets
Because the long term benefit of density ends up lifting the local economy a lot more than the property prices go down in the short term. Especially with remote work, the extra income brought in adds to the local coffee, haircut and food scene, and increased overall property taxes on the same land make the city money.
People just don't think in that long a timeframe but there are localities which do and hopefully it works for them and we all get to learn the timeframe for benefits (or the lack of benefits) from such a change.
My point is that communities that cam think long term seem rare based on the available evidence. Thus most of the communities where the housing crises is being exported will just face the same problem.
This why why I am making the point that we shouldn't rely on remote work (of self driving cars) to solve our housing crises. The only good solution is increasing density, (and I suspect we agree on that.)
It's great if people want to take advantage of remote work to live I'm new housing markets, but they should realize the consequences of those choices and work to mitigate them.
There is a limit to how long a commute can grow before it becomes untenable a part of a daily routine. Being able to do other things while commuting increases acceptable commute time, but does not elimant this limit.
Traffic can greatly extend commuting times and thus is directly relevant.
That just extends the limit, the limit still exists. Because of that limit, traffic reduces the range you can commute within that limit.
I don't think "self-driving" rv's do anything to revolutionize the housing market. What they do is revolutionize travel (it's like having a private luxery train car that can go almost anywhere.) Parking an RV can be an expensive and competive in and around urban areas (speaking from vanlife experience.) Having a self-driving RV driving around all night while you sleep also isn't cost effective and won't scale.
What I see as a revolution in the rv/housing market would be affordable, all eletric RVs with sufficient solar capacity to recharge their range over the course days. Combine this with starlink and/or 5g and you create cheaply location flexible housing.
> That just extends the limit, the limit still exists. Because of that limit, traffic reduces the range you can commute within that limit.
Yeah and? The limit is in the order of 250 miles. Have you seen how cheap houses get 250 miles away from cities? London to Bradford is about that distance, and the average property prices in those two are £629,400 [0] and £58,673 [1] respectively, nearly a factor of 11.
Or, if you prefer American reference points, SanFran to the edge of Nevada; or the White House to anywhere in Delaware and Maryland, most of Virginia and New Jersey, and half of each of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia; or Boston to the Canadian border; or LA to Ensenada, Mexico.
Don’t tell me there’s nowhere affordable in all that. Especially not in the large number of tiny places that aren’t important enough to be labelled on the map when it’s zoomed out to 250 miles.
House costs are mostly the land cost. More range = more land = more supply => cheaper houses.
Human psychology is, unfortunately, more complicated than that.
There was an attempt in 2016 to prepare a program to retrain coal miners in center Pennsylvania and other traditional mining regions, as the general market, automation, and decrease in available coal from mining had made that a high-unemployment space. Job retraining was on the table.
People handily rejected it. They didn't want to do something else; they wanted to mine.
The children of professional drivers may find something else to do, but professional drivers are going to, on average, be most comfortable driving, and if there's no driving to be done we're on our way to system shock.
What if I told you to quit your job and I'll get you training for another role. If you trusted me you might go with it, but it you knew from previous experience that I was an incompetent buffoon you would likely say no.
It's like a guy in a clown outfit saying the nobody wants open heart surgery beacuse everyone turns him down when he asks.
I think your assessment is good. Unfortunately, none of the clowns have taken off their clownsuits so the system shock is still the most probable outcome.
Looks like the point of the change is that all-passenger hardware configuration is now allowed, just like there is no reason you can't make a tablet PC with no keyboard. Slightly different from "self driving cars are now allowed on the road".
It should open up the possibility of facing backwards, assuming you don't have motion sickness, it's a much safer position to be in to dissipate energy in case of a crash.
What's going to be the rate of 'acceptable loss'? There's an obvious point on the cost curve where companies will begin pushing for driverless tech before the problem is fully solved. Without some standardized 'miles between intervention' requirement that accounts for the externality on innocent bystanders, the emergent behavior will be to remove the human in the loop before the societally optimal point. If I save $100M in staffing costs by firing all my human monitors and only incur $10M in payouts to the people my cars run over, the capitalist choice is clear.
Well, the USA has decided that 1000 deaths/day is acceptable and ignorable as background mortality for sars-cov-2.
I don't believe that autonomous cars are actually feasible in environments that aren't arid/flat Arizona that doesn't have winter so it's kind of a moot point. There isn't and will not be an autonomous car that can drive on winter, snow covered roads with emergent (incorrect) paths that humans flock and follow. If the car does the right thing it'll kill people. But 1000/day? I think they can probably come in under that.
> What's going to be the rate of 'acceptable loss'?
You might think anything less than the current incident rate. But that’s looking at it from a group perspective. From an individual perspective, I’ve never been in an accident in ~25 years of driving, so my requirements might be higher than others to feel like autonomous control is safer.
danger is a driverless car turning left onto a bridge that has washed away during a flood, mistaking the map for the territory, it drives us off the bridge because we've eliminated the brakes because we think the car is smarter than the human inside it
> Women specifically do not want to be in cars which they cannot even theoretically control.
I suspect women have a greater relative comfort with automated vehicles versus those controlled by a stranger than men, though I’m not aware of any solid data for that (certainly haven't seen any for your claim, either.)
Granted there's a lot of hype and the tech is not there yet, but seems the tech absolutely can be developed.
As far as the safety, these things can be indemnified and that will pave the way. Don't see any problem insurers can price accidents and injuries from autonomous cars. Also certainly plausible they will be able to be made safer than human driven.
That’s part of the point: Whether or not they are eventually possible is an open question. The standard argument for agnosticism as to the possibility is “The problem reduces to artificial general intelligence, the possibility of which is an open question.”
> Whether or not they are eventually possible is an open question.
They're probably not possible with the road system we have but we redesigned our road system to accommodate cars(arguably with terrible results for non-cars) and we could probably redesign it again for autonomous cars. For example by requiring pedestrians and cyclists to wear radio transponders.
Being able to read the intent of other cars and preemptively act if necessary. For instance, being able to predict that the harried mom on her phone toting 3 screaming kids in her beat up minivan is likely to change lanes without looking (I passed her preemptively), or that the car with out-of-state plates is likely to miss a confusingly signed exit and try and cut over at the last minute without looking (I slowed down preemptively, to let the car abruptly veer across three lanes of traffic ahead of me).
Both of these examples require an understanding of the world that goes far beyond mere driving skills.
Or, the AV can calculate the worst from every car and go a little slower i.e. safer. Leave more room between the car in front and move out of the way for cars too close behind.
An average 20 min ride increased by 10% would be 22 mins. I’d gladly trade an extra few mins in the car to 1. Be safer. 2. Get back 20 mins to check the news or play chess or worst case work.
Self driving cars aren’t just going to be a reality, in PHX they kinda are a reality. It doesn’t seem far fetched to think 5 years (high estimate - 10 years) from now Waymo will be scaled to the top 25 cities in the US.
These are indeed examples that are far ahead of the tech we have today, but I'd bet a single-digit percentage of drivers actually perform these tasks, and most do it only occasionally. There are areas where AI drivers win over human drivers. Maybe it's already net positive?
I have the opinion we don't need AI to be perfect, just on par or better than humans from an aggregate perspective.
>Doesn't the analogy fail given autonomous vehicles are eventually possible
Only if there is a mathematical proof that eventually it will happen, someone might proof the reverse that current type of tech will never be good enough for general purpose driving and will work only in some specific conditions.
This is a rather intuitive mathematical proof that neural nets can emulate all functions in many dimensions. Knowing integrals (Calc 102) would help.
With this information it’s either that self-driving is eventually possible or human brains are not mathematically representable (i.e. something akin to a soul).
Meanwhile, the data collection/storage is getting better (all Teslas are continually testing FSD and reporting failure cases, synthetic generation of “good and unique” perfectly labeled data[0] is only a year or two “old”). Sensors/cameras are improving (and have a lot more room to improve). The compute hardware is getting better and cheaper (analog computers[1], TSMC 2nm and beyond, Apple/Google/Teslas neural cores, etc).
Additionally, given Waymo is already in production without humans in PHX it’s arguable that we already have “autonomous vehicles”. We now just need them to improve slightly and for Waymo or similar to test in the top 25 cities in the US. Which is mostly a matter of capital and time not technology limits. Maybe weather will be an issue for a few more years/decades - but even if Waymo only operated in Summer, I’d be happy to reduce my Lyft costs - and with enough data and maybe better sensors the neural nets will be able to handle weather too. Especially if the car just goes slow.
>This is a rather intuitive mathematical proof that neural nets can emulate all functions in many dimensions.
Yes, but the problem is we don't know what function we want to approximate. So it is like interpolation you give it some points and you get an approximation that is good enough around those points but probably very wrong if you are far away of the points.
We don't even know how many layers and neurons are needed so it seems to be a brute force approach, throw more data and more hardware and when stuff goes wrong maybe throw more data. But one day a Tesla might go on a different environment and maybe people have different hats and goes to shit because those hats were not in the training data, we don't have like in other sciences bounded errors.
The only way it’s impossible in principle is if human intelligence (and a lot of non human animal intelligence) is due to some potent non-physical substance of thought which can never be made by any work of artifice on the physical plane, AKA a soul.
Absent souls, human drivers are existence proof that minds made of matter can drive cars.
That doesn’t stop being true even if the current preferred architecture is all wrong, as we can and do change those with ease.
>The only way it’s impossible in principle is if human intelligence (and a lot of non human animal intelligence) is due to some potent non-physical substance of thought which can never be made by any work of artifice on the physical plane, AKA a soul.
So I was thinking "eventually" as somewhat in next 100 years, otherwise even if you need a soul you could say shit like "eventually we will evolve to the next plane and become gods and we could create brains".
Could it be impossible that we hit a tech limit for AI? I mean there is no sure what that we will invent something better then digital, silicon based computers.
I am not that pessimist though, but is possible we get smart and realize that we could just put tracks and have self driving little trains on them to travel around: 100% safe (we could have actual scientist/engineers code the software for them) and much more green.
I think you may be underestimating the rate of progress — 100 years ago, transistors were hypothetical, now we have made more of them than there are stars in our past light cone, and they are smaller and faster than synapses to the degree to which wolves are smaller than hills and move further per day than continental drift.
IMO we will probably hit the single-atom limit in consumer devices this decade, though researchers are already suggesting multiple q-bits in a single atom so perhaps we won’t even stop when we get 1Å process chips.
The main limiting factor right now is that we don’t really understand the structure of our intelligence. If you will permit an analogy: perceptrons and convolution kernels are like bricks, while current brain scans (MRI, EEG, etc.) are like nighttime satellite photos of city lights — we’ve got a gap in the middle that would tell us we need steel reinforced concrete to make skyscrapers and why want to build them in the first place.
It may be an assumption, but I think of it as akin to the assumption that Wilbur and Orville Wright had that heavier than air flying craft could become practical. Unproven, but one would be a fool to bet money against it happening on the OP’s “eventually” timeline.
I don't get why people think this is theoretical. We have autonomous vehicles driving on the road _today_. They've logged millions of miles. The question is one of fidelity. Can they drive "safe enough?" Can they drive in a blizzard? These are important questions and are needed to answer a question like, are autonomous vehicles "sufficiently advanced" enough to fully replace human drivers in most scenarios? But even if they never advanced beyond what we have today, they still would have use cases that demand clear regulation.
I think that the autonomous vehicles on the road today are the equivalent of duct taping a traffic cone to a horse’s forehead and saying, “See, I told you unicorns aren’t theoretical.”
Agreed! My point is not so much as whether it's possible, it's as whether the analogy holds, which I think it doesn't, since no companies are trying to create unicorns.
Legacy regulations governing the occupant compartment are not yet a practical impediment for self driving cars because they haven't got that far yet.
Realistically what the removal of this regulation means is that some hypothetical future company with an autonomous yard spotter can drive the thing 500yd down the public way from warehouse B to warehouse C without the legal department getting antsy.
The only thing here is that the government rewrote the rules to no longer assume those things. It's not saying those things aren't necessary, just not required. If the car can meet all the safety standards without it, then that's fine.
It would be like saying today that you can't have a computer without an on/off switch because in the 70s every computer had a physical switch.