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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

Boring is perfectly acceptable as long as it's predictable. I live in DC where the traffic is terrible – and in the smartphone era people often express a preference for public transportation because it's when they catch up on Facebook, play games, etc. The transit agency has been making a concerted effort to spoil that through poor safety and reliability but I think whoever comes up with a self-driving car will sell a LOT of them around as long as they come with a gadget charger and maybe wifi or a larger screen.

This might also be a good intro for fuel efficient vehicles and alternative fuels: human drivers demand acceleration and avoid slower vehicles (never mind that 80% of their time will be going 13mph in traffic) but someone who's teleworking, playing a game or watching Netflix won't care since they'll get to work at the same time either way.

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Agree. As long as boring works, that's fantastic. Things like our core infrastructure, institutions, and services should be boring and predictable. That lets them fade into the background so we can focus our efforts elsewhere, and it also means that it attracts less of the impatient / selfish / spectacle-driven crowd.

Classic case is finance - people derided Canada's banking sector as being boring and not taking advantage of new fancy financial instruments, but lo and behold the financial recession hits and Canada's banks remain insulated from what happened in the US, Ireland, and other places that were exciting and flashy. [1]

This isn't to say that all of life should be boring and conservative, just that we shouldn't chase 'interesting' at the expense of 'stable and functional' in core areas of our society (or our apps).

[1] http://policyoptions.irpp.org/issues/the-fault-lines-of-fede...

about predictability, how would driverless car deal with situations like a guy with a chainsaw running towards your car in an intersection or being trapped by motorcycle gang?

What if you were being pursued by an unknown organization, could the driverless car perform evasion driving techniques and safely get it's occupant out of harms way?

There's so many edge cases.

How often does that happen outside of Hollywood? Most carjackings already happen when the vehicle is already stopped and I'd bet that the fact that a self-driving car will have 360° video streaming to the police will do more to keep the occupants safe than your video game-honed fantasies.

I guess I'm the only one who runs these scenarios constantly in my head.

>I'd bet that the fact that a self-driving car will have 360° video streaming to the police will do more to keep the occupants safe than your video game-honed fantasies.

You realize you're debunking one fantasy with another, right?

1. Self-driving cars have cameras 2. Once #1 is known, the odds of someone not adding the ability to record video and send it over OnStar, et al. will approach zero as soon as the insurance companies hear about it.

In fact, it's unlikely that the manufacturer wouldn't do it directly since they're going to have to survive the first wave of lawsuits any time someone gets in a crash and tries to claim it was a software bug. We've already seen this with Google's use of footage to demonstrate that crashes were caused by the other driver – I find it hard to believe they'd risk losing a lawsuit over a few dollars worth of flash memory?

>I find it hard to believe they'd risk losing a lawsuit over a few dollars worth of flash memory?

Do you find it hard to believe a car manufacturer would risk losing far more than a mere lawsuit by cheating emissions tests, despite the inevitability of getting caught? Or would design their cars in such a way as to allow the brakes to be tampered with over an open internet connection? Or would willingly allow cars on the market with a fatal mechanical flaw, because the calculus tells them paying out death settlements would cost less than a recall and redesign? Auto manufacturers consider the cost of human life and breaking the law as a matter of course, and there is always an acceptable amount of death and illegality they're willing to risk.

Nothing about this scenario requires autonomous cars anyway. They could already be packed with cameras, and streaming panoramic video to the police, yet they aren't. That 'few dollars of flash memory' would have to scale up to a few million dollars or more of something far more persistent and regulated to even be relevant - otherwise the volatility of the memory itself becomes a legal liability. It would also eat bandwidth and require infrastructure and maintenance, all of which would add to the cost of the vehicle, and subtract from its profitability.

While it may be a plausible attempt at futurism, it is far from being certain.

> Do you find it hard to believe a car manufacturer would risk losing far more than a mere lawsuit by cheating emissions tests …

That's an unrelated discussion. We're talking about whether to add an additional benefit to work which they already need to do and which is both obviously a simple addition and a benefit to both the manufacturer and purchaser, not to mention the their insurance company.

> Nothing about this scenario requires autonomous cars anyway. They could already be packed with cameras, and streaming panoramic video to the police, yet they aren't.

They haven't been in the past because those would be new, otherwise unnecessary equipment. You're forgetting that any self-driving car must have the cameras built in to work at all, which means that instead of adding a bunch of cameras you're only adding enough storage to retain footage for some time period.

Similarly, the cost of adding a cellular connection might deter some people if this was the only use but since that's rapidly becoming a common feature you're really only adding the cost of using some extra bandwidth when someone hits a panic button and it's unlikely that anyone is going to begrudge the $0.02 that'll cost in any scenario where this would be relevant.

> There's so many completely unlikely edge cases.

Fixed that for you :) Although I think you're joking, coming up with scenarios like these is often exactly what people do when change is presented to them - they fill in the gaps with their imagination. Our imagination can create infinite edge cases, but its bad at predicting frequency. Just remove 'driverless car' from your statement and ask yourself the same thing. How would you get out of that?

Carjacking is regular in some countries. Riots also in France (peaceful demonstrations are logged every two weeks in my city), including turning cars upside down. It also happens to destroy a McDonalds because it represents evil American capitalism (see how far people go). It's not a remote idea that Google cars become the new symbol of American hegemony, so yes it is a good idea for the cars to have a "dodge a riot by making an emergency, full-brakes U-turn" feature. Adapting products to countries is fun.

surprised there's so much unrest in France.

well, my point was that stuff we consider 'hollywood' happens day to day in less wealthy parts of the world, that's what I meant, it'd be interesting to see what solutions we come up with.

And to answer somebody who said, you couldn't get out of a situation yourself, that's the whole point of trusting a driverless AI, I want it to do the impossible for me.

Imagine if you had driverless cars in the favelas, that's what I mean.

Like that simpsons episode, where the truck automatically evades danger. I wonder if it's possible to have a driverless car that is able to perform these type of 'humanly impossible' feats.

I don't see why not, a sensor monitoring the world in ultra slow motion, able to steer it's occupants to safety when it detects a threat.

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