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