Humans are slamming into driverless cars and exposing a key flaw | Hacker News Reader

Humans are slamming into driverless cars and exposing a key flaw

autonews.com

7 pointsColinWright11 comments

Easy solution. Make ALL cars follow the law just as strictly as the driverless ones do. Cameras everywhere for enforcement. If driverless cars are a thing, then there's no reason we can't punish people by permanently taking away their drivers licenses for making even small mistakes.

When you drive, you are taking life and death into your hands. It's the ultimate responsibility. Cars kill as many people as guns in the US. If you don't take driving extremely seriously, or are incapable of doing it at an expert level without mistakes, then you shouldn't have the privilege of doing so.

That will be just as easy as enforcing gun control. No politician would survive - American society is predicated on everyone being able to drive anywhere, anytime.

In the vast majority of the US, if you can't or won't drive, you are regarded as abnormal, almost sub-human. A colleague of mine was eventually driven to the situation of having a non-drivers drivers license, because no one would accept checks without him showing his drivers license. And no, his passport wouldn't suffice, because the people behind the counter had never seen one and didn't accept that it was valid ID.

You'll never enforce stronger driving laws - driving is seen as a right, and you'll never take it away.

Who said anything about stronger driving laws or taking away the right to drive? Whether or not you have the right to drive, you don't have the right to drive illegally - with today's laws.

These cars are, no doubt, going to have cameras and sensors everywhere, so I'd say forget about putting cameras everywhere, just use the on-board cameras/sensors on the driverless cars themselves to catch people breaking driving laws.

I was responding to this:

    ... there's no reason we can't punish people by
    permanently taking away their drivers licenses
    for making even small mistakes.

That would require stronger driving laws.

I second this. Ohio recently passed a bill severely limiting the use of speed cameras. They caused to many unhappy citizens, regardless of the lives they probably saved.

Changing peoples habits (good or otherwise) is pretty difficult.

I remember a TV show showing one of the main characters riding a motorcycle and passing sensors along the road which apparently only randomly wake up; end result he was fined from his social security retirement account.

The key to more enforcement is of course more means of observation but I am not keen on camera's everywhere, let alone those that can identify us easily. Granted society is moving that way. I did post before that for security to work as well as many politicians want it will have to be nearly as omnipresent as possible and the work that techies have cut out for them is to insure that it is as unobtrusive as possible while still protecting privacy.

So, back to the point. 100% enforcement isn't necessary. The detection merely needs to be random enough that people always think its active and think they will be eventually caught.

Another interesting element to this is basic human body and behavioural language that can be used to telegraph intent.

As a pedestrian, making eye contact with a driver in order to determine intent is a key element of safety (which is why I detest folks who tint their windshield or front driver/passenger windows). The same is true driver-to-driver... folks often telegraph their moves via lane position, head movement, etc, before they actually make them, allowing an attentive driver to anticipate what someone else is going to do.

Automated vehicles obviously can't provide those signals, which may cause human drivers to struggle to predict their behaviour; doubly so if, as the article points out, they already operate in a way that violates local social norms among human drivers.

Worse, this can vary from place-to-place. Around the valley, extreme high speed on the freeway might be the norm, where elsewhere, that might be the exception (certainly around here, anything beyond 10kph above freeway speeds is atypical). Do these companies, then, need to somehow dynamically adjust to local norms?

I too wonder about the choice of running into a bus of children or driving off a cliff. It presupposes that the car will get into that situation in the first place (which I have heard argued as unlikely) but when it does, what does it do. If it chooses to kill the occupants (drive off the cliff) then the vehicle manufacturer faces a wrongful death suit, if it hits the bus full of kids (and maybe injures/kills some) then its the bus driver's liability (we're assuming that if the bus were driving in a safe, predictable way the car won't have to make this choice).

So the manufacturer decides, take out the bus, we don't want to be liable. But the human occupant might have decided differently. There is at least a twilight zone episode in there. Asimov plowed the conundrum often in his robot series and it was one of the reasons I really enjoyed those books.

Sounds like the problems will resolve on their own over time. As long as human drivers are at fault, they'll get more tickets, increased insurance rates, required defensive driving classes, etc.

I'm always pleased to see a vehicle other than mine that doesn't speed. I welcome the day one of them is driverless.

First sentence reads like a huge shill. No thanks

> The self-driving car, that cutting-edge creation that’s supposed to lead to a world without accidents, is achieving the exact opposite right now: The vehicles have racked up a crash rate double that of those with human drivers.

The key flaw is the humans!

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