Poll: Would you "drive" an automated car?
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The comparison is terrible.Virus0015 said:
While it's true that it's statistically more dangerous to drive a car than to take a plane, dangers associated with piloting an airplane are much different than the dangers associated with driving a car.
When piloting an airplane, the list of dangers associated is quite long. Here is an incomplete list of examples of areas associated with flying that computers simply can't be trusted with performing (without being supervised at least):
- Takeoff
- Landing
- Weather conditions (while weather also applies to cars, it's an entirely different magnitude)
- Overview (in a car, you only need overview of surrounding traffic. In a plane, you need overview of a dozen different things)
- Unexpected malfunctions while midair (engine failures, landing gear, fuel shortage)
Failures in airplanes are more dangerous than car failures. If your cars fails somehow, all that will happen is that it stops. If your plane fails, you crash.
The only danger associated with driving a car is surrounding traffic, aka. driver errors (your own or your fellow drivers). A computer can actually perform this job quite well, better than humans.
For your information, Google - who is one of the companies who is researching into computer-controlled cars - has test-driven over 225.000 kilometers (with human supervision still being required for now, although 10.5k of the kilometers was actually without supervision), and so far they only had one accident, which happened to be another car who bumped into them from behind while they were at a red light.
Anyone who believes that they will be superior drivers to computers in the coming years is fooling themself. It's like listening to people who 20-30 years ago said humans would never beat computers at chess. They are as wrong now as they was back then.
A big no for me.
1. I enjoy driving in the winter time on snow & ice. It's interesting. (When else can you do donuts & fish tail turns w/o squealing your tires? Plus, you can do it at slower, thus safer, speeds on ice.)
2. I've had technology fail me too often for me to let it control a 1 ton object I'm responsible for. Even if it's developed to the point of being statistically safer than the average driver, I wouldn't want it.
3. Anything that's controlled by a computer can be hacked. That's a scary thought right there. Imagine some young hacker gaining control of your car & taking you for a joy ride for their amusement. (Let's face it. It'll be constantly online to get traffic & weather reports & what not.)
4. I'm all about very limited gov't, & freedom & choice for citizens. If this came about, I'm sure the gov't would insist on a "public safety" feature of letting them control or disable any vehicle out there. Sadly, my gov't gives me less & less reason to trust it every month. I shudder to think what it'll be like in 10 years.
1. I enjoy driving in the winter time on snow & ice. It's interesting. (When else can you do donuts & fish tail turns w/o squealing your tires? Plus, you can do it at slower, thus safer, speeds on ice.)
2. I've had technology fail me too often for me to let it control a 1 ton object I'm responsible for. Even if it's developed to the point of being statistically safer than the average driver, I wouldn't want it.
3. Anything that's controlled by a computer can be hacked. That's a scary thought right there. Imagine some young hacker gaining control of your car & taking you for a joy ride for their amusement. (Let's face it. It'll be constantly online to get traffic & weather reports & what not.)
4. I'm all about very limited gov't, & freedom & choice for citizens. If this came about, I'm sure the gov't would insist on a "public safety" feature of letting them control or disable any vehicle out there. Sadly, my gov't gives me less & less reason to trust it every month. I shudder to think what it'll be like in 10 years.
I've been driving for 13 years, and the only thing I hate about it is dealing with the occasional idiot who thinks none of the rules apply to them... so no, I wouldn't buy an automated car, but I fully support the development of such things... most of the people who annoy me on the road looove buying into the newest fad in automaking, and I'd trust an AI to drive better than a yuppie.
Well for the sake of argument I'm assuming that the car would be at least as safe as a human driven car, and frankly I've seen studies on driving, most people vastly over estimate their driving skills, so that shouldn't be that hard.
The vast majority of accidents are human error aren't they?
And yea, obviously you'd need to be able to take control if needed, and honestly the best way I could see it working would be to allow anyone to own a car, but if you want to take control you need to pass a much much harder driving test, currently the one we have in most countries is just enough to keep only the biggest morons off the road, imagine if to get a licence you needed to basically qualify for NASCAR? It's basically a cost/benefit thing, I remember a quote from years and years ago my father was fond of, he is obsessed with cars, that the auto industry could make cars so safe that no-one would ever die, but no-one would be able to afford them. We can currently make driving licences need enough skill to prevent almost all accidents, but if we did it about 1% of the population would be allowed to drive.
With automated cars, those of you who enjoy your driving get to drive, and those that want to drive but are too stupid to breath, let alone control several tons of fast moving metal (my brother included, last time I drove with him I made him stop the car so I could get out and walk home, in the rain, with my bad leg acting up, hobbling along the road, because the moron started TEXTING while driving) get to sit back and let a computer handle it, and those of us who just want to get from A to B can.
The vast majority of accidents are human error aren't they?
And yea, obviously you'd need to be able to take control if needed, and honestly the best way I could see it working would be to allow anyone to own a car, but if you want to take control you need to pass a much much harder driving test, currently the one we have in most countries is just enough to keep only the biggest morons off the road, imagine if to get a licence you needed to basically qualify for NASCAR? It's basically a cost/benefit thing, I remember a quote from years and years ago my father was fond of, he is obsessed with cars, that the auto industry could make cars so safe that no-one would ever die, but no-one would be able to afford them. We can currently make driving licences need enough skill to prevent almost all accidents, but if we did it about 1% of the population would be allowed to drive.
With automated cars, those of you who enjoy your driving get to drive, and those that want to drive but are too stupid to breath, let alone control several tons of fast moving metal (my brother included, last time I drove with him I made him stop the car so I could get out and walk home, in the rain, with my bad leg acting up, hobbling along the road, because the moron started TEXTING while driving) get to sit back and let a computer handle it, and those of us who just want to get from A to B can.
I think automated cars are a great ide. Once they go world-wide, we may enter an age where cars will never hit school children crossing the road, or where drunks cannot crash into other cars because they are not the ones driving.
Automated cars cannot come soon enough I say.
Automated cars cannot come soon enough I say.
Wrong. Driving is exactly a mathematical problem as much as chess is. Both sciences are about taking factors into account and then planning ahead, assigning "scores" to the different courses of action and picking the one with the highest score.RAKtheUndead said:
In chess for example, a computer examines the basic value of pieces, but beyond that point, they suddenly start working with advanced factors like the reach/range of pieces, mobility, king safety, pawn structure, passed pawns, control of center etc. And in fact is, working with these factors actually aren't very different from working with driving factors, which is also a mathematical problem.
While it's true that computers USED to rely on brute-force to beat humans, advanced chess programs now rely much more on chess-KNOWLEDGE than brute-force. Modern chess programs, for example, actually uses advanced algorithms that deeply evaluates positions, and then actually SKIPS the evaluation of positions they predict have a high chance of turning out badly, and instead concentrate on positions that look good. In other words, they have replaced brute-force with more advanced and CPU-intensive algorithms (which consequently makes them search less positions, but still allows them to play better), which is more in the way of how humans play.
It is perfectly possible to break down driving into a mathematical problem for a computer to solve. If it wasn't, then human beings wouldn't be able to drive, because our brains are a computer as well. We just don't think about driving as a mathematical problem directly, but we are still working with factors that can be expressed in math:
- Own speed, speed of car in front, speed of car in back
- Traction on the particular kind of ground that is being driven (which is important for determining acceleration and brake-distance)
- Distance to nearby cars
- Road-characteristics (width, slope)
- Other characteristics (light signals, including traffic signals, but also lights on the car in front)
Above list is obviously simplified, but it's what humans use to drive, and the thing is that equipment/services that can enable a computer to determine ALL of the above exists, including cameras, gyroscopes/accelerometers, GPS (or other location-determination positions), dedicated weather services, thermometers, water sensors, and then translate that into a mathematical problem about which course of action is the "safest and fastest".
If you think that solving a driving problem is much different than solving a chess position, then you are sorely mistaken my man. Just as they were mistaken 30 years ago. Human beings just have a habit of not learning sometimes.
Just putting it out there, my bus runs every 10 minuites.tkioz said:
But you're correct, it is a slightly different scenario.
I love driving, I do it for enjoyment, I would HATE to have a car I couldn't drive, I hate driving auto transmissions let alone a fully automated car.
I think if it were a situation like I, Robot (the movie) where it's a highway where everybody is going like 200MPH I would prefer auto-pilot, and it would be nice to be able to do makeup in the car and whatnot without it being a traffic hazard. But I would like to have a manual setting too because driving is fun. As long as the technology was perfected and the infrastructure designed to be compatible with it, I don't see the problem. I see it as the next step forward in transportation.
Not really. Most of driving is drudgery with occasional periods of frustration.enzilewulf said:
Automating all road traffic would result in better traffic flow in general and would reduce transit time accordingly. With regards to bus travel, I prefer having a car simply because I am already at the mercy of enough timetables without adding an arbitrary one for transportation as well. Plus, there are few circumstances where a bus is a quicker route from point A to B than a car; the vast majority of the time the car is the faster option.
TestECull said:
That video handily demonstrates why humans driving cars is a bad idea.
See what i did there?
Lets get something straigth: The technology is still in development. I never said it was ready for primetime now, but eventually it will be. As for your trust issues, the inevitable future statistics showing how computers drive better than humans couldn't care less about them. I don't have to trust that YOU drive safely either.
That humans are designing the programs doesn't mean anything. You are trying to compare flaws in computer programming to flaws in driving, a comparison that is terrible. Human error that result in traffic accidents happens because the human got distracted and wasn't paying attention. Human error in programming happens because of lack of testing. Two very different things.
You are trying to engineer scenarios in your post where computer errors result in loss of human life. Thing is, those accidents could just as well have been triggered by humans. Your GPS example of "what if the GPS is off" is also lame. GPS lacks the precision to determine which side of a road a car is in, so another system that is more precise is going to handle that (camera, or potential road transmitters/sensors that helps the car) so thats a non-issue. Also, backup systems can be implemented. If a driving computer should, say, suffer from a glitch, you can implement a system that makes the car brake and alerts the human in it. Humans, by comparison, doesn't brake when they "glitch", they stay on the speeder until they discover they error, and by then it's more often than not too late.
Again: Your trust issues are completely irrelevant to this discussion, since it's not just about who you trust. And there will come a time where computers will be more trustable in a car than you or your fellow driver. A time, where the chance of a computer glitch happening is less than the chance of a human error. A time, where an error in driving from either a computer or a human has a lower fatality-rate if the computer is driving. A time, where the computer always reads the conditions of the road better than a human. That and computers doesn't suffer from overconfidence and always stay within the speed limits. Hell, there might even come a time where having a car capable of computer-based driving is a legal requirement.
Humans are a very egotistical race and always likes to think of themself as superior. Unfortunatly that doesn't mean you are superior, it just means you're fooling yourself.