[Technology] Self-Driving Uber Car Kills Pedestrian in Arizona.

[BLOCK F]

There are going to be huge benefits. Fewer accidents will mean less congestion and lower NHS costs for one thing. No labour costs will mean rides are going to be cheaper but, most of all, it will mean a more efficient use of road space.

We won't see autonomous vehicles as the norm for some years yet but I fully expect to see the end of people driving their own cars in my lifte-time (and I'm in my 60s)

Maybe Gwylan, but personally, I don't think we will see the end of people driving their own cars for many years yet. I am 69 and reckon we will still have plenty of 'driven' cars on the roads when I peg it.
Long, long way to go before all the glitches and legals are sorted out , and all we need is a few disasters on the way to slow down the march towards driverless cars.
Hey, when I used to read my Eagle comic and Annual, back in the '50's I remember seeing pictures of us all whizzing around with power packs on our back and not a car in sight. Well it hasn't come to pass and anyway, whilst I can envisage a certain amount of driverless cars in city and urban areas, how on earth will it work in the nooks and crannies of the wild parts of the British Isles?
As for less congestion and accidents.....hmmm?
Meantime, we seem to have trouble getting agreement about guardless trains and they run on tracks!
Funny old world.

 

[beorhthelm]

Assuming that basics of getting a driverless car to work properly are sorted at some point, I think there’s a real philosophical challenge around all AI-controlled automation that impacts on human safety.

How do you teach it intuition &/or ethics? Say that a car had to make a decision between ramming another car head on, driving onto the pavement where it’ll hit a mother pushing a pram, driving straight into a tree on the other side of the road, or trying to weave through the oncoming traffic with a 1% chance of pulling it off. A human has intuition and thousands of generations of societal pressure influencing their decision-making process. How does that get embedded into an AI?

It’s (relatively) easy to programme it to do its best to avoid all accidents; much harder to get it to choose the least bad option when an accident is inevitable, especially if what constitutes “least bad” is debatable...

do we teach drivers on ethics of such collision scenarios? is the intuitive response actually what drivers do in such scenarios, do they have time to consider? i'm of the opinion that this is better for AI simply because you can program in a set of rules with order of precedence, "avoid pram at any cost" high, with "avoid human at all cost" and "avoid dog at all cost" lower down the list. one key advantage of machine is the ability to go through and evaluate alterntives far, far faster than a human.

the problem with AI is to teach the more sutble etiquette side of driveing, courtesy, allowing a car to come out when its your right of way, accepting pedestrians to be crossing, safely, in close proximity in busy urban roads, or anticipating from road position a car is likely to do something different to its indication. and thats because this all requires actual intelligence, not pseudo-artifical intelligence which is really just machine learning dressed up.

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

I’m looking forward to the day when we cyclist-less cyclists; no sailing through red lights, programmed to use cycle-paths and hard-wired to pay their road tax.

 

[Gwylan]

Maybe Gwylan, but personally, I don't think we will see the end of people driving their own cars for many years yet. I am 69 and reckon we will still have plenty of 'driven' cars on the roads when I peg it.
Long, long way to go before all the glitches and legals are sorted out , and all we need is a few disasters on the way to slow down the march towards driverless cars.

Driverless cars have already completed millions of miles without any accidents. The fatality in Arizona will slow things down a little but there are still a few years of trials to perfect things but we could probably have mass usage of driverless cars within the next couple of years. We won't because of things such as the 'legals' - that's more of an issue than the technology.

I can envisage a certain amount of driverless cars in city and urban areas, how on earth will it work in the nooks and crannies of the wild parts of the British Isles?

That's actually one of the major challenges - our maps aren't good enough yet - but I'm sure they can be improved in the next five years or so.

As for less congestion and accidents.....hmmm?

It's widely accepted by everyone involved in this industry that computers will make fewer errors than humans. There is no question that there will be fewer accidents. This in turn will lead to less congestion as there won't be roads closed for ages after a smash. There will also be much more accurate information about the best routes to take, leading to better use of road space.

Meantime, we seem to have trouble getting agreement about guardless trains and they run on tracks!

Completely different issue - it's not the driving that's the concern, it's the loading of passengers. There'll be a long wait to see self-driving buses ... although I think that will come too.

 

[Tricky Dicky]

When will we have an AI contributor to NSC - maybe we have already - could we tell ? Is it BG, but the software still has bugs ??

 

[daveinprague]

Seeing the video on liveleak today, the cyclist seems a bit culpable tbh
https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=9omhH_1521676205

 

[Green Cross Code Man]

When will we have an AI contributor to NSC - maybe we have already - could we tell ? Is it BG, but the software still has bugs ??

This all day long. Although iron the 'bugs' out and suddenly there's no controversy.

 

[BLOCK F]

When will we have an AI contributor to NSC - maybe we have already - could we tell ? Is it BG, but the software still has bugs ??

Ernest maybe..............with a bad dose of virus?

 

[trueblue]

Seeing the video on liveleak today, the cyclist seems a bit culpable tbh
https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=9omhH_1521676205

If that's for real, then it's pretty difficult to see how a human could have avoided a collision. You'd hope that the cars though would be more sophisticated and be able to detect something that's difficult to see at night..... Obviously, they can't defy the laws of physics even if they do detect something, but it would be interesting to know how quickly and how hard the car applied the brakes. I'm all for self-driving cars by the way.. think they will be much safer in the long run.

 

[Tricky Dicky]

Ernest maybe..............with a bad dose of virus?

Would a computer go for breakfast at the Cliftonville ? Ketchup all over the PCBs, yuk.