It seems to have become a national past time for people to say the see the future. At the moment it is self-driving cars and electrifying everything. IMO both of those things are at best a very distant future, but I am, after all, the Skeptic. I remember is 2015 many people were saying that self-driving cars will be in production by 2020…
It seems to have become a national past time for people to say the see the future. At the moment it is self-driving cars and electrifying everything. IMO both of those things are at best a very distant future, but I am, after all, the Skeptic. I remember is 2015 many people were saying that self-driving cars will be in production by 2020, and transit would radically change right away.
Elon Musk seems like he is seeing the future, but I think he just says things on social media that he thinks are funny. Example: building colonies on Mars.
While it is 2023 (not 2020), I visited Phoenix last weekend, and was surprised to see what appeared to me to be Google Maps camera/mapping cars all over the place. It was explained to me that downtown Phoenix and parts of Scottsdale, Tempe, Mesa, and Chandler, AZ are part of Waymo's large test area for self-driving cars. My friends have themselves used Waymo as a taxi on more than one occasion. (Although they admitted that they were not all that comfortable doing so.) I came away thinking that self-driving cars are not that far off.
Waymo and Cruise have been testing in San Francisco for even longer, and they have started in Santa Monica. I am not an engineer; I am going off of reports I have read. What I have read is that the lidar system gets confused by rain. Also, it cannot reliably see motorcycles or bicycles. Maybe those challenges have been overcome. This is part of why they have test cities. The rain problem makes Arizona a good testing ground.
Ethical/legal/policy challenges are not things that technology can solve.
Should the driverless car algorithms be designed to minimize loss of life or injury?
If the answer is "yes", then what happens when a driverless car with one passennger is on a multi-lane highway behind a truck which suddenly stops or has a large part of its load drop off the back. There is not enough time to stop before hitting it. The road is crowded and there are cars on both sides with multiple passengers. The minimize injury algorithm would have the car choose to hit the road hazard putting risk only to its sole occupant rather than risk hitting more cars.
From a legal perspective, how is liability determined when there is a crash? Also, DUI laws would need to be updated. Typically, they state that it is illegal to operate a vehicle while impaired by alcohol or a controlled substance. If I summon a Waymo with an app on my phone when I am drunk and there is a crash, will the court determine that "was operating the vehicle" because I summoned it with an app? Would it matter if the vehicle provided the option for me to take control?
Should driverless cars have the ability to be controlled remotely by police and fire departments? One case I read about is a driverless car came to a stop because there was a fire truck nearby, but it stopped on top of a fire hose, which interfered with fire fighting. Adding remote control raises multiple questions. A big one is how to ensure the system cannot be hacked by people with bad intent. We continually see very high value targets owned by entities which have all of the resources they could want to secure their systems fall victim of ransomware. There is no doubt that hackers would try to get into self-driving car remote control systems. Are we ready to trust them?
If you google "self-driving cars further away than you think," you get articles saying that from 2013 all the way through 2020, and I think the below very recent article is a good statement about the state of the art today, which, while cheerleading the efforts still ongoing, is basically in the same vein:
True, widespread self-driving seems decades away and may be, as one source in that article put it, "basically impossible." Investments in self-driving companies have plummeted, many have closed, etc. Companies are focusing on more limited applications and enhancing automated driver assistance, along the lines I suggested, which will make the road far safer without having to close the gap between nifty and *usually* impressive performance in limited, mapped playgrounds today and a world where everyone could really rely on these things all the time in any locations and any conditions.
To be fair that prompt to google is expected to give results that say that we are not close. The Atlantic published an article a few days ago stating that we are close. I don't think we are, and the article mainly discusses test environments. It also does point out challenges.
It seems to have become a national past time for people to say the see the future. At the moment it is self-driving cars and electrifying everything. IMO both of those things are at best a very distant future, but I am, after all, the Skeptic. I remember is 2015 many people were saying that self-driving cars will be in production by 2020, and transit would radically change right away.
Elon Musk seems like he is seeing the future, but I think he just says things on social media that he thinks are funny. Example: building colonies on Mars.
While it is 2023 (not 2020), I visited Phoenix last weekend, and was surprised to see what appeared to me to be Google Maps camera/mapping cars all over the place. It was explained to me that downtown Phoenix and parts of Scottsdale, Tempe, Mesa, and Chandler, AZ are part of Waymo's large test area for self-driving cars. My friends have themselves used Waymo as a taxi on more than one occasion. (Although they admitted that they were not all that comfortable doing so.) I came away thinking that self-driving cars are not that far off.
Waymo and Cruise have been testing in San Francisco for even longer, and they have started in Santa Monica. I am not an engineer; I am going off of reports I have read. What I have read is that the lidar system gets confused by rain. Also, it cannot reliably see motorcycles or bicycles. Maybe those challenges have been overcome. This is part of why they have test cities. The rain problem makes Arizona a good testing ground.
Ethical/legal/policy challenges are not things that technology can solve.
Should the driverless car algorithms be designed to minimize loss of life or injury?
If the answer is "yes", then what happens when a driverless car with one passennger is on a multi-lane highway behind a truck which suddenly stops or has a large part of its load drop off the back. There is not enough time to stop before hitting it. The road is crowded and there are cars on both sides with multiple passengers. The minimize injury algorithm would have the car choose to hit the road hazard putting risk only to its sole occupant rather than risk hitting more cars.
From a legal perspective, how is liability determined when there is a crash? Also, DUI laws would need to be updated. Typically, they state that it is illegal to operate a vehicle while impaired by alcohol or a controlled substance. If I summon a Waymo with an app on my phone when I am drunk and there is a crash, will the court determine that "was operating the vehicle" because I summoned it with an app? Would it matter if the vehicle provided the option for me to take control?
Should driverless cars have the ability to be controlled remotely by police and fire departments? One case I read about is a driverless car came to a stop because there was a fire truck nearby, but it stopped on top of a fire hose, which interfered with fire fighting. Adding remote control raises multiple questions. A big one is how to ensure the system cannot be hacked by people with bad intent. We continually see very high value targets owned by entities which have all of the resources they could want to secure their systems fall victim of ransomware. There is no doubt that hackers would try to get into self-driving car remote control systems. Are we ready to trust them?
If you google "self-driving cars further away than you think," you get articles saying that from 2013 all the way through 2020, and I think the below very recent article is a good statement about the state of the art today, which, while cheerleading the efforts still ongoing, is basically in the same vein:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/5/23711586/autonomous-vehicle-investment-toyota-nvidia
True, widespread self-driving seems decades away and may be, as one source in that article put it, "basically impossible." Investments in self-driving companies have plummeted, many have closed, etc. Companies are focusing on more limited applications and enhancing automated driver assistance, along the lines I suggested, which will make the road far safer without having to close the gap between nifty and *usually* impressive performance in limited, mapped playgrounds today and a world where everyone could really rely on these things all the time in any locations and any conditions.
To be fair that prompt to google is expected to give results that say that we are not close. The Atlantic published an article a few days ago stating that we are close. I don't think we are, and the article mainly discusses test environments. It also does point out challenges.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/10/robotaxi-services-self-driving-cars-national-rollout/675659/