
Humans are slamming into driverless cars and exposing a key flaw - ColinWright
https://www.autonews.com/article/20151218/OEM11/151219874/humans-are-slamming-into-driverless-cars-and-exposing-a-key-flaw
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Apreche
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.

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ColinWright
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.

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coffeedan
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.

~~~
ColinWright
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.

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zzalpha
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?

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ChuckMcM
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.

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edwhitesell
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.

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dplgk
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.

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freddref
The key flaw is the humans!

