
Unexpected Consequences of Self-Driving Cars - ghosh
http://rodneybrooks.com/unexpected-consequences-of-self-driving-cars/
======
Daishiman
Whenever people jump up enthusiastically about autonomous cars being right
around the corner, I remember taking a cab in Lima, Peru, in the middle of
some horrendously chaotic traffic, where drivers were navigating with little
regard for lanes, negotiation for merging is done eye-to-eye, and impatient
pedestrians would throw themselves into the street, tired of waiting for
minutes to cross and trusting that the driver ahead wasn't suffering from some
murderous rage that day.

I also remember run-down suburbs where massive potholes and ditches make
navigations of certain streets a puzzle by itself, compounded by garbage
trucks ahead just doing their thing, improperly placed signage ahead, and
those badly-designed intersections where you can totally count on drivers
misjudging distances.

As the designers move away from the relatively trivial confines of well-
maintained urban spaces and into different countries and cultures, I seriously
question their ability to keep things reasonable for the rest of the human
drivers. So far nothing in the near-future horizons of this technology
indicates that the software would be able to navigate in many of these adverse
situations without incurring huge time penalties or causing unacceptable
delays.

I really do think that a lot of the hype happens to be because certain actors
(Uber comes to mind as the most significant) have basically placed all their
bets in these edge cases being small enough that a small number of human
drivers should suffice to get around them. I remain skeptical.

~~~
morgante
Why is the situation in Peru at _all_ relevant? I too have been to lots of
places where self-driving cars would have a ridiculously hard time.

Those places are also very far from the cutting edge of technology.

Even if self-driving cars are confined to US highways, cities, and suburbs
they have terrific potential. The future doesn't have to be evenly distributed
to arrive on time.

Seriously, I don't even understand you argument. Why would the existence of
challenging backwaters in Peru prevent the development and deployment of self-
driving cars in the US?

~~~
gambiting
Because there are 1st world countries where the situation is not that
different? Poland for example, actual road:
[http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/FESuhya2Ig0/hqdefault.jpg](http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/FESuhya2Ig0/hqdefault.jpg)

Signage is absolutely atrocious, there's too many signs, some of them wrong,
some of the rules are implied(speed limit ends at any intersection, but if a
road is going to a private property, then it's not an intersection, so good
luck knowing where a speed limit ends), people drive like crazy, there's loads
of unpaved roads.....and yet a person from a very rich western country(say UK
or Germany) can drive over there in few hours driving time.

Every time someone makes an argument for self driving cars, I keep thinking if
they would work back home - the answer is, they wouldn't.

~~~
annnnd
I would buy a self-driving car (even if it only works on normal roads and
refuses to drive anywhere else) in a heartbeat. Can't drive some road in
Poland? I'll manage. But if it takes the driving out of my daily commute I
would pay good money for it.

On a separate note, try replacing "self-driving cars / normal cars" with "cars
/ carriages and horses" in such discussions. It make many answers obvious.
(Hint: I am sure there were people who pointed out that the cars couldn't
drive over narrow winding paths where horses ruled)

~~~
obastani
How is the self driving car going to know it can't drive on that road? I
imagine the argument is that the self driving car won't notice that the signs
don't make sense (like a human would) and causes an accident.

~~~
baddox
That seems like one of the easiest problems, much easier than actually
navigating a well-organized road system like in the USA. If the car can follow
a lane then it can certainly know when it detects no discernible lane. If the
car can avoid obstacles like a pedestrian or a car crossing its lane, then it
can certainly know when there is a chaotic mess of obstacles crossing its
lane.

------
Larrikin
I thought it was a very good article, but disliked the comparison to the sad
state of US trains.

The author knew he was being a little disingenuous with his comparisons to the
sad state of US infrastructure, which is why he was careful to preface every
reference to poorly automated train systems with the US. There are a number of
automated systems worldwide that work pretty well. The Yurikamome was the
first line that came to mind. Its not an extremely packed line, but having
safety systems similar, like door gates, works very well. Automating a more
used line would of course be more difficult, but not impossible. Aggressive
door closing seems to work pretty well in taming crowds. It might take an
education period in the US, but once people realize holding a door won't allow
you on the train and that it will only allow you to remove a trapped limb,
people will be less inclined to do it.

~~~
jholman
Haha, yeah. Entirely agreed.

There is, within 15 miles of the continental United States, a Level 4
automated train, that has been running for over 30 years, with 50 miles of
track, and 300,000 passengers per day. And it works great. It's off-the-shelf
technology backed by a moderately sizable 70-year-old company, so you can just
go out and order a system like this yourself next year, if you want to (and
you have a few billion dollars).

That doesn't solve any of the self-driving car problems in the article, so
it's totally a side point, but Level 4 trains are a solved problem, for over
30 years.

------
smileysteve
I have to disagree with Social outcasts; A study this year concluded that
driver pedestrian interactions are at an all time low; likely because of both
parties using cell phones.

As the article states, I often enter cross walks to test if a car is going to
slow down; and they often don't. Similarly, I recently had a near miss when a
pedestrian ran across the street when I had a green light (late at night too).

(in Atlanta) Currently, cars are 1st class , Pedestrians are 2nd class, and
when I bicycle, I'm often 3rd class.

Self Driving cars, I hope, will make this more equal because I'm tired of
almost getting hit when I walk across the street in my residential part of
town and a "showboat" enjoys flooring it (going 2x the speed limit) down my
street for the 1 block between traffic lights.

~~~
nommm-nommm
Twice now in the last year I've waited at intersections for the walk signal
and when it came on I almost got run over and got beeped and screamed
profanities at by drivers taking a right. I guess now drivers believe that
they have the right to the road 100% of the time and nobody should ever be
allowed to cross, even at crosswalks during the prescribed time for crossing.

Drivers have become increasingly hostile in the last several years.

------
Tepix
The author is wrong, the manufacturers are already considering the problem of
communicating with pedestrians.

Mercedes: [http://www.electronics-eetimes.com/news/mercedes-benz-
self-d...](http://www.electronics-eetimes.com/news/mercedes-benz-self-driving-
car-communicates-leds)

Google: [http://time.com/4129247/google-self-driving-cars-
patent/](http://time.com/4129247/google-self-driving-cars-patent/)

And this article in popular science: [http://www.popsci.com/people-want-to-
interact-even-with-an-a...](http://www.popsci.com/people-want-to-interact-
even-with-an-autonomous-car)

~~~
amelius
Do pedestrians now have to learn the UIs of different brands of cars in order
to not be overrun?

------
_ph_
Many good points in that article. Probably self driving cars are finally going
to force us to review and to fix in many occasions the way we are using cars
today. Especially the ways which are already broken today. A good example is
the competition for the parking in front of a Starbucks or other similar
shops. The common usage pattern is still crafted by how traffic was decades
ago, and you could still just drive to a location and leave your car. But that
depended on there being fewer cars than parking lots. In most locations, this
is a thing long past - so I would consider the current situation already as
broken. Self driving cars would make it worse and such could force us to
finally find solutions for these situations.

There are two obvious ways of fixing that situation. The first, recognize that
trying to reach a location by individual cars cannot work out and ban private
cars. Many European Cities have large pedestrian zones where private cars are
locked out of whole streets in city centers.

The other option would be, and fortunately self driving cars would be part of
the solution, to create enough parking spaces. Parking in the streets would
still be disallowed, creating large pickup areas instead. So the road sides
would be free of parking cars, enabling drivers to stop at any desired spot.
As soon as the passengers left the car, the car would leave immediately for a
nearby garage. This would of course depend on the creation of the necessary
amount of parking garages.

~~~
chx
Banning private cards, I believe, will be unnecessary. I know free market is
often folly but in this case, I believe, the advantages of just tapping in the
app to call a driverless cab will be huge. In almost all cases it must be
cheaper than owning a car which doesn't work most of the time just sits there.

~~~
_ph_
I was not speaking of a total ban of private cars, just banning cars from
certain streets. Converting streets to pedestrian zones is quite successful in
the center of large cities, where the distances are short and the traffic
density higher than individual transport could deliver.

------
decker
Don't forget that once we get to level 4, every time there's rain or snow,
there might even be more loss of life as everyone gets to learn how to drive
again in bad weather.

------
MR4D
This is a great article that covers not only edge cases, but almost subliminal
behavior that people perform almost every day.

To me, it is clear that our behavior will change. As an American in Amsterdam
a few years ago, I was horrified to learn that at some places pedestrians can
just walk out in front of you, and you have to stop. After a few days of
observing this (as a passenger, thankfully), I noticed that you could tell the
tourists - the natives would walk into the street without looking, knowing the
drivers would stop. Tourists would hesitate, looking to the driver for
feedback. Oddly (to me, as an American), I found that the natives had it
right, and that blind faith made things smoother. The tourists, in checking
for driver feedback before waling into a street, would actually slow things
down more than necessary.

This is but one anecdote of thousands, but it shows how the expected behavior
of a person from one place does not necessarily translate to another place. I
would extend that same thinking to the future, in that or future will be a
behavior change from what we do today.

I'm sure it will come slowly (although occasionally startlingly), and there
will be new signs, new laws, and new behaviors. But for me, the best
comparison is to when we introduced cars into the streets that had previously
been owned by horses and carriages. a bit of chaos, but fairly rapid adoption
(within a decade). It wasn't uniform, and it was messy, and some places lagged
the modern world by decades. But it came, we adjusted, and now we can't even
remember what that previous world was like.

What's that quote about the future not being evenly distributed? I think it
applies here perfectly.

------
tabeth
Weird, but somewhat relevant question (given that self driving capabilities
combined with buses can potentially disrupt public transportation in urban
areas): why do we even allow anything that's not a bus (say, 10+ passenger) or
industrial vehicle on the road?

The downsides of such a thing seem small.

1\. There would be less traffic

2\. The speed limit could be raised

3\. Due to higher occupancy, more people could go to places, faster.

4\. Cheaper per person (maybe) than most other forms of public transportation

5\. High density areas can have fleets of buses go there, express. This would
have only a little overhead compared to driving your own vehicle, yet would be
substantially cheaper.

~~~
amelius
Depending on destination, you might need to change buses several times, which
is of course inconvenient.

OTOH, booking a busride far in advance might mitigate this. Also different
price-levels could mitigate this to some extent. I'm not sure if it would be
sufficient, though.

------
umberway
If and when _all_ cars are computer-controlled another consequence may be that
children will be free to roam about. This assumes that those same cars are
built to be incapable of hitting pedestrians. Is this possible?

~~~
michaelbuckbee
Well, this sort of behavior has (presumably) already happened [1], but this
also gets to the crux of "unintended consequences". Will we see kids
deliberately walking in the street, knowing full well they aren't going to get
hit and extorting drivers to let them pass?

1 - [https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-autopilot-saved-life-
pr...](https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-autopilot-saved-life-prevented-
serious-injury-pedestrian-dc/)

~~~
umberway
Yes I'm sure this sort of thing will happen however I imagine the overall
social consequences would be beneficial. Children are highly confined at
present and the ability to roam and talk to different people, walk to school,
etc, has been lost. Largely for fear of their being run over by traffic.

~~~
dagw
_Largely for fear of their being run over by traffic._

Are you sure? I get the feeling that good old Stranger Danger is still alive
and well, and automated cars won't in any way change that.

------
noonespecial
I expect as far as the social aspect of driverless cars making their way
through our neighbourhoods goes, eventually most humans will just come to see
them as an odd type of animal. Like a horse. It probably wouldn't hurt to give
them some active animal-like cosmetic features that help nearby humans
anticipate what they are "thinking".

Delightful symmetry there, no? The first great task of mechanized transport
was getting rid of the horse aspects, the second was building them back in.

~~~
amelius
Nice thought, but as the article states, car manufacturers do not want their
cars to be recognizable as autonomous, because others might take advantage.

------
tony-allan
If the advent of self driving cars corresponds with reduced private ownership
then cars will not need to wait and our children just need to hop into the
next free car and their phone or smart school bag will contain their home
address. For adults, cars will not need to hand around near venues because we
will just get into the next available car.

I agree that the transition will be messy. Perhaps we will need to redesign
our local communities a bit to help. More off street parking for example.

------
webmaven
_> Since there are no current ways that driverless cars can give social
signals to people, beyond inching forward to indicate that they want to go,
how will they indicate to a person that they have seen them and it safe to
cross in front of the car at a stop sign?_

There is no reason that autonomous vehicles can't give other rudimentary
social signals in ways similar to drivers that can't see each other by using
their headlights, turn signals, emitting short 'beeps' from their horn, and so
on.

For that matter, autonomous vehicles can be given greater range of expression
by adding a 100^2 pixel RGB LED display or similar behind the windshield or on
the hood that can display emojis, or by actually giving them the ability to
speak (KITT-style):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-UqF5ElduY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-UqF5ElduY)

~~~
amelius
Eventually perhaps. But until then, there is a very large uncanny valley to
bridge.

------
lhopki01
The comparison to level 4 or 5 trains doesn't make sense to me. For a train
you've got millions of dollars worth of hardware and track so the driver is
only a tiny component in the overall cost. For trucks and taxis the driver is
the biggest costs. The incentives for autonomous cars are much higher than
autonomous trains.

------
chernaborg
What about that part where all of our computers are riddled with zero-days,
and wide open to shadowy government organizations with massive technical
budgets, and the part where we weren't 100% cool with that.

And like, what about the part where we were worried about nefarious anonymous
super hackers cyber-attacking the electric grid, and the gas grid, and other
critical infrastructure, and we were worried about that sort of thing
spiraling out of control into a federal emergency, because heat and potable
water were taken down in the middle of winter, when a utility worker's laptop
was spearphish hacked, because internet of things? I guess that can't happen
anymore?

So now, right in the middle of this, the cars get to drive wherever they want
because computers, and nothing can go wrong. One has nothing to do with the
other, and we'll all be safe and totally okay, right?

------
elihu
One thing about self-driving cars that I'm not looking forward to is the
proliferation of zero-occupant vehicles on the roads.

~~~
jakeogh
Remotely connected AI with ~1MJ of KE? No thanks.

------
eriknstr
Having the description of abbreviations all the way at the bottom of the
article so that one has to scroll a mile to read what they mean is a bit
annoying. Instead of:

>When the first IMPs^1 for the fledgling ARPANET were being built starting in
1969 at BBN^2 in Cambridge, MA, I think it safe to say that no one foresaw the
devastating impact that the networking technology being developed would have
on journalism thirty to fifty years later.

>[A million words]

>^1 Interface Message Processors. Today they would be referred to as Internet
protocol routers.

>^2 Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, MA, a company that was always known
as BBN. As distinct from BBN, the Buckingham Browne and Nichols school in
Cambridge, MA — no doubt many employees of BBN sent their kids to school at
BBN.

I would have preferred for at least the first of these two to be baked into
the text itself.

~~~
MikeTLive
While I agree to some extent, I find it funny that I've somehow been around
long enough to not realize people needed your example acronyms and names to be
defined. Including the reference in the BBN definition to the other bbn :) I
guess that's what happens when you live it first hand.

------
bamboozled
What about privacy?

There could be some serious privacy issues introduced by self-driving cars if
they take off.

Cameras and microphones patrolling neighborhoods of the world, constantly
feeding data into "the cloud" with absolutely no accountability?

Just no!

------
pfarnsworth
I had to stop reading because the blog poster's level of thinking is really
superficial.

If you're going to think completely autonomous self-driving cars, why the hell
would you bother with things like parking? Why would I even bother "owning" a
car? What the more reasonable approach is time-sharing of multiple vehicles,
like Uber.

So instead of worrying about parking, you order a car, and it picks you up,
and then you get dropped off. It drives off and services other customers.
Then, when it comes time to get driven home, you order another car that comes
and picks you up. You only pay for the car while it's driving you, not while
it's sitting there doing nothing.

Or, if you did own the car, when you are not using it, it could go off and
service other people and earn you money, and then return to pick you up.

And why would you go to Starbucks to pick up your own coffee? Why not send a
self-driving car through the special self-driving car drivethru to pick up the
coffee and return it to you? It could wireless transmit the order and payment
details for you, and have a special slot for the coffee or food order.

Seriously, the article is really superficial thinking when it comes to self-
driving cars.

~~~
vecinu
I keep hearing this rhetoric and one could say that this superficial thinking
because it's very out of line with how people all over the world use their
cars today.

I don't feel comfortable renting out my car to strangers while it's not being
used. I'm afraid of it getting dirty, them not operating it properly and
causing mechanical damage that won't be seen for weeks.

On the other hand, having an "on demand" car service as my only option would
increase my transportation costs. My car is paid off, insurance is almost free
and gas is dirt cheap in the US it might as well be free. If I had to Uber
around with self driving cars my costs of getting around would skyrocket.

Are you suggesting having your own car as well? That's the only way I could
see this working.

~~~
smileysteve
> On the other hand, having an "on demand" car service as my only option would
> increase my transportation costs.

I've done some of the math on this; here are some very conservative figures.

\- $50/mo for reasonable high deductible coverage.

\- $100/mo gas

\- $100/mo parking at the office

\- $x /mo parking at home (not realized in my case)

\- $80mo misc expenses (tires, wiper, diy synthetic oil change, taxes, car
wash)

$330/mo pays for a lot of $5 uber pool trips.

And while _our_ cars are paid of; The average American does not and is
increasingly spending more. This adds an additional $300 to the amount I can
spend on trips.

This says nothing of the current liability of driving a car. Where an accident
with a > $50k car with over $100k of medical costs creates a gap in coverage
for the average American.

~~~
vecinu
I don't commute to work by car so for my occasional use of getting groceries,
going out to eat, getting a haircut or doing the occasional shopping, I don't
spend anywhere near that much.

\- $40 for insurance

\- $30 gas

\- $5 (Maintenance)

$75/month on my end. If I were to UberPOOL everywhere, besides the fact that
it would be inconvenient because it would take longer and I would have to
share a ride, it would cost more.

~~~
nommm-nommm
$5 in maintenance sounds low. $5 a month in maintenance is $600 over 10 years,
a new set of tires would cost around $600 and you should replace your tires
before 10 years no matter the tread depth(1). I believe you are probably doing
more maintenance to your car than new tires every 10years.

You also can't just totally discount the initial cost of the vehicle like that
as "free."

(1) [https://www.edmunds.com/car-care/how-old-and-dangerous-
are-y...](https://www.edmunds.com/car-care/how-old-and-dangerous-are-your-
tires.html)

------
ck425
This is very interesting to read from a UK perspective. We don't have the
concept of jaywalking, except for on motorways (I was actually shocked when an
american friend explained it at uni, how the hell does anyone get anywhere,
then I realised they mostly drive). So these social interactions don't just
occur in certain areas, they're widespread across most roads and pedestrians
technically have right of way over cars. Could autonomous vehicles cause the
end of walking places?

------
aamederen
At some point, we will debate against manual driver cars. As a petrol-head, I
love driving and riding but that is the truth. the sooner we get rid of
manual-drived cars, the faster we switch to self driving cars because the
existence of manual cars are a big problem for self driving cars and they
limit the potential the self-driving cars can achieve. We should at least do
that in some cities. Imagine a town with no traffic lights and cars move in a
harmony and scary precision in traffic.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Imagine a power outage. Imagine solar flares. Imagine a town with no backup
plan for complex systems suddenly encountering events with 1 in a million
odds.

------
zby
One aspect that is not covered is armed conflict (or terrorism). Imagine what
would happen if enemy take over a fleet of autonomous cars, be it through
hacking or by physical attack on a control center.

Another thing: imagine robbery with autonomous robots and cars.

I am waiting for Hollywood to catch up on these ideas - this would be very
cinematic.

~~~
ajmurmann
Does the car need to be completely autonomous for that scenario to be a huge
issue. Isn't completely controllable through on board computer bad enough?
Someone could remote control and thus weaponize such a car already, could they
not?

~~~
zby
Yeah - indeed, remote control would be enough. There is a problem with
latencies though - so you need at least some autonomy in the car. And then
there is also the thing that if it is remotely controlled - then it is easy to
stop it - just jam the communication link.

~~~
jakeogh
Eliminating the passenger lets you make the tool more expendable. The attacker
can control more than one and afford to lose a few.

------
njharman
Most of #2 sounds fascinating and not anti-social to me at all.

Except, very few parents are gonna send a car and forgo helicoptering over
their kids. Isn't having kid unattended in car illegal most places?

------
argonaut
> taking away much of the rest of advertising revenue from print, radio, and
> TV

TV advertising revenue continues to grow, and is still larger than online ad
revenue.

------
jack9
Bait title for blog hits. These aren't unexpected consequences, they are some
of the specific benefits. It adds nothing to the discussion as it's neither
comprehensive nor insightful. Why does the author think autonomous cars are a
net good? Thanks, he went on and on about a few things he wants to pretend are
"unexpected". SMH

------
tahoeskibum
I think that driving in places such as India with little traffic rules might
be easier for an AI because the traffic flow is self-organized. There might
not be any rules, but that is not relevant as we are not talking about expert
rule based systems. If the AI car sees a cow it'll just slow down and move to
the side to overtake.

------
wcummings
I live in this area, completely agree, author is spot on.

------
known
Social mobility is a major problem in democracy [http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-
politics-24936416](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-24936416)

