

Why Automated Cars Need New Traffic Laws - acheron
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/why-automated-cars-need-new-traffic-laws

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stephengillie
> _“A stop sign—rather than a ‘yield’ sign—is there to make sure people have
> the opportunity to look both ways and see nobody is coming,” Kornhauser
> says. “But with 360-degree camera coverage, lidars and radars, those
> automated cars know in a 20th of a second whether something is coming. Why
> should we require them to come to a complete stop?”_

I would make the same argument for a human with gamer-level twitch reflexes
and high-level situation awareness. What sense does it make to completely stop
your vehicle when you've been constantly monitoring oncoming traffic, cross
traffic, and sidewalk traffic?

We have developed a set of rules (laws) for a rules-engine that will abandon
rules when there's an situation that will optimize without those rules. AKA a
human. And we've replaced that with a different rules-engine that's designed
to absolutely obey rules. And so we're finding that our rules aren't working
anymore.

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SamReidHughes
A big reason you should stop as a human, and obey other traffic laws, even
when there's no traffic, is to keep the habit. Otherwise, when you're tired or
distracted, you'll be more likely to miss that stop sign or forget your turn
signal.

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kwhitefoot
I think that we should require that automated cars obey the rules we already
have. The highway is for people not machines, the machines should not be given
privileges that the humans do not have.

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stephengillie
But we operate by 2 sets of mutually exclusive rule sets.

One rule, printed on signs, says the maximum speed is 45 MPH.

One rule, stored only in tribal knowledge, says the maximum speed is 54 MPH.

We choose which rule to obey to optimize our state - increase desired effects
while decreasing undesired effects. We will obey the 2nd rule most of the
time, as it decreases our travel time to our destination.

We will obey the first rule selectively, as it will generally increase our
travel time, but will reduce interaction with Law Enforcement individuals,
which can both increase our travel time (as they process a traffic stop
paperwork) and possibly incur a monetary penalty, which is also undesired.

So do we program self-driving cars to evaluate the proximity of LEO and change
rulesets appropriately?

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joshuaheard
Once all cars are automated, we won't need any traffic laws at all. All
machine behavior will be coded into the algorithms controlling the cars.

