Are autonomous (self-driving) cars a good thing?

[Yertle the Turtle]

Given the talks about autonomous cars in the debate on speed limits I thought I'd start one here.

So, are they a good thing or not? I think that they are good, but only when all cars are autonomous. Until then you can never eliminate the human aspect, and the fact that some cars are perfectly driven will not help. However I think that there may come a stage where cars have exact GPS coordinates for all the cars around them, and will all travel at a safe speed, whatever 'safe' means. However, I think that this leads to certain human rights and privacy issues, but I will leave you to talk about them.

btw, they cannot deal with roos, so...

[Aaron]

If it's ever going to be a thing, there must be an option for manual override or an ability for the human to take control. Even things like cruise control in my car, I don't use. The addition of tech in current vehicles (e.g. cameras, park assist etc), I just personally don't feel confident with a reliance on these things at the moment. I like having an ability to control my own car. An addition of technology to a vehicle also leaves open the possibility of hacking.

Have any of you seen such a situation where a GPS guides you in the incorrect direction? I think this scenario alone at least raises the question of whether we should fully rely on tech at this point in time.

I love technology, but do I trust it enough to control my destiny in a car..... who knows.

[turinturambar]

Thanks Yertle.

So, are they a good thing or not? I think that they are good, but only when all cars are autonomous. Until then you can never eliminate the human aspect, and the fact that some cars are perfectly driven will not help. However I think that there may come a stage where cars have exact GPS coordinates for all the cars around them, and will all travel at a safe speed, whatever 'safe' means. However, I think that this leads to certain human rights and privacy issues, but I will leave you to talk about them.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.  If some cars are driven better, then accident rates are likely to go down.  And it's never likely that we'll have a big bang switch anyway.

Not convinced I'd want to rely on GPS and radioed in positions of other cars when there's the option of using computer vision and finding out where the other cars actually are.  This also happens to accommodate human drivers as well as other computer drivers.

btw, they cannot deal with roos, so...

Cannot yet deal with roos. It would not be surprising if in the long-term autonomous cars respond to roos better than human drivers can.

If it's ever going to be a thing, there must be an option for manual override or an ability for the human to take control. Even things like cruise control in my car, I don't use. The addition of tech in current vehicles (e.g. cameras, park assist etc), I just personally don't feel confident with a reliance on these things at the moment. I like having an ability to control my own car. An addition of technology to a vehicle also leaves open the possibility of hacking.

Have any of you seen such a situation where a GPS guides you in the incorrect direction? I think this scenario alone at least raises the question of whether we should fully rely on tech at this point in time.

I love technology, but do I trust it enough to control my destiny in a car..... who knows.

Hacking is a definite risk, so are systems that are complex and opaque enough that we don't really understand how they work or why they make the decisions they do. I'm less positive about self-driving cars taking over than I was a year ago.

As for manual control, yes, I think we will keep that for the foreseeable future.  However, a couple of things might change that:
1. If self-driving cars are statistically vastly safer than human-driven cars, it is possible for there to be a push sometime to restrict or ban human-driven cars.  This is the main argument I've heard in favour of self-driving cars.

2. If it is considerably cheaper or more efficient to produce self-driving cars with limited or no manual overrides, the time may come when market forces push cars in that direction.

The statistical argument will be tough to win, because failure modes in self-driving cars are different from human cars. Even if it is safer overall, I suspect there will be more chance for catastrophic failures (10+ cars involved), and it might only take one such catastrophic failure to raise a public outcry that sets them back five or ten years.

However, if it does win out I suspect there will be a time when certain streets or sections of a city are only open to self-driving cars (I think it would take longer to stretch to country roads, dirt roads, etc.)  I hope this will also go along with better ride-sharing services and more shared ownership of cars, at least in cities.  Individually owned cars are expensive (registration, insurance, and maintenance before you even start driving), and if individually driven just makes for too much traffic on the roads.  This would of course require massive social and technical changes, so I'm not sure if it will ever happen.  But if done well it could be a good middle point between public transport and individual car ownership.

None of this will be mainstream any time soon.

[slothpomba]

They are a very good thing. On the whole, they will save lives, improve human lives and progress the economy.

Like any technology, and this is a massively disruptive technology, there will be friction and resistance against it.

They are vastly safer than human driven cars (proven by statistics), any deaths or injuries are publicised as exceptional or shocking when human error accidents are treated as routine and a fact of life, there is negative media hype. There will be a time in the early-middle stages of technology adoption where the most dangerous cars on the road are human driven cars because they will be difficult to predict and will not be able to share information with other cars (say wifi, bluetooth, radar, etc).

Eventually, i foresee a time where perhaps in certain zones (say cities) it may be illegal to drive your own car due to safety reasons. This is however very far in the future. In rural life, you will probably have human drivers for much longer (roads aren't as well mapped or easy for cars to deal with, farmers need to drive machinery etc).

In many US states, the single biggest job classification is "truck driver". Once we reach autonomous trucks, there will be great progress and great harm. All these truck drivers will lose their jobs, i come from a working class family and i can see how this will sting. If you spent 40 years driving trucks, it's very hard to retrain into anything else at say age 50, let alone get hired.

The dream that all the suddenly unemployed truck drivers, taxi drivers and so on will magically all become engineers fixing self driving cars is a pipe dream. Just like mechanics now, you may need 1 engineer for every 1,000 trucks, so, 999 people will still be out of work. This is a bad thing, you can call me a luddite for resisting the flow of progress but this technology will make the rich moreso and harm the working class.

One other big thing is these cars will have to decide who to kill. If there's a situation that has a very high probability of harming the driver OR a pedestrian/other driver, who does it choose? (Example - swerving to avoid a pedestrian but hitting a wall) Either way it will be extremely controversial.

However, the improvements will be vast. There will be less need for traffic enforcement (police, etc). There will be less deaths. Traffic will improve - when cars communicate, the safe following distance (the gap left between you and the car in front of you) can be dramatically reduced, allowing more cars to fit into the same space. Eventually they can be centrally routed by traffic management authorities and algorithms. It'll greatly benefit commerce since trucks, deliveries, etc will be able to run overnight moreso than normal as well.

Overall, they are a good thing and a massive technological leap but correspondingly the harm they will cause and societal friction will also be massive. They are always "10 years time" on the horizon and its continually pushed back, expect this to keep happening but we will get there eventually.