coominya

Originally Posted by coominya
Car jacking will be easier, just push a shopping trolley out in front of one and when it stops push another one up behind it.
You're thinking too simplistically and this is the problem with the whole debate on these cars. Perhaps you can't steal the car, but perhaps you can, for a joyride at least. But you can certainly rob the occupants after smashing in a window, which is often the purpose of many thieves. Robbery, sexual-abuse, murder.

This is a social consequence of the technology and no one here who is a proponent of these vehicles is willing to discuss the social aspects. All they want to do is look at the technology, ignoring the reality of say their teenage daughter being alone in a mindless robot at 1:am in the morning when some gangbangers push a shopping trolley in front of it.

We're talking about the segway here. it's great, soon everyone will be going to work on one and there will be Segway parking stations all over the city...

genec

And yet oddly the very first self driving vehicles piloted their way across a featureless desert to a predetermined destination... That was successfully done in 2005. I suspect getting to your house is a piece of cake for the current 2017 technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge

What you and a lot of others here need to understand is that these vehicles do not rely only on google maps (as do some human drivers, in situations that have had tragic failures). The vehicles use maps as part of a much larger picture that includes GPS, mm wave radar, LIDAR, infrared and 360 vision. The vehicles see things that humans cannot. They make judgments faster than humans.

What the smart vehicles do not know are "stupid human tricks..." The things humans do to cheat rules, and one another, that sometimes results in a collision, but often does not. The close following thing that has resulted in Google car collisions is one of those "stupid human tricks..." (follow closely and try to beat the red.) Since it is not legal to do those things, the programmers do not allow the cars to perform such antics.

No, the technology is not 100% there yet... but even the basic stuff, as installed is saving lives by preventing collisions.

Human drivers have maybe 35 good years of driving in them... and the first several years they are very much in a learning curve (but have quick reaction times due to being young). The next say, 30 years or so, depending on bad habits learned, humans tend to improve their skills, until age reduces their facilities and reaction times... at which point humans slowly become bad drivers in their old age. Oh sure, we all know one or two exceptions to this... the teen that never could pass the driving test (as easy as it is) or the elder that can still do stock car races... but on average, we humans have a very limited time to learn driving well and we tend to muck that up with the aforementioned "stupid human tricks" and bad habits.

Self driving car technology will continue to improve... the sensors will get better, the software will have updates and the computers themselves will become more and more robust.

I suspect that as we see fewer and fewer fatalities due to the use of smarter and smarter cars, there will eventually come a mandate as to what is allowed on the road... just as seat belts and airbags are now mandated. This is a long way off. Right now, self driving cars are in "drivers ed," and one of the things they have yet to manage is that humans just don't always follow the rules.

Over time, self driving cars will become smarter and smarter... but each day brings a new human driver into the world with the same old lack of knowledge that all other humans have when they start driving.

genec

So you are arguing against self driving cars as they will fall prey to the same situations that humans now fall prey to...

Let me know when human motorists no longer are carjacked... so I'll know that humans are no longer vulnerable to gangbangers etc.

BTW in places like South Africa they defeat this sort of thing by spraying flammable liquids out of cars and lighting it, and by electrifying the exterior handles of the cars with high voltage.

genec

It was a freaking movie! Get over it.

coominya

good point. Look at the way people chop and change lanes in traffic now, how they sit right up each other's tails. Can you imagine an autonomous being in the middle lane and needing to get across to another lane to make a turn off a busy road? The car will wait until it gets a minimum clearance obviously, it wouldn't dream of pushing in as we often have to do now. So what are the options?

a/ Grind to a halt on a busy road
b/ Drive right past the street and formulate a plan to double back

Again, it's the social integration that will be the making and breaking of this technology.

coominya

So you advocate incinerating car thieves without benefit of a trial do you? You believe that crackpot's invention will get approved by the SA transport authorities do you?

Did you know it's actually lawful to steal a car in a lot of countries, if you prove you needed it to save life? If you believe that video then you'll believe ANY invention will get approval
Sorry genec, go to back of the class for absurd justifications

genec

I believe it was you that mentioned the gangbangers.

Just what is to keep a self driving car passenger, who is permitted and carrying, from blowing away said gangbanger, while the car records the scene to justify "standing one's ground" and then makes the getaway?

Yeah, we can go down a whole list of absurdities.

Leisesturm

I have seen the future, and it is not pretty. The DOT is going to have to call in the military to help remove some of you from the gene pool slightly ahead of schedule. Specially equipped attack helicopters will prowl the skies looking for human piloted cars... there you are blasting along on a daring daylight dash at 75mph on a 45mph two lane, adrenaline buzzing in your ears, trees looking like a picket fence... yee haa... suddenly your windshield is full of attack chopper gliding just 20 feet overhead and the voice of God booms from its public address system: "stop your vehicle NOW! Exit the car and lie down NOW! Stop, or you will be fired upon!" Your already pounding heart finds an additional 20 beats per minute as you bury the gas pedal into the footwell. All the way down. What a way to go...

Ninety5rpm

Why do you say imagine? No need to imagine. Uber and Waymo and who knows what other autonomous cars are all over the place doing these negotiations as we speak. They're still tweaking and refining, but all the fundamentals are in place.

Ninety5rpm

You're grasping at straws. In areas where this is an issue the cars will have emergency call systems that will summon the police who could show up in seconds. The potential jackers will never know whether the police might be right around the corner and are going to be inhibited from finding out.

coominya

I think you're the one grasping for straws mate

City & State - NYPD response times up even as ?crime in progress? calls see major drop
More than enough time to commit a crime and get away and they don't even have to leave the hood!


Now here is a screen grab of the second link I got off google, it says it all about what sort of service you can expect from computers

coominya

You need to check the facts before go making wild claims 95. It doesn't do your case for autonomous cars any good to be pulling stats out of your hat to justify the safety of people alone in cars traveling near dangerous neighborhoods.

noisebeam

Drones will have a faster response time and can quickly take out any troublemakers.

jon c. 

This thread has become downright surreal.

Myosmith

Far from improving our safety, autonomous or semi-autonomous cars are far more likely to get us banned from the road.

https://www.bikebiz.com/news/read/mak...e-roads/018934

Driverless cars confused by cyclists

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...omous-vehicles

https://newsok.com/bicycles-pose-diff...rticle/5551195

https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-t...icycle-problem

coominya

Yes but why bother with the cars at all? I'm sure in another decade or two they will have matter transporters and we can leave the roads behind. Rubber tires, rolling over concrete, so 20th century, so neanderthal don't you think.

genec

Every story but one, focused on Deep3DBox and the ability of that software system, noting that it only ID'd cyclists 79% of the time and determined direction of travel 59% of the time. They all reported the same story.

Meanwhile, one report indicated that google seems to have overcome this issue....

genec

Or flying cars...
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/2...echnology.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarwants...on-to-reality/

mr_bill

Standard DNA Testing Can't Differentiate Between Identical Twins. A New Test Challenges That | WBUR News

Funny thing about technology. It changes.

-mr. bill

Ninety5rpm

You missed my point: The potential jackers will never know whether the police might be right around the corner and are going to be inhibited from finding out.

Just because the average response time is 9 minutes does not preclude the possibility that there is a cop around the corner in any given situation. Plus, the jackers need to not only stop the car, but also break into it, which will take time and attract attention. Not to mention that their actions are on the car's video system and being observed by the car hailing company's central command center, also alerted by the customer pressing the emergency button. All this risk for what? Mugging someone on the street is much easier, less risky, and just as bountiful.

You're grasping for straws in an attempt to find reasons to oppose AV technology to rationalize your emotional Luddite tendencies. It's a classic example of making an emotional decision and then looking for reasons to support it. The repeated comparisons here to the supposed promises of the Segway are another example. It's a straw man because while the Segway people themselves made such prognostications, there were very few if any such predictions made by technology futurists or the public in general. I, for one, was very skeptical from the start. This is totally different. Not to mention that dozens of major corporations are working on this, and so are government agencies at all levels. That someone believes there is some kind of parallel between the lackluster popularity of Segways and the potential of AVs demonstrates how heavy the emotional/irrational load is in their position.

Open your eyes. Don't be a Luddite.

I-Like-To-Bike

"Become" surreal? It began surreal and picked up a head of surrealistic steam and hot air from there.

Amitoj

Hahaha. Good point. I can imagine the poor thing going into Boston on I93 South and not able to take an exit till it reaches Cape Cod

I-Like-To-Bike

tyrion

These are learning systems. "Understanding" bicycles is difficult for them now, but nothing that can't be overcome with experience (i.e. learning) and tuning.

Leisesturm

Seems to be a foreign concept, this notion of... improvement... progress... I mean... the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, not the Stealth Bomber. The powered hang glider that the two bicycle mechanics flew at Kitty Hawk bears as much resemblance to a 747 airliner as a self driving car of today will have to one 50 years from now. I get that the pace of progress is more subject to market forces in the 21st Century than in the 20th but there is still, overall, an upward pressure on the innovations of humanity to evolve. Become better, more efficient. No amount of naysaying will alter that.