[ma2rten]

That is what Tesla and other car manufacturers are doing essentially, isn't it? However, this will always require a human to be paying attention. Highway driving is boring until it suddenly isn't. Driving perfectly on a highway is just as difficult as driving perfectly in a city.

As automation becomes better humans will be paying less and less attention to the road, making this technology somewhat dangerous in the interim. There has already been a fatal accident involving a Tesla on autopilot where the driver was watching Harry Potter.

[mjevans]

It is my belief that the boring highway situations decay in the following paths:

* Predictable termination. The user must affirm that they are ready to receive the car. :: User takes over.

* Operator emergency. The user is unresponsive or active indications are that they require emergency assistance. :: auto-park in the nearest assistance area, (video monitored), emergency response crews also en-route.

* Unpredictable catastrophic failure. Internal/External doesn't matter. The vehicle is no longer responsive to the global mesh and a timeout condition occurs. Emergency response is dispatched to the area of incident automatically.

The 'driver taking over' in your scenario would be that final case, however most of those incidents could either be detected and minor failures avoided/tolerated or binned in to the second category. Any other cases are extreme and would result in a cascade anyway, likely even if the human were paying attention as normal.

Thus, the low hanging fruit of travel on the freeway IS the low hanging fruit. Developing a space reserved for automated vehicles and preferably app assisted ride-sharing/carpooling.

[sounds]

Good analysis, but I think we should call out the "predictable catastrophic failures."

Humans can see the scenarios below coming from enough distance to mitigate the problem and AIs have not yet demonstrated equivalence:

1. Slow/erratic person or vehicle suddenly veers into the path of travel. AIs so far tend to just be ultra-safe here and stay far away, which is not the same thing as understanding the situation.

2. Construction zone path of travel is suddenly obstructed. (I'm picking a major scenario to exemplify a class of scenarios where humans surpass AIs still in predicting their environment.)

3. A vehicle ahead performs an emergency maneuver, which communicates unseen/undetected driving hazards. A human can reason from what the vehicle did to what the hazard might be, and immediately begin mitigating the hazard. AIs have not been very forthcoming with detailed behavior descriptions, but they all appear to still be mainly designed as advanced control loops (that is to say, mostly stateless). And yes, it's going to be a legal morass when AIs begin to follow "rules of behavior," since there will always be exceptions.

[manmal]

But this accident was due to a "bug" in the model S' sensor suite and software, and would reportedly not happen with a Lidar. I actually trust a self-driving Google car on a highway more than myself when it's 2AM in the morning, or in a fog.

[icebraining]

I think the idea is that you can start by having complete automation (without requiring driver attention) on highways, before enabling it everywhere else. Tesla's current autopilot is neither.