| Even if self-driving cars become the norm in developed countries, there is no way they'll be so in the rest of the world. In many places, there are no lines drawn on the road and you have to imagine the lanes. It could be a space big enough for 3 or 4 lanes. It makes me wonder if cars would recognize the general direction of the road and not drive diagonally through the imaginary lanes when there's a turn. Some lanes may also have horrible holes that seem like they could easily take your wheel off if you fall on them with speed. Sometimes they're sinkholes, other times they're part of a construction job that was left midway for months seemingly until someone has a horrible accident. Some lanes look like they're at risk of becoming large sinkholes, and you'd rather avoid them lest the whole car suddenly falls meters below the ground. For both of these, you know they're there, and you know they're basically unavoidable once they become visible. How would you communicate these risks to the car? Jaywalkers on high-speed, high-traffic highways might be common due to lack of bridges or any other alternative to crossing the road. They coordinate their movements with the incoming traffic and the drivers also coordinate their movements with them. Behaving unexpectedly, like simply changing lanes, even at a distance, could be fatal because it changes the shape of the incoming traffic the jaywalkers depend on once they decided to start crossing. Emergency stopping might worsen the situation when tailgaters are common. Pedestrians might also be suicidal and you might be able to discern their intent from a distance by watching their behavior, but the car is not going to interpret that and it'll get close enough for the pedestrian to throw themselves at the road when it can't avoid them. Advancing when a streetlight becomes green might generally be unsafe in zones where it's common for cars to cross at high speeds when the light is about to or just turned red. Would cars be on the lookout for high speed traffic coming from the left or right at a distance? Simply put, there's lots to be on the look out for, especially when pedestrian city infrastructure, vehicle city infrastructure, traffic law enforcement, driving education, etc. is lacking. If self-driving cars become the norm in developed countries, I think it'd be in great part because they're not lacking in any of these things, and the car software can deal with a somewhat consistent environment. That wouldn't be the case elsewhere, though. As to what my opinion is on the issue at hand, as a software developer, I wouldn't put so much trust in software as to not have a way to take manual control when this software has the ability to bring physical harm or death to me and others. Even disregarding the possibility of malice through malware and assuming whatever code that executes was written with the best intentions, there's just too many ways for things to go wrong in this problem domain and the consequences can be deadly. Good design lies in simplicity. I cannot imagine the behemoth of code that must be required to implement safe automated driving. That's a lot to put faith in when lives are on the line. |