[F-0X]

I think I am going to side with VW on this. I have always been skeptical of fully autonomous vehicles, and I do not believe they will _ever_ exist on the roads that currently stand. Driving safely in all conditions without aid from a human is simply too complex a task for code that can be audited and verified. If some AI model that's been trained on a billion years of driving experience shows promise, but it is some incomprehensible black box of weights, I won't be getting in that car.

Autonomous vehicles will only ever truly exist upon infrastructure literally designed to aid them, greatly simplifying how they need to interact with the environment, thus making the problem tractable with code we can prove works. I really think it will take more than putting markings on existing roads. It is going to take new roads full stop, probably with various wireless checkpoints built into them.

[jsolson]

You may not be getting in that car, but I certainly will.

After all, every driver on the road today is an incomprehensible black box where not only do we not know the parameters, we don't even know the function they're parameterizing. Every instance functions differently, and our testing procedures have woefully low coverage.

[darkerside]

When one of those black boxes malfunctions it gets taken off the road. When the AI malfunctions, are we going to shut down entire classes of vehicles until the problem is confirmed fixed?

Not to mention that most software fixes cause other bugs...

[jsolson]

In an extreme example I expect that's precisely what would happen. Consider what's currently unfolding around the 737 Max. In the automotive space there's a long history of serious flaws that resulted in loss of life, ranging from faulty airbag deployment systems to flawed designs for ignition systems.

We have precedent for how we qualify and evaluate things for safety: test them across a variety of conditions, accumulate driver-miles or operator-hours and incident frequencies. Then, using that data establish a bar for what constitutes an acceptable level of risk given the utility something provides. If we wanted to ensure nobody ever died in a car accident, we would ensure there were no cars, but collectively we've made a different choice.

[darkerside]

We've made a choice to allow people to kill each other in cars from time to time, but that's different from choosing to allow automated cars to kill anybody. Knowing human nature, I don't think the general public will accept double digit automated deaths without an outcry.

Shutting down a plane is completely different from taking an entire class of publicly owned vehicles off the road. People will be furious.

Yes, they will be furious about the deaths and the shutdown, both. Don't forget that people are made up of individuals.

[runarb]

> When the AI malfunctions, are we going to shut down

> entire classes of vehicles until the problem is confirmed fixed?

Yes, a malfunction AI would have to be grounded, just like for example the Boeing 737 MAX is now.

[dx034]

Or a car model with severe problems. This rarely (if ever) happens because with that many cars, severe problems tend to be noticed fairly quickly. That shouldn't change with self driving cars. With several million miles driven each day for more popular models, even rare edge cases should appear within days.

[Erlich_Bachman]

> are we going to shut down entire classes of vehicles until the problem is confirmed fixed?

Yes of course we will. What is the problem with that approach? That is the exactly logical thing to do and will be done.

[toasterlovin]

At least the software is fixable. Other humans are not.

[FriendlyNormie]

At least other humans fear death as a consequence of driving incorrectly. Computers do not.

[jsolson]

Some humans, when seeking to end their own lives, end the lives of others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

That's an extreme example, but automotive suicides that kill other passengers, drivers, or pedestrians fall into the same category. Consider also deaths from accidents involving drunk driving or fatigue -- thousands of motorists take to the roads every day modified in one manner or another that reduces their driving aptitude.

Also, while it may be correct to say that computers don't "fear death", there's no reason that "risk to self" can't be part of the criteria for decision making by an autonomous system.

[beejee]

Too many people still driving around drunk sadly counters that point.

[darkerside]

Humans are fixable in that they are held accountable. One person can be taken off the road if they are unfit to drive. (Revoke license, imprison, etc). Then the incident has become Someone's Fault, and society can move on.

[toasterlovin]

I’d personally rather have less death and mayhem than be able to blame someone for it...

[darkerside]

That's a fine opinion, but it's the minority. Maybe not in the abstract, but as soon as you have unexplainable deaths (meaning there's nobody to blame), people freak the fuck out.

[_red]

how do you see insurance working? why would drivers be responsible to have insurance when the car is completely controlled by bigcorp programmers?

[jedberg]

I have to have insurance now, even though a lot of the functions of my car are controlled by their software.

Remember when the Toyota had that problem of the accelerator "getting stuck" because the software didn't disengage? Initially the owners' insurances were paying out, until it happened enough that they were able to prove it was Toyota's fault, and then Toyota had to pay them back.

I imagine in a self driving world it would work the same way. You get insurance, the car has a crash, your insurance and the manufacturer fight out whose fault it is.

[Erlich_Bachman]

Sometimes it seems that critics of something like self-driving cars want so badly for the project to fail that they themselves fail to see obvious solutions.

The insurance will work much better than it does today, because insurance in it's core is about spreading the risks and calculating exact costs of those risks, it's about calculating statistics of negative events and predicting total costs of such events for the entire fleets.

ALL parts of that equation are just better calculated if all cars were automatic, - you can better calculate number of accidents, you can see details of all accidents because there is blackbox data including videos, you can compare cars to each other because a Tesla with same hardware drives in exactly the same way as another one (which cannot be said for human drivers), they don't have to calculate for weird human risk activities such as drinking or being tired, they can run simulations of the same situation on the same software etc. etc.

Insurance is not going to have any problems, insurance is going to love it and make a lot of money on the self-driving cars, they are a perfect fit for each other. Insurance companies don't even care for whom do they have to pay to, they just care that the statistic of the number of failures is correctly represented and that manufacturers don't lie about those statistics - that is all they care about, they calculate a simple equation, that's all insurance is about...

[supertrope]

Insurers like standards and features that can be easily verified and improve predictability of the crowd. The issue with high tech solutions, especially mono-cultures is malicious hacking or outages of central services that result in simultaneous failure. An insurer can't handle 50% of cars crashing in the same year.

[spookthesunset]

Insurance would be a nightmare for a manufacturer. Every accident will initially be pegged to the auto maker (as it should be.. it’s their code!). The auto maker will always try to weasel out and blame the passenger-owners of the car (they didn’t maintain it, the paint was dirty and messed with the sensors, the tire pressure was 2 PSI lower than average).

And if you go with the “nobody will own cars, you’ll just summon one” model... well the fleet owner will just sue the manufacturer instead.

[supertrope]

Just like Tesla blames dead drivers for using "autopilot." "They should have kept their hands on the wheel and been paying attention." No you can't have a copy of the data.

[lsc]

Seems like it would mostly be the manufacturers that would have to insure the cars, at least for the expensive part (liability)

For me? I'm a self-driving skeptic, but... if the manufacturer was willing to properly insure it, (I mean, a reasonable amount of insurance, at least a statistical life worth) I'd ride in the thing. I think that's an honest signal.

[_red]

>... if the manufacturer was willing to properly insure it,

Its not just the manufacturers, who is underwriting all that insurance?

Ford sells approximately 2.3M vehicles per year, imagine if 50% of self-driving...over a 5 year period that 5.5M cars...if each one needs to carry a potential 1M policy thats an incredible amount of liability on someone's balance sheet. (even if you say the policy is only 100K thats still $576B in liability)

Thats only for Ford, add in all vehicles manufacturers and extend that to 10-15 years into the future and thats an incredible amount.

However there is nothing to say that a new laws won't be passed to allow manufacturers to escape liability. Most likely this is what will happen (see vaccine courts, etc)

[sib]

But all of those cars are insured (and that insurance is underwritten) today. So the liability already lives on the balance sheet of insurance companies. Maybe the specific companies change...

[lsc]

eh, right now most people are massively underinsured; minimum coverage in California is like $35k, and most insurance companies won't sell you a plan with more than a half million of liability (at least not without an umbrella policy) - if we stop subsidizing driving through pushing costs on to victims of accidents, the cost of driving will go up. But yeah, it should be about the cost of a good umbrella policy+auto policy is now, modulo any savings if the self-driving car gets in fewer accidents.

[grey-area]

but it is some incomprehensible black box of weights, I won't be getting in that car.

You don't understand the complex weighted probabilities in your doctor's head either, but you trust them to diagnose cancer (which incidentally machine learning is beating humans at). None of the algorithms in doctors' heads can be formally proved to work in all circumstances, nor can the code that runs medical equipment.

A full understanding of complex systems (machine or human controlled) is not possible today in many domains, that's why we measure results. If the data shows that self-driving cars are safer, we will switch. At present, that's what it shows.

As to special roads/markers, these would make the technology less effective at dealing with the unexpected (crash ahead, moose on road, cyclist in the lane etc), and many of the leading companies don't think they are necessary. I can see cars forming networks which report danger, or adding more sensors, but don't think our roads will have to change for self driving, which will be prevalent within the decade IMO without infrastructure changes.

[rorykoehler]

5g networks could greatly help bridge the technical gap. A good example of unforeseen consequences similar to smartphones and 4g transforming society.

[supertrope]

I don't understand how a vehicle or any other real time system can rely on 5G. For example, electrical utilities have such a critical responsibility for matching supply to demand and maintaining exactly 50/60Hz that the landline phone network is not good enough, they have to maintain a private signaling network. Cellular networks are notoriously unreliable with dead zones, dropped calls, congestion, power failure, etc. Millimeter wave 5G is even worse with line of sight coverage zones measured in meters.

[fastball]

There is no one solution that is meant to not fail.

It is layers of redundancy. If one fails, the car continues to operate normally. If all are operating at peak, the car is near perfect. If multiple fail, it operates with somewhat degraded performance, but still markedly better than a human.

* Digital maps * P2P Networks * Human-reported obstructions and changes (Waze) * Machine-focused traffic markings * LIDAR * Cameras

[fastball]

"I'm going to agree with the side I already agreed with."

... ok.