Plus there is an opportunity for all the cars to learn the same lesson at once and forever.
Also humans can learn from this too. It’s not hard to imagine a new type of safety cone that has an explicit sign for autonomous vehicles to stop far far away.
>It’s not hard to imagine a new type of safety cone that has an explicit sign for autonomous vehicles to stop far far away.
Two things:
The promise of self-driving cars is that they can operate themselves in an environment not specifically designed for them. If that promise is broken, and it's the position of the industry that things like traffic signals, construction, emergency services, road markings etc need to be modified for functionality with self-driving cars then I think public will to accommodate them dries up quickly.
That being said, I can imagine having a lot of fun with a physical token that can remotely stop an autonomous car.
> It’s not hard to imagine a new type of safety cone that has an explicit sign for autonomous vehicles to stop far far away.
Car companies will never build in failsafes like that, it would be too easy for anyone to put up those signs anywhere. Cars and streets are made for human drivers, there is no way around it and no alternative to making your car AI as good as human drivers. If you can't do that, you can make a much simpler train "AI" and put it on tracks. We did that in the 60s.
The point of autonomous vehicles is to not have to totally reshape the world before being able to accommodate them. But small shifts like adjusting signs to also be easily read by autonomous vehicles aren't that crazy.
It'd just be done such that new signage is made to be easily readable, so that over time, as old stuff is replaced, the signage becomes more readable for machines.
This sort of thing can also benefit regular vehicles.
It's corralling in the possible range of the vehicles - anywhere without the enhanced signage will have to be no man's land. If an autonomous car drives to a small town that doesn't have the enhanced cones and gets into an accident at a construction zone whose fault is it?
I'm not sure what "This sort of thing can also benefit regular vehicles." means in this instance. If the cone is machine readable how does that help me?
Enhanced signage doesn't mean that the cars shouldn't be able to read regular signage, it just means that future usages of signage will make the task easier and lower risk. As such, locations without the signage aren't "no man's land". Would be similar to how many places aren't outright banning ICE cars, just banning the sale of new ones at some point in the future. Allowing for a comparatively smooth transition.
The cones being machine readable would allow regular vehicles to also be given the ability to read them more reliably (and potentially with less equipment than needed by a current autonomous vehicle), so, they could do things like warn the driver, which could be valuable in reducing the cases of distracted drivers slamming into closed off lanes.
> Would be similar to how many places aren't outright banning ICE cars, just banning the sale of new ones at some point in the future. Allowing for a comparatively smooth transition.
This comparison doesn't make much sense. We're highlighting a dangerous failure in capability here, not a desire to change out the engine. Either engine works perfectly fine, it's secondary properties that we care about with transition. It's a primary responsibility of an autonomous vehicle to be able to identify and react to obstacles.
We either need the enhanced cones or we don't, but only a fraction of cones being enhanced means they aren't actually that useful or that the situations without them are inherently more dangerous. Are we OK with a situation where autonomous vehicles identify the enhanced cones 90% of the time but the non-enhanced 50%? No, we want both to be very high.
I grew up close to a city, (Worcester MA,) with plenty of weirdo streets like San Francisco, and had plenty of teenage friends who lived in the city or travelled through it.
Needless to say, we didn't get behind the wheel for the first time in Worcester. We stayed in calmer streets until we were ready. When we drove in Worcester with learner's permits, we had adult supervision. Afterwards, we were only allowed to drive without adult supervision once we passed the driver's test. (I should also point out that, at the time, Worcester had a very serious problem with unlicensed drivers.)
Clearly, Cruise's vehicles aren't ready to drive in San Francisco without adult supervision.
But let's get back to the thesis: It is highly inappropriate to equate a machine with a human. Machines have no rights whatsoever. The "We've all got to learn sometime" attitude doesn't apply to this discussion, because an autonomous car is not a human.
What instead applies to this argument is conventional engineering and business development: Where is it appropriate to run Cruise's early marketing experiments, where bugs (and other unanticipated behavior) is expected? What are the appropriate limitations to put on vehicles when they have no driver? For example, what if the first use of the vehicles was a private resort (like Disney World) where the nature of a malfunctioning vehicle is easier to absorb because there are very few passenger vehicles.
> When we drove in Worcester with learner's permits, we had adult supervision. Afterwards, we were only allowed to drive without adult supervision once we passed the driver's test.
Am I to assume you never made a single mistake while doing so?
Of course not. Learner drivers stall, they forget turn signals, they don't keep up well with the flow of traffic. That is fine, that's all part of learning and perfectly normal.
> Clearly, Cruise's vehicles aren't ready to drive in San Francisco without adult supervision.
I don't think that is clear at all. Sure, they're making mistakes, but so did you and I and everyone else that ever learned to drive.
> But let's get back to the thesis: It is highly inappropriate to equate a machine with a human. Machines have no rights whatsoever. The "We've all got to learn sometime" attitude doesn't apply to this discussion, because an autonomous car is not a human.
I don't think that has anything to do with it. Driving a car is not a "right" that all humans have, it's a privilege that can be quickly taken away.
Everyone is afforded the opportunity to learn at some point, and we need self-driving vehicles to have that opportunity too. Fast forward 20 (or whatever it is) years to when self-driving vehicles are much, much safer, they mean long-haul truckers don't have to be away from home in an unsafe and unhealthy profession, they mean less vehicles on the road, etc. etc.
Society NEEDS those benefits, and if we never give the self-driving vehicles the opportunity to learn, we'll never get there.
> What instead applies to this argument is conventional engineering and business development: Where is it appropriate to run Cruise's early marketing experiments, where bugs (and other unanticipated behavior) is expected? What are the appropriate limitations to put on vehicles when they have no driver? For example, what if the first use of the vehicles was a private resort (like Disney World) where the nature of a malfunctioning vehicle is easier to absorb because there are very few passenger vehicles.
Absolutely, those are very important discussions to have. They are being had, by people in a position to make those decisions. Like a million things in our society, if you don't like the decisions they're making, you need to get yourself into that position.
Again, the whole thesis of your argument is that you're equating robotic cars with humans. Your statements are irrelevant because robotic cars are not humans.
For example: Yes I did stall, but I did not block traffic for 20 minutes. I started the car and moved the shifter from 3rd to 1st. I did not require outside intervention to move my car.
I am also a person with fundamental human rights. A self-driving car has no rights, and deserves no empathy.
Which is why I'm trying to refocus the discussion back to "tech."
For example, when we talk about disruptive tech: The early customers need to be willing to put up with the "faults." In this case, San Francisco's emergency response departments aren't willing to put up with these faults.
Likewise, when we talk about choosing a market for early markets: That means making sure the market is well-chosen to suite the capabilities of the tech. One of the issues in San Francisco is that demand for self-driving cars outstrips the capabilities at this point. IE, it's better to choose a place where Cruise can meet the demand.
> I am also a person with fundamental human rights. A self-driving car has no rights, and deserves no empathy.
Are you saying that driving a vehicle is a fundamental human right?
Becuase it is absolutely 100% not.
> In this case, San Francisco's emergency response departments aren't willing to put up with these faults.
What are you talking about? San Francisco's emergency response departments absolutely ARE putting up with these faults, and the regulators and people who make decisions about if they should or should not be on those streets are deciding they should be.
I understand the self-driving cars can be inconvenient right now, but that always happens when you're aiming for improvement or progress. When lanes get added to a road the traffic suffers during construction. When you renovate your kitchen it's painful to live in during the work, etc. etc.
Just because it's inconvenient doesn't mean you shouldn't do it - the eventual improvement will be worth it.!
Also humans can learn from this too. It’s not hard to imagine a new type of safety cone that has an explicit sign for autonomous vehicles to stop far far away.