ARE SELF-DRIVING CARS A THREAT ??

It'll go into oncoming traffic. Higher chance of survival for the occupants of the cars than pedestrians.

And what would you do if you were in that situation?

 

Driverless cars will never be able to off-road the way we can, so conventional vehicles won't be gone anytime soon. Driverless cars that can winch themselves up a stupid trail or out of a ditch would be sweet to watch though.

 

Likely wouldn't have enough time to make a calculated decision, it'd be some combination of swerving, braking and pants-sh!tting. Not really the point.

AI can process information at exponentially faster rates so you could program the computer to make an educated decision in emergency scenarios. I guess you could also just keep it real simple and program "if obstacle, hit brake" but why do that if it could recognize that making a dangerous maneuver (full brake at speeds) to avoid hitting a pedestrian is not an ideal scenario when the obstacle is a raccoon.

Presenting a computer with different scenarios and asking it to choose the most effective is nothing new. I'm just saying if the most effective is based on least loss of human life it's not always the least tragic. Does that factor in at all?

 

Self driving cars are a bigger threat than the automatic transmission conspiracy.

 

if one day my car can drive shit faced me home from the bar sign me up haha

 

When surveyed, many people are supportive of self-driving cars.
But when asked about a self-driving AMBULANCE.... the support drops to almost zero. To me, that speaks volumes.

 

How would this scenario end if it were a human driving the car rather than a computer?

 

Yeah, just like when that stupid person blows through a red light and plows into your family and kills your kids.

 

I welcome driverless cars when the time is right. I can't stand other drivers idiocy, nor the sheer inefficiency of roadways due to people driving on them. I'll damn anyones "right to drive" in lieu of driverless cars any day. Anything off the roadway however is free game for manual driving (dunes, deserts, trails, etc.)

That doesn't make any sense. Imagine a future that you could just press a button if in a health emergency, robo ambulance shows up to your house at high speed because all the driverless cars were in sync with its pathway to your house so they slow down and clear out the way faster than any bozo human beings. Then the EMS crew hops out, takes care of your ass and gets you inside, then its boom straight back to hospital at high speed, which is possible with driverless cars also being on the road.

 

Op... would you really want a Car from the 60s/70s as your main mode of transportation? Let's be honest... they maybe have been cool at the time but those things are horrid to drive and live with.

Self driving cars will be so much safer in 99.999 percent of situations. hell, in that "child running into the street" situation cars may very well be programmed to slow down and be more cautious on residential streets at times when kids are likely to be out playing. And anyone that says "I don't want my car driving slower in neighborhoods" is a moron.

 

Your options are too limited. AI would be running on countless situational algorithms. Whose to say there isn't an option 4+?

Example: Right lane car with kids in direct path slows down drastically and swerves to left to avoid kids....all other cars to left in the swerving cars path hit brakes simultaneously to also slow down and avoid further accident. Traffic to rear follows in suit. Problem avoided, no retarded ultimatum type situation needed.

 

I'm far more worried about those stupid people killing me or a loved one than I am about me killing one of them.

 

There is no one set way it would end. The human would do what they thought was best likely factoring in loss of life, prolonging their own life, and make a decision based on that. I would think somewhere factored in there would be that whole "women and children first" mentality where the innocent are given precedence. Not sure if women still factor in today with the nonsense we are going through now but regardless it would depend on the person.

I'm confused why you keep circling back around to what I would do or what humans would do. We're talking about self-driving cars, and why they are oh-so-scary. My fear with these cars is they don't have a conscious. It'll do what it's programmed, so what's it programmed to do?

Here's a selfish scenario to consider, say you're in your self-driving car going down a steep mountain grade, two lane road. You come around a blind curve and there are 10 cyclists. Something causes one of the cyclists, who were already going at a much slower speed, to crash and takes down the others throwing bike and people across both lanes. Now they're stopped, injured and you're bearing down on them at speed with very little reaction time as you came up on them around a blind curve on a grade and they are stopped. Does your car make the decision of what to do based on least loss of human life? If so:

1.) Go left off the cliff killing one.

2.) Mow over multiple people.

 

While I appreciate your input on my "retarded" conversation seems like you're assuming quite a bit including that the children haven't made it far enough into the lane that a small left adjustment doesn't carry the far left car into oncoming traffic and that either all cars surrounding the self-driving car are also self-driving or just full of the most excellent defensive drivers.

I will admit that you're right that while I only see three possibilities perhaps the computer sees many more. Wasn't really the point of my retarded scenario. It was more in a no-win situation where someone will die what will the computer be programmed to do?

 

This would never happen. A self driving car won't ever allow itself to drive faster than it can stop, let alone drive around an obstacle where it cannot see the road ahead. It will simply slow down and take it safely, just like a good, smart, attention-paying human driver should do.

 

Paved roads only sir. Dirt roads won't have the buried infrastructure.

Besides, once you live in a fully automated world (See Wall-E) you'll be too fat to go hiking anyhow.

 

How does it react to a child who suddenly darts out in front of it to chase their cat/ball/ladybug?

Speed isn't the issue in all cases. Immediacy is. In theory, a CPU with sensors may react faster than the human brain. But can you program the AI to determine that swerving into a parked car/house is better than hitting a child that you can't brake quickly enough for?

 

In the optimal scenario of a driverless car world, we would no longer have any other manual driven vehicles. They just can't coincide together, as like you said, at that point you are introducing human into the equation. As we all know, the wrecks that the test driverless vehicles are getting into are largely due to humans being in the mix.

I can't answer your question on the whole "no win situation". What I'm proposing is that in a world where we have optimized the technology, it won't happen. The possibilities for where this tech goes and the constraints it will find itself in are endless. Who is to say that we won't shrink down the size of passenger vehicles to imply better safety and maneuverability? Or lower speed limits in residential zones to avoid the sorts of scenarios you are referring to.

What if every car is so tightly linked technologically like one big mainframe that the car 20 vehicles back is actively scanning ahead and lets the impending car ahead that could potentially hit those kids know that it needs to act immediately?

 

Yep. They're called antilock brakes and yaw control.

 

You can't replace 253 million automobiles with AI driven ones overnight so there's going to be a period of time where there is a mix. In your scenario I agree that the likelihood of tragedy is greatly reduced.

Now if you can keep cyber-terrorists and the 16 year old douche in his parents basement who didn't get enough hugs from hacking into them for a little real-life bumper cars then I'm all for it.