The Money Mustache Community
Other => Off Topic => Topic started by: scottish on March 25, 2019, 06:12:24 PM
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Yes, I know, this is a speculative statement.
My nephew - an engineering student - was over for dinner a few months ago and I was grumbling about self driving cars and the safety issues associated with them.
He commented that "They just have to drive better than the average person."
I had trouble articulating a good argument to this statement. I pointed out that software implementations tend to have identical failure modes. So we'll tend to get sets of cars all failing in the same way maybe at the same time. For example, all self-driving Priuses at the save rev level could fail to work properly in a snow storm, causing (more) mass collisions on the 401. But this seemed a little speculative even to me.
And then today I was reading an article in the NYT about this very topic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/opinion/sunday/stick-shift-cars.html (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/opinion/sunday/stick-shift-cars.html)
I've always been skeptical of automated safety features. For example, I'd rather have 4 point safety harnesses than airbags. WTF, who thinks putting little bombs all around the cabin of a vehicle is a good idea? I think the NYT author does a good job of explaining what bothers me about self driving cars.
In order to get to self driving cars, there are really two approaches.
There's the big bang approach, where we put a self-driving car on the road, perhaps with a (un)safety driver who will take over when the car fails. As Uber tried to do in Phoenix last year.
Then there's the incremental approach, where we increase the level of automation in the vehicle, allowing massive field tests of new automation by providing assistance to the full time human driver. Tesla uses this approach, and drivers occasionally allow their vehicles to drive them into stopped trucks and bridge abutments.
So one weak link is the human. Once you remove the need to concentrate on driving, the driver will tend to, well, not concentrate on driving.
There's tons of technology experience on this forum. What do you guys think? Is there a good way to deploy automatic-driving technology? 'cause I don't really see one.
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Aside from the self-driving cars, I find the opinion piece irritating mostly because the author is a physician but provides no actual evidence to support his assertions (even though there is some evidence supporting the idea that technology encourages inattentiveness). I'm not sure how this relates to airbags or seatbelt designs since both are well-proven safety features not related to attention span.
But yes, I think that's the problem with any technology that allows for some automation in high-risk situations - humans aren't good at responding to sudden failures in these systems. Unless we have a truly proficient AI that can handle essentially any scenario, we will see accidents due to inattention. However, this is biased by the fact that no one writes articles on how a car prevented a driver who's texting from rear-ending someone on the interstate. That's way less interesting than "Tesla slams into semi-truck, blows up!". This gets back to my first point about the poor quality of this opinion piece due to the author's lack of supporting evidence and actual effort into researching this issue. No one cares about how good he is with a stick-shift.
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Tesla and Waymo are doing it right, with different approaches.
Tesla has their AI running on every Tesla on the road all the time, weather autopilot is enabled on the car or not. The AI is continually learning, and reporting when the driver does something different than it would have done. New updates run in this shadow mode until they are confident it’s safe.
Waymo builds simulations based on real world driving experience, then the software is put through millions of miles of simulation for every change before ever being deployed into a vehicle.
The key point here is both methods run through millions if not billions of “real world” scenarios before we even see a minuscule of their capability hits the road. This amount of mileage, and continued improvement is what will make self driving cars safer than humans.
For me the potential safety, way out ranks the potential risk. Self driving vehicles are fully alert 24/7, have an in-depth understanding what is surrounding the vehicle. I cannot say the same for myself. Yes further improvements will need to be made, yes someone will die in a self driving vehicle, but we’re already at the point where the autonomous technology is saving more lives/reducing accidents than are lost/caused.
My real concern is companies taking shortcuts in an attempt to catch up. As we saw with Uber and will likely see again.
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With the rampant problem of people texting while driving...yeah, I would happily replace everyone with self driving cars for the sake of collective safety.
I simply don't see humans as very safe drivers. Nor does anyone who spends any time in traffic.
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At least in the USA we seem to be okay with 15,000 deaths a year attributed to firearms. Why are we so concerned about AI driving being perfect? I'm being sarcastic and serious at the same time.
They'll get it right. I see self-driving cars as a moon shot effort. It just takes time. We aren't there yet.
The marketing departments however are building enthusiasm while the engineering departments are still working out the problems.
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Self-driving cars just have to be safer than the average person on average. As soon as that happens, it would be immoral to allow people to drive for themselves any more . . . because you know that it will cause more accidents/deaths/injuries than fully automated vehicle fleets.
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Self-driving cars just have to be safer than the average person on average. As soon as that happens, it would be immoral to allow people to drive for themselves any more . . . because you know that it will cause more accidents/deaths/injuries than fully automated vehicle fleets.
Once we get to that point it will be difficult if not impossible to get insurance for self-driving.
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Self-driving cars just have to be safer than the average person on average. As soon as that happens, it would be immoral to allow people to drive for themselves any more . . . because you know that it will cause more accidents/deaths/injuries than fully automated vehicle fleets.
Once we get to that point it will be difficult if not impossible to get insurance for self-driving.
I'm gonna disagree with both of these points. There are plenty of examples of "unsafe" things both in your home and outside of it that we all accept. I wouldn't call staircases and swimming pools immoral despite the fact that we know they kill thousands of people every year. We do have regulations regarding handrails and fences however. Taking away the freedom and enjoyment(for some) of owning and operating a car doesn't feel right.
Insurance will certainly change, but again you can still insure your home with all of it's dangers.
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Self-driving cars just have to be safer than the average person on average. As soon as that happens, it would be immoral to allow people to drive for themselves any more . . . because you know that it will cause more accidents/deaths/injuries than fully automated vehicle fleets.
Once we get to that point it will be difficult if not impossible to get insurance for self-driving.
I doubt that. You can get insurance for all kinds of dangerous and unnecessary stuff (FIRE@50 mentioned pools, and I'll add guns to the list). All that's required for someone to offer insurance is a reasonable way to assess the costs, and the auto industry has a century of experience under its belt.
And for what it's worth, I think self-driving cars will have to be much safer than the average human before humans will accept them as an alternative. As in 100x - 1000x safer.
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Then there's the incremental approach, where we increase the level of automation in the vehicle, allowing massive field tests of new automation by providing assistance to the full time human driver. Tesla uses this approach, and drivers occasionally allow their vehicles to drive them into stopped trucks and bridge abutments.
So one weak link is the human. Once you remove the need to concentrate on driving, the driver will tend to, well, not concentrate on driving.
This was exactly my biggest concern about getting / using Tesla's autopilot upgrade (I know, Teslas are not very Mustacian cars...). I was concerned that it would make me less attentive and less able to respond and that I would be placing too much trust in a system that was not ready to bear it.
However I have found it not to be true in practice. The car's current level of automation frees up my attention from the trivial portions of driving - things like lane keeping, going the right speed, not hitting the guy in front of me - and allows me to pay more attention to the overall situation.
Is there a motorcycle coming up fast behind me? Are there cars currently in my blind spots? Is there an upcoming traffic or merging problem that I'll have be prepared for? I'm more aware of these answers all the time now, not less. And yes, I'm still babysitting the car's lanekeeping and speed adjustments, it just requires a lesser percentage of my attention than doing it myself would.
Yeah people suck and some people will use half-finished self-driving as an excuse to text. But I think those same people would have been bad, inattentive drivers regardless of the car. The question is not just if the car is better than the average driver. I consider myself better-than-average (don't we all) but I think I still benefit from its assistance. But then you add in drunks, texters, or just plain worse-than-average drivers, and it seems obvious to me that self-driving cars will be a huge boon to mankind. I think they are already saving more lives than they cost even at this early stage of development.
Also that stick shift article is particularly unconvincing given that the only evidence he can come up with to support his position is a single study done on ADHD kids. Sure, people who by definition have a medically-diagnosably-hard time paying attention might benefit from a more constant stream of trivialities that force attention. That doesn't make it true for most people in general.
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I believe costs will drive the change(see what I did there?).
I agree the public is going to have a hard time. They will be taken to the self driving future kicking and screaming.
Specifically, insurance costs will price out human drivers. Insurance companies are great at looking at data and making non-emotional decisions that effect their bottom line.
I believe that as technology improves, costs to insure automated cars will fall, and the human drivers will be seeing huge increases, since they will be the only cars getting in accidents(or as close to near zero as we can get). Finally, you just will not find a carrier that insures human drivers.
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Tesla has their AI running on every Tesla on the road all the time, weather autopilot is enabled on the car or not. The AI is continually learning, and reporting when the driver does something different than it would have done. New updates run in this shadow mode until they are confident it’s safe.
Hey is this true? Do you have a reference?
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Self-driving cars just have to be safer than the average person on average. As soon as that happens, it would be immoral to allow people to drive for themselves any more . . . because you know that it will cause more accidents/deaths/injuries than fully automated vehicle fleets.
Once we get to that point it will be difficult if not impossible to get insurance for self-driving.
I'm gonna disagree with both of these points. There are plenty of examples of "unsafe" things both in your home and outside of it that we all accept. I wouldn't call staircases and swimming pools immoral despite the fact that we know they kill thousands of people every year. We do have regulations regarding handrails and fences however. Taking away the freedom and enjoyment(for some) of owning and operating a car doesn't feel right.
Insurance will certainly change, but again you can still insure your home with all of it's dangers.
Allowing someone to drive, knowing that there is both a greater risk of injury and harm to others and no real reason whatsoever beyond vanity to do so is immoral.
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Then there's the incremental approach, where we increase the level of automation in the vehicle, allowing massive field tests of new automation by providing assistance to the full time human driver. Tesla uses this approach, and drivers occasionally allow their vehicles to drive them into stopped trucks and bridge abutments.
So one weak link is the human. Once you remove the need to concentrate on driving, the driver will tend to, well, not concentrate on driving.
This was exactly my biggest concern about getting / using Tesla's autopilot upgrade (I know, Teslas are not very Mustacian cars...). I was concerned that it would make me less attentive and less able to respond and that I would be placing too much trust in a system that was not ready to bear it.
However I have found it not to be true in practice. The car's current level of automation frees up my attention from the trivial portions of driving - things like lane keeping, going the right speed, not hitting the guy in front of me - and allows me to pay more attention to the overall situation.
Is there a motorcycle coming up fast behind me? Are there cars currently in my blind spots? Is there an upcoming traffic or merging problem that I'll have be prepared for? I'm more aware of these answers all the time now, not less. And yes, I'm still babysitting the car's lanekeeping and speed adjustments, it just requires a lesser percentage of my attention than doing it myself would.
Yeah people suck and some people will use half-finished self-driving as an excuse to text. But I think those same people would have been bad, inattentive drivers regardless of the car. The question is not just if the car is better than the average driver. I consider myself better-than-average (don't we all) but I think I still benefit from its assistance. But then you add in drunks, texters, or just plain worse-than-average drivers, and it seems obvious to me that self-driving cars will be a huge boon to mankind. I think they are already saving more lives than they cost even at this early stage of development.
Also that stick shift article is particularly unconvincing given that the only evidence he can come up with to support his position is a single study done on ADHD kids. Sure, people who by definition have a medically-diagnosably-hard time paying attention might benefit from a more constant stream of trivialities that force attention. That doesn't make it true for most people in general.
The automatic features on my vehicle are limited to the transmission, ABS, cruise control and EFI/engine management. EFI and ABS are way better than carburetors and no ABS. Cruise control is a neutral and I have a mild preference for manual transmissions.
It sounds like you have a Tesla then, is this correct? This is the first time I've heard the idea that the car can take care of the little picture stuff freeing the driver to worry about the big picture.
Is anyone else (on the forum) using driving assist features this way?
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Self-driving cars just have to be safer than the average person on average. As soon as that happens, it would be immoral to allow people to drive for themselves any more . . . because you know that it will cause more accidents/deaths/injuries than fully automated vehicle fleets.
Once we get to that point it will be difficult if not impossible to get insurance for self-driving.
I'm gonna disagree with both of these points. There are plenty of examples of "unsafe" things both in your home and outside of it that we all accept. I wouldn't call staircases and swimming pools immoral despite the fact that we know they kill thousands of people every year. We do have regulations regarding handrails and fences however. Taking away the freedom and enjoyment(for some) of owning and operating a car doesn't feel right.
Insurance will certainly change, but again you can still insure your home with all of it's dangers.
Allowing someone to drive, knowing that there is both a greater risk of injury and harm to others and no real reason whatsoever beyond vanity to do so is immoral.
What about situations that the self driving car can't handle? Do you think there'll be a manual mode? Or are you expecting the automation to be able to do everything except get out and shovel snow?
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Self-driving cars just have to be safer than the average person on average. As soon as that happens, it would be immoral to allow people to drive for themselves any more . . . because you know that it will cause more accidents/deaths/injuries than fully automated vehicle fleets.
Once we get to that point it will be difficult if not impossible to get insurance for self-driving.
I'm gonna disagree with both of these points. There are plenty of examples of "unsafe" things both in your home and outside of it that we all accept. I wouldn't call staircases and swimming pools immoral despite the fact that we know they kill thousands of people every year. We do have regulations regarding handrails and fences however. Taking away the freedom and enjoyment(for some) of owning and operating a car doesn't feel right.
Insurance will certainly change, but again you can still insure your home with all of it's dangers.
Allowing someone to drive, knowing that there is both a greater risk of injury and harm to others and no real reason whatsoever beyond vanity to do so is immoral.
What about situations that the self driving car can't handle? Do you think there'll be a manual mode? Or are you expecting the automation to be able to do everything except get out and shovel snow?
I'd assume that there will be a manual override for certain situations . . . but I'd also assume that if you cause a death or injury while overriding the automatic mode unnecessarily you will be treated quite harshly in a court of law.
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At least in the USA we seem to be okay with 15,000 deaths a year attributed to firearms. Why are we so concerned about AI driving being perfect? I'm being sarcastic and serious at the same time.
Are we only OK with half of the firearm deaths per year? What percentage of the AI car deaths will we be OK with?
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At least in the USA we seem to be okay with 15,000 deaths a year attributed to firearms. Why are we so concerned about AI driving being perfect? I'm being sarcastic and serious at the same time.
What percentage of the AI car deaths will we be OK with?
The percentage of manually driven car deaths - 1.
That's the tipping point where automatic driving becomes empirically better. But the beauty of automation is that it doesn't regress . . . it gets progressively better and better with each iteration.
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Self-driving cars just have to be safer than the average person on average. As soon as that happens, it would be immoral to allow people to drive for themselves any more . . . because you know that it will cause more accidents/deaths/injuries than fully automated vehicle fleets.
Once we get to that point it will be difficult if not impossible to get insurance for self-driving.
I'm gonna disagree with both of these points. There are plenty of examples of "unsafe" things both in your home and outside of it that we all accept. I wouldn't call staircases and swimming pools immoral despite the fact that we know they kill thousands of people every year. We do have regulations regarding handrails and fences however. Taking away the freedom and enjoyment(for some) of owning and operating a car doesn't feel right.
Insurance will certainly change, but again you can still insure your home with all of it's dangers.
Allowing someone to drive, knowing that there is both a greater risk of injury and harm to others and no real reason whatsoever beyond vanity to do so is immoral.
Oh come on. 100% of drivers die.
More seriously - driving is dangerous. It would be safer if we all took the bus; let's ban driving completely? It just doesn't work like that. Drinking coke makes you obese - we should ban coke.
I'd say that considering how much driving happens we're actually pretty amazingly good at it. Considering everything.
There is risk in going outside your house, there is risk in staying inside it. "But there is a really low chance it could kill me" is not a good reason to not... go for a walk/bike ride/list of other things including driving.
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Self-driving cars just have to be safer than the average person on average. As soon as that happens, it would be immoral to allow people to drive for themselves any more . . . because you know that it will cause more accidents/deaths/injuries than fully automated vehicle fleets.
Once we get to that point it will be difficult if not impossible to get insurance for self-driving.
I'm gonna disagree with both of these points. There are plenty of examples of "unsafe" things both in your home and outside of it that we all accept. I wouldn't call staircases and swimming pools immoral despite the fact that we know they kill thousands of people every year. We do have regulations regarding handrails and fences however. Taking away the freedom and enjoyment(for some) of owning and operating a car doesn't feel right.
Insurance will certainly change, but again you can still insure your home with all of it's dangers.
Allowing someone to drive, knowing that there is both a greater risk of injury and harm to others and no real reason whatsoever beyond vanity to do so is immoral.
Oh come on. 100% of drivers die.
More seriously - driving is dangerous. It would be safer if we all took the bus; let's ban driving completely? It just doesn't work like that. Drinking coke makes you obese - we should ban coke.
Taking the bus would be safer, but cars fill a niche for personal transportation that buses do not.
For the bulk of driving that takes place there is zero benefit to manually driving a car over automatically driving a car.
These are completely different scenarios you're comparing.
There is risk in going outside your house, there is risk in staying inside it. "But there is a really low chance it could kill me" is not a good reason to not... go for a walk/bike ride/list of other things including driving.
Agreed, but there is benefit and utility in going out of your home. There is no benefit in being able to drive manually over being driven in an automated vehicle for the vast majority of uses of vehicles. Again, completely different scenarios.
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Self-driving cars just have to be safer than the average person on average. As soon as that happens, it would be immoral to allow people to drive for themselves any more . . . because you know that it will cause more accidents/deaths/injuries than fully automated vehicle fleets.
Once we get to that point it will be difficult if not impossible to get insurance for self-driving.
I'm gonna disagree with both of these points. There are plenty of examples of "unsafe" things both in your home and outside of it that we all accept. I wouldn't call staircases and swimming pools immoral despite the fact that we know they kill thousands of people every year. We do have regulations regarding handrails and fences however. Taking away the freedom and enjoyment(for some) of owning and operating a car doesn't feel right.
Insurance will certainly change, but again you can still insure your home with all of it's dangers.
Allowing someone to drive, knowing that there is both a greater risk of injury and harm to others and no real reason whatsoever beyond vanity to do so is immoral.
Do you have a staircase in your house? Was it immoral to build that home with a staircase knowing that it is incredibly unsafe and that you could just live in a one story home? I would say no.
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Self-driving cars just have to be safer than the average person on average. As soon as that happens, it would be immoral to allow people to drive for themselves any more . . . because you know that it will cause more accidents/deaths/injuries than fully automated vehicle fleets.
Once we get to that point it will be difficult if not impossible to get insurance for self-driving.
I'm gonna disagree with both of these points. There are plenty of examples of "unsafe" things both in your home and outside of it that we all accept. I wouldn't call staircases and swimming pools immoral despite the fact that we know they kill thousands of people every year. We do have regulations regarding handrails and fences however. Taking away the freedom and enjoyment(for some) of owning and operating a car doesn't feel right.
Insurance will certainly change, but again you can still insure your home with all of it's dangers.
Allowing someone to drive, knowing that there is both a greater risk of injury and harm to others and no real reason whatsoever beyond vanity to do so is immoral.
What about situations that the self driving car can't handle? Do you think there'll be a manual mode? Or are you expecting the automation to be able to do everything except get out and shovel snow?
I'd assume that there will be a manual override for certain situations . . . but I'd also assume that if you cause a death or injury while overriding the automatic mode unnecessarily you will be treated quite harshly in a court of law.
The purely autonomous cars being tested today don't even have a steering wheel. You would have no chance to override.
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Do you have a staircase in your house? Was it immoral to build that home with a staircase knowing that it is incredibly unsafe and that you could just live in a one story home? I would say no.
You appear to be missing the argument.
There is utility in having stairs because they are used to transport you from level to level in a home where elevators are cost prohibitive. A multi-story home or apartment has utility (it's not possible for everyone to have a one story bungalow given space and money restrictions).
If there was a cheap, effective stair climbing device that was much safer than using stairs and would work in all instances that stairs are normally found . . . then yes, I'd argue that it would be immoral to continue using stairs.
There is no utility in being able to drive manually if it is safer to drive automated.
The purely autonomous cars being tested today don't even have a steering wheel. You would have no chance to override.
That just means that the bar will be higher for the automated cars before it can be accepted as safer. They'll have to be proven safer in all weather conditions, all light conditions, all road conditions.
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Tesla has their AI running on every Tesla on the road all the time, weather autopilot is enabled on the car or not. The AI is continually learning, and reporting when the driver does something different than it would have done. New updates run in this shadow mode until they are confident it’s safe.
Hey is this true? Do you have a reference?
Not all cars, just the ones that have purchased the Autopilot upgrade. And it's not "new updates" that are running in shadow mode, but the car's current software version (so while it's useful for AI training / feedback it doesn't help with validating new releases). But yeah the basic idea is accurate (https://electrek.co/2018/07/17/tesla-autopilot-miles-shadow-mode-report/), and Tesla talks about it openly.
The automatic features on my vehicle are limited to the transmission, ABS, cruise control and EFI/engine management. EFI and ABS are way better than carburetors and no ABS. Cruise control is a neutral and I have a mild preference for manual transmissions.
It sounds like you have a Tesla then, is this correct? This is the first time I've heard the idea that the car can take care of the little picture stuff freeing the driver to worry about the big picture.
Correct, I have a Tesla Model 3.
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I believe costs will drive the change(see what I did there?).
I agree the public is going to have a hard time. They will be taken to the self driving future kicking and screaming.
Specifically, insurance costs will price out human drivers. Insurance companies are great at looking at data and making non-emotional decisions that effect their bottom line.
I believe that as technology improves, costs to insure automated cars will fall, and the human drivers will be seeing huge increases, since they will be the only cars getting in accidents(or as close to near zero as we can get). Finally, you just will not find a carrier that insures human drivers.
I don't think all the public will have a hard time with it. There will be plenty of early adopters that will jump at the chance to use self-driving cars.
The place where public opinion may be an issue is laws regarding self-driving cars on the roads. If there is a lot of fear self-driving cars may be stymied by being banned on the roads. There will probably always be jurisdictions that will allow testing to look more tech friendly (ie Pittsburgh).
It is possible that self-driving cars will be more dangerous initially, but, unlike with human drivers, every incident will prompt improvements.
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Hey is this true? Do you have a reference?
Not all cars, just the ones that have purchased the Autopilot upgrade. And it's not "new updates" that are running in shadow mode, but the car's current software version (so while it's useful for AI training / feedback it doesn't help with validating new releases).
Actually let me walk some of those restrictions back. It's apparently all "Autopilot Equipped" cars, may or may not be talking about having purchased the Autopilot upgrade. All modern Tesla cars come equipped with the Autopilot hardware, so that may be what they're talking about. (FYI you can turn data collection off in the settings if that's a concern).
And according to the Version 9.0 (https://www.tesla.com/blog/introducing-software-version-9) software announcement they *do* actually use shadow mode to verify the safety of new features before making them available.
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At least in the USA we seem to be okay with 15,000 deaths a year attributed to firearms. Why are we so concerned about AI driving being perfect? I'm being sarcastic and serious at the same time.
Are we only OK with half of the firearm deaths per year? What percentage of the AI car deaths will we be OK with?
•In 2016, 10,497 people died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for 28% of all traffic-related deaths in the United States.1 (CDC website)
For 2016 specifically, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data shows 37,461 people were killed in 34,436 motor vehicle crashes, an average of 102 per day.[1] (Wikipedia)
I think general American culture is that we're completely fine with thousands of deaths as long as our personal liberties aren't limited. Just look at people who will aggressively drive during high traffic times just to get a car length or two ahead... they aren't getting to their destination much faster, maybe a matter of seconds or a minute, but they're still willing TO RISK THEIR LIVES for that feeling of control. And if you drive the speed limit, you're the asshole, and people will claim that you're even a danger to other drivers because you don't want to drive faster and break the law.
The soda example is true too... you can't make eating junk food illegal, even if poor eating decisions kill tens of thousands of Americans a year. Don't you dare step on my freedom!
Insurance being a driver of accepting self-driving cars does make sense though, because the collective power of insurance companies can overcome the control culture of the average driver.
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Do you have a staircase in your house? Was it immoral to build that home with a staircase knowing that it is incredibly unsafe and that you could just live in a one story home? I would say no.
You appear to be missing the argument.
There is utility in having stairs because they are used to transport you from level to level in a home where elevators are cost prohibitive. A multi-story home or apartment has utility (it's not possible for everyone to have a one story bungalow given space and money restrictions).
If there was a cheap, effective stair climbing device that was much safer than using stairs and would work in all instances that stairs are normally found . . . then yes, I'd argue that it would be immoral to continue using stairs.
There is no utility in being able to drive manually if it is safer to drive automated.
The purely autonomous cars being tested today don't even have a steering wheel. You would have no chance to override.
That just means that the bar will be higher for the automated cars before it can be accepted as safer. They'll have to be proven safer in all weather conditions, all light conditions, all road conditions.
There are countless of activities that are not immoral yet provide zero utility and would result in some unfortunate accidents every year. We allow people to skydive yet there is zero utility in jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.
This argument is akin to all motorcycles are immoral because cars are safer and perform the exact same utility.
I'm all for self-driving car technology and welcome it's advancement, especially as it becomes significantly safer than manually-driven cars. However, there are some who enjoy driving as recreation and they'll be around long after self-driving cars are vastly safer than the alternative. Driving a car will then fall into a perfectly legal and valid hobby activity - much like equestrian, flying a private plane, hunting, or any other thousands of activities which have a non-zero chance of harming the person doing them and innocent bystanders.
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Do you have a staircase in your house? Was it immoral to build that home with a staircase knowing that it is incredibly unsafe and that you could just live in a one story home? I would say no.
You appear to be missing the argument.
There is utility in having stairs because they are used to transport you from level to level in a home where elevators are cost prohibitive. A multi-story home or apartment has utility (it's not possible for everyone to have a one story bungalow given space and money restrictions).
If there was a cheap, effective stair climbing device that was much safer than using stairs and would work in all instances that stairs are normally found . . . then yes, I'd argue that it would be immoral to continue using stairs.
There is no utility in being able to drive manually if it is safer to drive automated.
The purely autonomous cars being tested today don't even have a steering wheel. You would have no chance to override.
That just means that the bar will be higher for the automated cars before it can be accepted as safer. They'll have to be proven safer in all weather conditions, all light conditions, all road conditions.
There are countless of activities that are not immoral yet provide zero utility and would result in some unfortunate accidents every year. We allow people to skydive yet there is zero utility in jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.
Agreed. In this case though, the difference is that the danger is to the person performing the activity. With cars, far too often the danger is to others.
This argument is akin to all motorcycles are immoral because cars are safer and perform the exact same utility.
Actually, I'd argue that cars do not perform the same utility as motorcycles. They are heavier, and consume more fuel. I'd assume that self driving motorcycle rules would soon follow self driving car rules though.
I'm all for self-driving car technology and welcome it's advancement, especially as it becomes significantly safer than manually-driven cars. However, there are some who enjoy driving as recreation and they'll be around long after self-driving cars are vastly safer than the alternative. Driving a car will then fall into a perfectly legal and valid hobby activity - much like equestrian, flying a private plane, hunting, or any other thousands of activities which have a non-zero chance of harming the person doing them and innocent bystanders.
I've got no problem with people who want to drive recreationally. They can do so on safe closed courses. To allow them to put other's lives at risk by playing around on the road is immoral though.
After all, equestrian activities don't take place on highways. You must get special licensing and follow an awful lot of rules to fly a private plane in public airspace. Ditto for hunting, etc.
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Very few people are driving the safest car commercially available today. Does that mean they are all immoral for doing so?
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Very few people are driving the safest car commercially available today. Does that mean they are all immoral for doing so?
How do you define 'safest car commercially available today'?
Safest for occupants? Safest for other party in the case of an accident? Safest in terms of electronic features like backup camera? Mechanically safe? My response would change depending on your definition.
Assuming the latter though, I'd argue that if you are driving a car on the highway with brakes or steering that don't work properly, yeah . . . you're being immoral.
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Very few people are driving the safest car commercially available today. Does that mean they are all immoral for doing so?
How do you define 'safest car commercially available today'?
Safest for occupants? Safest for other party in the case of an accident? Safest in terms of electronic features like backup camera? Mechanically safe? My response would change depending on your definition.
Assuming the latter though, I'd argue that if you are driving a car on the highway with brakes or steering that don't work properly, yeah . . . you're being immoral.
but this isn't an issue of morality really... there's are tons of immoral things we do that have an impact on ourselves and others and oftentimes the immorality of it is culturally acceptable.
Speeding is immoral but if you go drive at or under the speed limit you'll see hundreds of cars passing you... each one of those drivers is totally ok with breaking the law because they have a justification for it. Morality isn't really as important as most pretend it is.
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Speeding is immoral but if you go drive at or under the speed limit you'll see hundreds of cars passing you... each one of those drivers is totally ok with breaking the law because they have a justification for it. Morality isn't really as important as most pretend it is.
Speeding is illegal. Immoral does not equal illegal.
If we're approaching the question from a least-danger-to-others framework then not speeding / not driving at the rate of traffic could be considered immoral.
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Speeding is immoral but if you go drive at or under the speed limit you'll see hundreds of cars passing you... each one of those drivers is totally ok with breaking the law because they have a justification for it. Morality isn't really as important as most pretend it is.
Speeding is illegal. Immoral does not equal illegal.
If we're approaching the question from a least-danger-to-others framework then not speeding / not driving at the rate of traffic could be considered immoral.
Then we get into the gray realm of what is 'right'. I personally reject the idea that a group of people can, while breaking the law, pressure me into also breaking the law in the interest of safety. What is safe is for everyone going faster than the speed limit to slow down. I'd argue that is also the moral and right thing to do. But I know that you can't expect Americans to do that, so we get into this argument about how I should break the law to be a 'safe' driver.
Anyways, if self driving cars stick to the legal speed (which might very well be much higher in the future if they can handle increased speeds and decreased reaction times), this will be a moot point.
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Speeding is immoral but if you go drive at or under the speed limit you'll see hundreds of cars passing you... each one of those drivers is totally ok with breaking the law because they have a justification for it. Morality isn't really as important as most pretend it is.
Speeding is illegal. Immoral does not equal illegal.
If we're approaching the question from a least-danger-to-others framework then not speeding / not driving at the rate of traffic could be considered immoral.
Then we get into the gray realm of what is 'right'. I personally reject the idea that a group of people can, while breaking the law, pressure me into also breaking the law in the interest of safety. What is safe is for everyone going faster than the speed limit to slow down. I'd argue that is also the moral and right thing to do. But I know that you can't expect Americans to do that, so we get into this argument about how I should break the law to be a 'safe' driver.
That's not really my point. I'm not advocating for speeding. I'm just pointing out that you can't make the unsubstantiated claim that "speeding is immoral".
To respond to your actual point, I would argue that regardless of what you think is immoral most people obviously do not think that speeding is immoral, hence why they do it. If there is a dramatic perception shift around how much you endanger others by not using a self-driving car then that might not be viewed in the same category as speeding for forever.
I'm more interested in talking about OP's topic though. And to that I say that I think the future of self-driving cars is both bright and inevitable.
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I'm sure liability insurance for human drivers will continue for quite a while. If self driving cars improve overall road safety, than insurance rates should even go down (though decreased experience driving might make humans poorer drivers than they are now increasing rates). Eventually, it will likely be cheaper to upgrade to self-driving vehicles than to continue to insure human drivers which will probably cause many people to give up driving, but the option is likely to continue to exist as a luxury. Then we'll start to see restricted access roadways that only permit autonomous vehicles and gradually human drivers will become a novelty.
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However I have found it not to be true in practice. The car's current level of automation frees up my attention from the trivial portions of driving - things like lane keeping, going the right speed, not hitting the guy in front of me - and allows me to pay more attention to the overall situation.
Is there a motorcycle coming up fast behind me? Are there cars currently in my blind spots? Is there an upcoming traffic or merging problem that I'll have be prepared for? I'm more aware of these answers all the time now, not less. And yes, I'm still babysitting the car's lanekeeping and speed adjustments, it just requires a lesser percentage of my attention than doing it myself would.
I feel exactly the same. I find driving an older car stressful and draining. After 2 hours I'm wiped, my nerves are shot from monitoring and maintaining every little thing. However, we recently got a Honda with lane keeping and adaptive cruise control. I did a 5 hour non stop drive with it and came out feeling fine, could have done hours more. I still had to monitor the road, but I didn't have to focus hard with 100% attention. It was fine with 30-70% depending on conditions and let me focus on the bigger picture as you said. I'm ecstatic for the future of automated cars.
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There's the big bang approach, where we put a self-driving car on the road, perhaps with a (un)safety driver who will take over when the car fails. As Uber tried to do in Phoenix last year.
A very important part of that story that is often overlooked was the fact that the car's factory equipped automatic braking system detected the bicycle, but it couldn't brake because Uber disabled it. They thought the auto braking would interfere with the testing of their self driving technology. Uber made the car less safe.
In addition, Uber hired unqualified people to drive these things and the employees watched movies on their phones instead of monitoring the car. Uber created a perfect storm. It's really surprising they didn't have a crash sooner.
I think Waymo would be a much better example of a company that is taking self driving technology seriously.
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At least in the USA we seem to be okay with 15,000 deaths a year attributed to firearms. Why are we so concerned about AI driving being perfect? I'm being sarcastic and serious at the same time.
What percentage of the AI car deaths will we be OK with?
The percentage of manually driven car deaths - 1.
That's the tipping point where automatic driving becomes empirically better. But the beauty of automation is that it doesn't regress . . . it gets progressively better and better with each iteration.
I don't think this point about technology regression is very accurate. There are a couple of problems.
First - inadequate work on the next iteration. The Boeing 737 max 8 appears to be an example of this. A new flight safety features tilts the plane into a dive if one of the sensors fails. The pilots aren't able to easily disable the feature.
Second - the self driving technology is proprietary to each manufacturer. There's no knowledge sharing happening so that Tesla can learn from Waymo's experience (for example).
Third - there seems to be no independent oversight of the technology development. So we're trusting the manufacturers to do a good job without verifying that they are in fact doing a good job.
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At least in the USA we seem to be okay with 15,000 deaths a year attributed to firearms. Why are we so concerned about AI driving being perfect? I'm being sarcastic and serious at the same time.
What percentage of the AI car deaths will we be OK with?
The percentage of manually driven car deaths - 1.
That's the tipping point where automatic driving becomes empirically better. But the beauty of automation is that it doesn't regress . . . it gets progressively better and better with each iteration.
I don't think this point about technology regression is very accurate. There are a couple of problems.
First - inadequate work on the next iteration. The Boeing 737 max 8 appears to be an example of this. A new flight safety features tilts the plane into a dive if one of the sensors fails. The pilots aren't able to easily disable the feature.
Second - the self driving technology is proprietary to each manufacturer. There's no knowledge sharing happening so that Tesla can learn from Waymo's experience (for example).
Third - there seems to be no independent oversight of the technology development. So we're trusting the manufacturers to do a good job without verifying that they are in fact doing a good job.
Yeah, I totally agree on the third point. This needs to be regulated by governments for it to ever be safe. The example of Boeing is a great one that shows how well corporate self-regulation and testing works. Or doesn't. (I've spent some time working with Boeing engineers . . . it wouldn't be my choice to let 'em loose with no oversight).
Proprietary technology is not really a big deal, but I envision something like an independent set of tests that are government run which need to be successfully completed before a car is certified safe. Similar idea to what goes on with crash tests to achieve a certain minimum level of safety.
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imo long haul trucking will be a prime candidate for this first.
You have far less city driving, far more long stretches. There are multiple economic factors driving it.
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Self-driving cars just have to be safer than the average person on average. As soon as that happens, it would be immoral to allow people to drive for themselves any more . . . because you know that it will cause more accidents/deaths/injuries than fully automated vehicle fleets.
Then there's the incremental approach, where we increase the level of automation in the vehicle, allowing massive field tests of new automation by providing assistance to the full time human driver. Tesla uses this approach, and drivers occasionally allow their vehicles to drive them into stopped trucks and bridge abutments.
I think there is the answer already: Per mile driven Teslas and other autonomous cars are safer than other cars already.
And they will get better, while the human will not.
What about situations that the self driving car can't handle? Do you think there'll be a manual mode? Or are you expecting the automation to be able to do everything except get out and shovel snow?
For the foreseeable future there will always be a manual mode. I cannot see Teslas driving on a car train for example, or onto a car transport ship with <20cm between each car.
Do you have a staircase in your house? Was it immoral to build that home with a staircase knowing that it is incredibly unsafe and that you could just live in a one story home? I would say no.
I would argue that regardless of what you think is immoral most people obviously do not think that speeding is immoral, hence why they do it.
Some people seem to be troubled by the fact that something can be immoral and still be done happily ;)
A new flight safety features tilts the plane into a dive if one of the sensors fails.
There is a feature that would alarm if the two sensors make different data. That is a feature you have to pay extra though.
THAT is the real danger. And whoever was the person responsible for that financial decision should get into jail for manslaughter. It is bad enough for e.g. Tesla to put in the same battery but disable parts of it of you don't pay. But safety features that exist?!?
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At least in the USA we seem to be okay with 15,000 deaths a year attributed to firearms. Why are we so concerned about AI driving being perfect? I'm being sarcastic and serious at the same time.
What percentage of the AI car deaths will we be OK with?
The percentage of manually driven car deaths - 1.
That's the tipping point where automatic driving becomes empirically better. But the beauty of automation is that it doesn't regress . . . it gets progressively better and better with each iteration.
I don't think this point about technology regression is very accurate. There are a couple of problems.
First - inadequate work on the next iteration. The Boeing 737 max 8 appears to be an example of this. A new flight safety features tilts the plane into a dive if one of the sensors fails. The pilots aren't able to easily disable the feature.
...
For this it just has to be better than a human. How many accidents have been pilot error?
Also, the Boeing 737 Max issues are prompting a whole lot of scrutiny. There will be changes before those aircraft leave the ground again. If the accidents had been attributed purely to pilot error I don't think we would have as much expectation of correcting the issues.
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At least in the USA we seem to be okay with 15,000 deaths a year attributed to firearms. Why are we so concerned about AI driving being perfect? I'm being sarcastic and serious at the same time.
What percentage of the AI car deaths will we be OK with?
The percentage of manually driven car deaths - 1.
That's the tipping point where automatic driving becomes empirically better. But the beauty of automation is that it doesn't regress . . . it gets progressively better and better with each iteration.
I don't think this point about technology regression is very accurate. There are a couple of problems.
First - inadequate work on the next iteration. The Boeing 737 max 8 appears to be an example of this. A new flight safety features tilts the plane into a dive if one of the sensors fails. The pilots aren't able to easily disable the feature.
Second - the self driving technology is proprietary to each manufacturer. There's no knowledge sharing happening so that Tesla can learn from Waymo's experience (for example).
Third - there seems to be no independent oversight of the technology development. So we're trusting the manufacturers to do a good job without verifying that they are in fact doing a good job.
Yeah, I totally agree on the third point. This needs to be regulated by governments for it to ever be safe. The example of Boeing is a great one that shows how well corporate self-regulation and testing works. Or doesn't. (I've spent some time working with Boeing engineers . . . it wouldn't be my choice to let 'em loose with no oversight).
Proprietary technology is not really a big deal, but I envision something like an independent set of tests that are government run which need to be successfully completed before a car is certified safe. Similar idea to what goes on with crash tests to achieve a certain minimum level of safety.
I think the proprietary aspect is a big deal in the long run. As new techniques and methods are developed, they need public scrutiny. There's alot of synergy (I hate that word, but there you are) to be had by opening the kimono and allowing public evaluation of how each technique works.
If nothing else, society deserves the safest self-driving technology available & car companies should not be allowed to keep them confidential.
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Jesus, as much as I like the idea of self-driving vehicles, I'm really having trouble seeing it go full tilt in snowy/icy area's, or the worst, snowy with hills... Like the testing they did in Pittsburgh. I don't like driving all that much in snow (I'm in lake effect the snow-belt), and I sure as hell can't see me at this time, being in a SD vehicle in those type of conditions. Any links of how they deal with the issues I raise?
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Jesus, as much as I like the idea of self-driving vehicles, I'm really having trouble seeing it go full tilt in snowy/icy area's, or the worst, snowy with hills... Like the testing they did in Pittsburgh. I don't like driving all that much in snow (I'm in lake effect the snow-belt), and I sure as hell can't see me at this time, being in a SD vehicle in those type of conditions. Any links of how they deal with the issues I raise?
+1
I think self driving cars need roads with good lines on the sides and in the middle. And probably not too many potholes. This excludes most of Norway's smaller roads and practically all the roads in the winter.
You might want to follow the project they are going to do on Svalbard (Spitsbergen). I think they just implemented a self-driving buss there. And you could say they have quite snowy conditions there. I wonder whether the buss will be able to distinguish a polar bear from a pile of snow? The non so representative thing it that there is only 1 road there, so maybe they will just use beacons, like they have for robovacs.
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Although it's not yet a "self-driving car," a couple of days ago my wife and I test drove a 2019 Subaru Outback, which had some pretty cool AI features, like adaptive cruise control, lane keeper assist, blind spot detection, pre-collision automatic braking, etc. It was pretty amazing! We're planning on purchasing the car in late May and keeping it for ~10 years. Pretty sure it'll be the last car we ever buy that has to be driven by a human.
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Jesus, as much as I like the idea of self-driving vehicles, I'm really having trouble seeing it go full tilt in snowy/icy area's, or the worst, snowy with hills... Like the testing they did in Pittsburgh. I don't like driving all that much in snow (I'm in lake effect the snow-belt), and I sure as hell can't see me at this time, being in a SD vehicle in those type of conditions. Any links of how they deal with the issues I raise?
The great thing about self driving cars is if the conditions are unsafe, none of them will attempt to travel. Yes it’ll inconvenience some people, but it’ll be a whole lot safer than what we have today with morons driving in conditions they are not equipped to do so safely.
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Hey is this true? Do you have a reference?
Not all cars, just the ones that have purchased the Autopilot upgrade. And it's not "new updates" that are running in shadow mode, but the car's current software version (so while it's useful for AI training / feedback it doesn't help with validating new releases).
Actually let me walk some of those restrictions back. It's apparently all "Autopilot Equipped" cars, may or may not be talking about having purchased the Autopilot upgrade. All modern Tesla cars come equipped with the Autopilot hardware, so that may be what they're talking about. (FYI you can turn data collection off in the settings if that's a concern).
And according to the Version 9.0 (https://www.tesla.com/blog/introducing-software-version-9) software announcement they *do* actually use shadow mode to verify the safety of new features before making them available.
Thanks for taking the time to clarify my comment. FWIW, all autopilot equiped cars is all Tesla’s sold in the last 5 years or so, irrespective of the owner having purchased the Autopilot option.
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Although it's not yet a "self-driving car," a couple of days ago my wife and I test drove a 2019 Subaru Outback, which had some pretty cool AI features, like adaptive cruise control, lane keeper assist, blind spot detection, pre-collision automatic braking, etc. It was pretty amazing! We're planning on purchasing the car in late May and keeping it for ~10 years. Pretty sure it'll be the last car we ever buy that has to be driven by a human.
We have a 10 year (165.000 km) old Subaru Outback that doesn't have all these modern features. But it is currently driving very well.
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imo long haul trucking will be a prime candidate for this first.
You have far less city driving, far more long stretches. There are multiple economic factors driving it.
Totally agree with this statement. Straight runs with doubles and triples.
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I'm sick this morning, so I can't ride my bike and am a bit grumpy about it, so bear with me. My academic career involves a lot of technologies in use in self driving cars; machine learning, image analysis, 3d point clouds. I have numerous colleagues that work directly on actual self driving car projects (I chose to avoid the field).
THE SELF DRIVING CAR IS THE WORST BOOMERTECH, END RUN, TECHNOCRAT NIGHTMARE SOLUTION TO A PROBLEM EVER.
Look, you want to make roads safer? Ban fucking cars. Public transportation and bicycles. Also in my dreams I have a pony that can fly.
Oh, we can't do that!
Fine, I can probably identify 90% of driving infractions such as distracted driving, drunk driving, speeding, hit and runs, and otherwise shitty driving with technology that already exists that everybody carries around with themselves damn near 24/7: their cell phone.
But privacy!
See: Self driving cars.
The dream of me stumbling out of the bar, passing out in the safe and loving arms of my self driving car to be safely delivered home just isn't going to happen. But some dipshit bro at Uber thinks he can save ten bucks by eliminating the driver from my uber ride home and is willing to burn through billions in venture capital to prove he's right.
We can't even make a web browser that doesn't crash, I'm not holding out much hope for cars. Also something something 737max automation.
Unfortunately, we'll probably get a self driving car. At best, we can just hope the self driving car becomes the flying car of today. But probably not. The dipshit tech bros have too much invested. Shipping crappy, barely working products without considering the larger impacts to society has never stopped them before, why should it stop them now?
Maybe we'll adapt our infrastructure to self driving cars. Maybe they'll just be a plaything of rich retired boomers. Maybe when we take the human pleasure out of driving a car, we'll come to our senses and realize private car ownership is just a retarded idea anyway. My pony that can fly is also a unicorn.
Thanks, and good morning. I'll leave you with this: https://twitter.com/mcclure111/status/999762887735263232
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Jesus, as much as I like the idea of self-driving vehicles, I'm really having trouble seeing it go full tilt in snowy/icy area's, or the worst, snowy with hills... Like the testing they did in Pittsburgh. I don't like driving all that much in snow (I'm in lake effect the snow-belt), and I sure as hell can't see me at this time, being in a SD vehicle in those type of conditions. Any links of how they deal with the issues I raise?
Humans suck at driving in those conditions though.
I live in a frozen hellscape and on snowstorm days, 100+ accidents by 9am is not unusual. It's a frozen hellscape here every year, and yet almost no one here has specific winter driving training. There are courses, they are incredibly useful, and no one takes them.
All of the self driving cars will automatically use all of the techniques for handling slipping that local motorists have never bothered to learn. They also probably won't drive way too fast out of frustration with traffic, and if the self driving cars are all networked, then other cars will be able to anticipate the moves of merging vehicles.
Also, yes, as PP said, self driving cars need detectable lines in the road. OK, so eventually lines that don't need to be seen to be detected will be installed. Easy.
We may not be there yet, but the capacity is there for self driving cars to be INFINITELY safer than the idiot yahoos who currently occupy the road.
Ever driven in Montreal?
I would take a fleet of drunk robots over Montreal drivers any day.
Self driving of course has flaws, I just simply have no faith in humans to be collectively safe behind the wheel. We are TERRIBLE drivers. Truly, exceptionally, unreasonably terrible drivers.
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THE SELF DRIVING CAR IS THE WORST BOOMERTECH, END RUN, TECHNOCRAT NIGHTMARE SOLUTION TO A PROBLEM EVER.
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[long anti tech/car rant cropped]
So Waymo's self driving cars have successfully driven over 10,000,000 miles with only causing 1 accident that I know of so far which is a far better rate than most humans. So your anti tech rant is unfair. The technology does work and works very well when you aren't cutting corner (looking at you uber).
I understand you also just hate cars in general, but they are a necessity for much of the country that is too sparsely populated and spread out not to mention other factors like disabilities, injuries, and inhospitable weather.
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Automated driving is an inevitability. By 2025 the evidence will be indisputable that it is safer than human driving in all circumstances. By 2030 more miles will be driven automated than by humans. By 2035-2040 human driving will be outlawed or otherwise eliminated, most likely by being uninsurable.
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Automated driving is an inevitability. By 2025 the evidence will be indisputable that it is safer than human driving in all circumstances. By 2030 more miles will be driven automated than by humans. By 2035-2040 human driving will be outlawed or otherwise eliminated, most likely by being uninsurable.
2050 . . . skynet. :P
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Also, yes, as PP said, self driving cars need detectable lines in the road. OK, so eventually lines that don't need to be seen to be detected will be installed. Easy.
Easy enough to add some tech to the reflectors that get installed on major highways anyway. Probably would add less than $1 per lane mile of reflector to the manufacturing costs to add something like an RFID tag that says "this is a [color] reflector". No other change in road construction required; just use tagged reflectors. Of course not all roads get reflectors - I suppose tags could be embedded in the striping, but that would likely require changes to the striping equipment.
Also autonomous vehicles with accurate enough location tracking could map the lanes when visible and use the location tracking with previously developed maps when visibility is poor.
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Jesus, as much as I like the idea of self-driving vehicles, I'm really having trouble seeing it go full tilt in snowy/icy area's, or the worst, snowy with hills... Like the testing they did in Pittsburgh. I don't like driving all that much in snow (I'm in lake effect the snow-belt), and I sure as hell can't see me at this time, being in a SD vehicle in those type of conditions. Any links of how they deal with the issues I raise?
Humans suck at driving in those conditions though.
I live in a frozen hellscape and on snowstorm days, 100+ accidents by 9am is not unusual. It's a frozen hellscape here every year, and yet almost no one here has specific winter driving training. There are courses, they are incredibly useful, and no one takes them.
All of the self driving cars will automatically use all of the techniques for handling slipping that local motorists have never bothered to learn. They also probably won't drive way too fast out of frustration with traffic, and if the self driving cars are all networked, then other cars will be able to anticipate the moves of merging vehicles.
Also, yes, as PP said, self driving cars need detectable lines in the road. OK, so eventually lines that don't need to be seen to be detected will be installed. Easy.
We may not be there yet, but the capacity is there for self driving cars to be INFINITELY safer than the idiot yahoos who currently occupy the road.
Ever driven in Montreal?
I would take a fleet of drunk robots over Montreal drivers any day.
Self driving of course has flaws, I just simply have no faith in humans to be collectively safe behind the wheel. We are TERRIBLE drivers. Truly, exceptionally, unreasonably terrible drivers.
From a different perspective, I'm in a place where we get significant snowfall only about once every couple of winters. It's not enough to be worth the equipment to clear the roads, so most natives just stay home until it melts.
We do have a lot of people who've moved in from further north. I tell them that they may have experience driving in snow, but that's not relevant. Bubba in the huge truck behind them probably doesn't.
Once it's a mature technology I'd much rather see an automated vehicle behind me in the snow than a human driver.
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THE SELF DRIVING CAR IS THE WORST BOOMERTECH, END RUN, TECHNOCRAT NIGHTMARE SOLUTION TO A PROBLEM EVER.
...
[long anti tech/car rant cropped]
So Waymo's self driving cars have successfully driven over 10,000,000 miles with only causing 1 accident that I know of so far which is a far better rate than most humans. So your anti tech rant is unfair. The technology does work and works very well when you aren't cutting corner (looking at you uber).
I understand you also just hate cars in general, but they are a necessity for much of the country that is too sparsely populated and spread out not to mention other factors like disabilities, injuries, and inhospitable weather.
A web browser doesn't need to be 100% reliable, so it's not tested to the same level. The problem with the 737 Max looks like it's more about "Sure, Boeing, we here at the FAA will take your word for it" than whether or not systems can be developed that are safe. And they only have to be safer than human pilots.
I completely agree with the fact the whole hype glosses over the fact it still has all the other problems of over-reliance on cars. Most of the US may be very spread out, but 80% of the population is concentrated in urban areas. Saying the US is too spread out not to need cars is either untrue or just bad planning for most of the population.
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I completely agree with the fact the whole hype glosses over the fact it still has all the other problems of over-reliance on cars. Most of the US may be very spread out, but 80% of the population is concentrated in urban areas. Saying the US is too spread out not to need cars is either untrue or just bad planning for most of the population.
Statistic without context. Most of the US is in suburbs or exurbs. The definition of being "urban" is simply 2,500+ people in close proximity. That's a pretty low bar.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/11/data-most-american-neighborhoods-suburban/575602/
Vast majority of people live way to far from work, food, shopping to be without cars in US. New York City is the exception, not the rule.
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imo long haul trucking will be a prime candidate for this first.
You have far less city driving, far more long stretches. There are multiple economic factors driving it.
Totally agree with this statement. Straight runs with doubles and triples.
Except we already have this. It's way more fuel efficient than conventional trucking, it doesn't compete for space on the interstate or transcanada, and it has a very low operator requirement. Best of all the technology is mature and doesn't require billions to develop.
(http://www.cbj.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/CN-Rail-train-image.jpg)
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I completely agree with the fact the whole hype glosses over the fact it still has all the other problems of over-reliance on cars. Most of the US may be very spread out, but 80% of the population is concentrated in urban areas. Saying the US is too spread out not to need cars is either untrue or just bad planning for most of the population.
Statistic without context. Most of the US is in suburbs or exurbs. The definition of being "urban" is simply 2,500+ people in close proximity. That's a pretty low bar.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/11/data-most-american-neighborhoods-suburban/575602/
Vast majority of people live way to far from work, food, shopping to be without cars in US. New York City is the exception, not the rule.
Yeah, the prime example of bad planning. Suburbs.
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I completely agree with the fact the whole hype glosses over the fact it still has all the other problems of over-reliance on cars. Most of the US may be very spread out, but 80% of the population is concentrated in urban areas. Saying the US is too spread out not to need cars is either untrue or just bad planning for most of the population.
Statistic without context. Most of the US is in suburbs or exurbs. The definition of being "urban" is simply 2,500+ people in close proximity. That's a pretty low bar.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/11/data-most-american-neighborhoods-suburban/575602/
Vast majority of people live way to far from work, food, shopping to be without cars in US. New York City is the exception, not the rule.
As I said, just bad planning.
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Automated driving is an inevitability. By 2025 the evidence will be indisputable that it is safer than human driving in all circumstances. By 2030 more miles will be driven automated than by humans. By 2035-2040 human driving will be outlawed or otherwise eliminated, most likely by being uninsurable.
2050 . . . skynet. :P
I'm thinking more a Brazil-esque dystopia where nothing works quite right and we're all forced to buy self driving cars not because they are safer or better, but because we need to prop up an auto industry that's "too big to fail". Bicycles are banned from public roadways because we couldn't quite figure out how to keep the cars from mowing them down.
Meanwhile, some bureaucrat mistypes your street name in some database and everybody's car parked on that street suddenly thinks it's lost and drives off looking for home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKAc6yJI_fw
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imo long haul trucking will be a prime candidate for this first.
You have far less city driving, far more long stretches. There are multiple economic factors driving it.
Totally agree with this statement. Straight runs with doubles and triples.
Except we already have this. It's way more fuel efficient than conventional trucking, it doesn't compete for space on the interstate or transcanada, and it has a very low operator requirement. Best of all the technology is mature and doesn't require billions to develop.
<picture of a train>
What exactly is your point? We have both trains and human-driven semis today. Are you assuming that the entire shipping industry is incompetent and doesn't know what it's doing?
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imo long haul trucking will be a prime candidate for this first.
You have far less city driving, far more long stretches. There are multiple economic factors driving it.
Totally agree with this statement. Straight runs with doubles and triples.
Except we already have this. It's way more fuel efficient than conventional trucking, it doesn't compete for space on the interstate or transcanada, and it has a very low operator requirement. Best of all the technology is mature and doesn't require billions to develop.
<picture of a train>
What exactly is your point? We have both trains and human-driven semis today. Are you assuming that the entire shipping industry is incompetent and doesn't know what it's doing?
This makes me think of a quip from a fellow I know who built a lumber business from the ground up and was quite successful with it: "If you want it to get there on time, use a truck; if you want it to get there eventually, use a train."
There is absolutely a place for self-driving technology in the transportation sector, and the "just use a train" crowd is glossing over some severe limitations. It doesn't really make sense to think of the two as interchangeable - they each serve a valuable role, and if they didn't we wouldn't have them both. I work in the lumber industry, and a common arrangement is for sawmills deliver their lumber (comprising a very specific order of sizes/grade with a tight delivery window) by truck, while the residuals (commodity products like chips, bark, sawdust that are used for pulp/paper or burned for fuel) are delivered by train. I can assure you that the business that operate these mills have spent considerable effort to figure out the most cost effective means of delivery for their products.
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imo long haul trucking will be a prime candidate for this first.
You have far less city driving, far more long stretches. There are multiple economic factors driving it.
Totally agree with this statement. Straight runs with doubles and triples.
Except we already have this. It's way more fuel efficient than conventional trucking, it doesn't compete for space on the interstate or transcanada, and it has a very low operator requirement. Best of all the technology is mature and doesn't require billions to develop.
<picture of a train>
What exactly is your point? We have both trains and human-driven semis today. Are you assuming that the entire shipping industry is incompetent and doesn't know what it's doing?
This makes me think of a quip from a fellow I know who built a lumber business from the ground up and was quite successful with it: "If you want it to get there on time, use a truck; if you want it to get there eventually, use a train."
There is absolutely a place for self-driving technology in the transportation sector, and the "just use a train" crowd is glossing over some severe limitations. It doesn't really make sense to think of the two as interchangeable - they each serve a valuable role, and if they didn't we wouldn't have them both. I work in the lumber industry, and a common arrangement is for sawmills deliver their lumber (comprising a very specific order of sizes/grade with a tight delivery window) by truck, while the residuals (commodity products like chips, bark, sawdust that are used for pulp/paper or burned for fuel) are delivered by train. I can assure you that the business that operate these mills have spent considerable effort to figure out the most cost effective means of delivery for their products.
And that is exactly the point of problem, because the "most cost effective" way is only the most cost effective because a lot of the costs is not in the calculation. For example cost of CO2 in climate change damage. Usage of land. Other pollution.
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I completely agree with the fact the whole hype glosses over the fact it still has all the other problems of over-reliance on cars. Most of the US may be very spread out, but 80% of the population is concentrated in urban areas. Saying the US is too spread out not to need cars is either untrue or just bad planning for most of the population.
Statistic without context. Most of the US is in suburbs or exurbs. The definition of being "urban" is simply 2,500+ people in close proximity. That's a pretty low bar.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/11/data-most-american-neighborhoods-suburban/575602/
Vast majority of people live way to far from work, food, shopping to be without cars in US. New York City is the exception, not the rule.
As I said, just bad planning.
Bad planning? Starting when? 1700s? 1600s? The US has always been a huge amount of land with a relatively small population for the size. Other countries avoided this by having lots of people in a small space, ie: Japan, Western Europe, Southern England. The US spread out for many reasons and not simply bad planning. People historically don't voluntarily choose to live like sardines in dense urban areas, just recently (like last 30-40 years), that has become more hospitable. No amount of planning would have prevented this short of extreme govt intervention dictating no one could live X distance from a city center. A lot of this sprawl happened before those dense city centers even existed. Were people supposed to build dense super tall buildings exclusively initially in unpopulated prairie land?
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And that is exactly the point of problem, because the "most cost effective" way is only the most cost effective because a lot of the costs is not in the calculation. For example cost of CO2 in climate change damage. Usage of land. Other pollution.
It's a tragedy of the commons type of problem, and in this case, the "commons" (the global climate & atmosphere) is too large to expect any sort of cooperation among the individuals who depend on it. We must depend governments to intercede on our behalf, and so far our own government refuses to even formally acknowledge that the problem exists. You can't expect individuals and corporations to price in the negative externalities out of the goodness of their precious little hearts, because they'll simply become less competitive and lose market share to the entities that ignore the externalities. We are dealing in reality.
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I completely agree with the fact the whole hype glosses over the fact it still has all the other problems of over-reliance on cars. Most of the US may be very spread out, but 80% of the population is concentrated in urban areas. Saying the US is too spread out not to need cars is either untrue or just bad planning for most of the population.
Statistic without context. Most of the US is in suburbs or exurbs. The definition of being "urban" is simply 2,500+ people in close proximity. That's a pretty low bar.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/11/data-most-american-neighborhoods-suburban/575602/
Vast majority of people live way to far from work, food, shopping to be without cars in US. New York City is the exception, not the rule.
As I said, just bad planning.
Bad planning? Starting when? 1700s? 1600s? The US has always been a huge amount of land with a relatively small population for the size. Other countries avoided this by having lots of people in a small space, ie: Japan, Western Europe, Southern England. The US spread out for many reasons and not simply bad planning. People historically don't voluntarily choose to live like sardines in dense urban areas, just recently (like last 30-40 years), that has become more hospitable. No amount of planning would have prevented this short of extreme govt intervention dictating no one could live X distance from a city center. A lot of this sprawl happened before those dense city centers even existed. Were people supposed to build dense super tall buildings exclusively initially in unpopulated prairie land?
The US does have huge areas with sparse population, but only a small fraction of the US population lives in areas like that. New Jersey is more dense than Japan, and far more people live in places like New Jersey than Montana or Nebraska. It doesn't matter how dense the country as a whole is, but how dense the areas people actually live in are.
Planning and government intervention is exactly what put us here in the first place. We already had a lot of people living in dense cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, etc. We created policies that destroyed the urban fabric of those places while also making folks in those areas subsidize sprawl. Yes, planning could have prevented this because extreme govt intervention is what actually created the way our cities are currently laid out.
Also, you don't need the density of Manhattan to create an environment where a car is not a necessity. The current density of a lot of suburbs would work if it weren't for issues like the streets being disconnected, lack of sidewalks, lack of bicycle infrastructure, and opposition to mass transit. Our suburbs were laid out with the idea that people would never walk again, or sometimes purposefully to keep pedestrians out.
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Lack of population density is not a sufficient argument against public transport. I live in quite possibly one of the most rural areas of the midwest. We still manage to somehow pick every kid up right outside their house and deliver them to school dang near every day.
Solving the same problem for adults who can likely navigate a public transit transfer or two does not require a fleet of cars that can drive themselves.
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Bad planning? Starting when? 1700s? 1600s? The US has always been a huge amount of land with a relatively small population for the size. Other countries avoided this by having lots of people in a small space, ie: Japan, Western Europe, Southern England. The US spread out for many reasons and not simply bad planning. People historically don't voluntarily choose to live like sardines in dense urban areas, just recently (like last 30-40 years), that has become more hospitable. No amount of planning would have prevented this short of extreme govt intervention dictating no one could live X distance from a city center. A lot of this sprawl happened before those dense city centers even existed. Were people supposed to build dense super tall buildings exclusively initially in unpopulated prairie land?
Historically "everyone" lived in either villages or dense cities. Walkable distances.
But in the case of the US especially the car-city ideology was extremely intensive, like dougules said even with areas completely without sidewalks.
I strongly recommend reading about the comparison between North America and Japan on zoning planning. Very interesting stuff.
https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/euclidian-zoning.html
https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
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Bad planning? Starting when? 1700s? 1600s? The US has always been a huge amount of land with a relatively small population for the size. Other countries avoided this by having lots of people in a small space, ie: Japan, Western Europe, Southern England. The US spread out for many reasons and not simply bad planning. People historically don't voluntarily choose to live like sardines in dense urban areas, just recently (like last 30-40 years), that has become more hospitable. No amount of planning would have prevented this short of extreme govt intervention dictating no one could live X distance from a city center. A lot of this sprawl happened before those dense city centers even existed. Were people supposed to build dense super tall buildings exclusively initially in unpopulated prairie land?
Historically "everyone" lived in either villages or dense cities. Walkable distances.
But in the case of the US especially the car-city ideology was extremely intensive, like dougules said even with areas completely without sidewalks.
I strongly recommend reading about the comparison between North America and Japan on zoning planning. Very interesting stuff.
https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/euclidian-zoning.html
https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
Interesting links. Thanks for sharing, @LennStar
There's definitely room for improvement in the way local governments do zoning in North America. Allowing more density to develop gradually by permitting multi-family dwellings, i.e., duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, etc, in neighborhoods with existing single-family homes, sounds like a good way to do it. Insisting that only single-family dwellings be permitted in residential neighborhoods drives up the cost of housing out of the reach of working and middle class families. Apparently, according to the links above, that was the purpose behind the Euclidian Zoning model we use in NA. It was to exclude POC and poor people from living in "good" neighborhoods, by making it too expensive for them to buy and impossible for them to find anything to rent...
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Interesting links. Thanks for sharing, @LennStar
Funnily enough the US zoning is extremely "socialist" while the Japanese is extremely free market, though enacted by fairly "socialist" planners.
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And that is exactly the point of problem, because the "most cost effective" way is only the most cost effective because a lot of the costs is not in the calculation. For example cost of CO2 in climate change damage. Usage of land. Other pollution.
It's a tragedy of the commons type of problem, and in this case, the "commons" (the global climate & atmosphere) is too large to expect any sort of cooperation among the individuals who depend on it. We must depend governments to intercede on our behalf, and so far our own government refuses to even formally acknowledge that the problem exists. You can't expect individuals and corporations to price in the negative externalities out of the goodness of their precious little hearts, because they'll simply become less competitive and lose market share to the entities that ignore the externalities. We are dealing in reality.
I thought the reason people are promoting convoys of self-driving trucks is to save fuel reduce carbon output. The trucks drive closely together so they draft each other. The automation reduces the need for staff. The whole approach reduces operator costs.
But convoys of self-driving trucks will plug up the freeways pretty badly. And they're dangerous - the results of a collision between a tractor-trailer rig and a passenger car or light truck are always bad for the smaller vehicle.
We're willing to invest billions and billions in a highly complex technology based solution to a problem that is largely solved by trains already. Yes, trains have problems. They have to go to a railyard to off-load goods and put them on trucks for local deliveries. Train scheduling needs to be improved for timeliness.
But these problems are much easier to solve than inventing self-driving technology. People like the idea of self driving trucks because they're flashy and cool, not because they're a great solution.
Get the big rigs off our highways!
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We're willing to invest billions and billions in a highly complex technology based solution to a problem that is largely solved by trains already. Yes, trains have problems. They have to go to a railyard to off-load goods and put them on trucks for local deliveries. Train scheduling needs to be improved for timeliness.
But these problems are much easier to solve than inventing self-driving technology. People like the idea of self driving trucks because they're flashy and cool, not because they're a great solution.
Citation needed?
Most of the United States doesn't have remotely the rail infrastructure to do what you are suggesting.
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My DH thinks self driving cars might need to wait until the roads have been modified for them. They could for example put electronic midt stripes and side stripes into a road and devices that gives warnings about speed or other information. They could then wirelessly transmit it to the cars. This would work equally well with snowy conditions. The self driving cars could then only be allowed to drive on those approved roads. The cars would have to be hybrid, so that the owner can drive him/herself on the remaining roads.
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We're willing to invest billions and billions in a highly complex technology based solution to a problem that is largely solved by trains already. Yes, trains have problems. They have to go to a railyard to off-load goods and put them on trucks for local deliveries. Train scheduling needs to be improved for timeliness.
But these problems are much easier to solve than inventing self-driving technology. People like the idea of self driving trucks because they're flashy and cool, not because they're a great solution.
Citation needed?
Most of the United States doesn't have remotely the rail infrastructure to do what you are suggesting.
Yeah, seriously. I work for a firm that, among other things, helps big corporations decide where to build manufacturing facilities. When they specify rail access as one of the required criteria, it drastically winnows the range of available sites because coverage is so poor in some parts of the country. And they never just want "rail access". It has to be a rail line owned or managed by one or two specific rail companies, which further narrows the field. Imagine if USPS, UPS, and Fedex controlled various highways, and you could only send your goods down the highways controlled by one company. That's what you're dealing with when you ship by rail. Rail transportation has serious limitations that I don't think you are fully aware of, and they're not solvable by just telling the rail companies to improve their timeliness.
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We're willing to invest billions and billions in a highly complex technology based solution to a problem that is largely solved by trains already. Yes, trains have problems. They have to go to a railyard to off-load goods and put them on trucks for local deliveries. Train scheduling needs to be improved for timeliness.
But these problems are much easier to solve than inventing self-driving technology. People like the idea of self driving trucks because they're flashy and cool, not because they're a great solution.
Citation needed?
Most of the United States doesn't have remotely the rail infrastructure to do what you are suggesting.
Yeah, seriously. I work for a firm that, among other things, helps big corporations decide where to build manufacturing facilities. When they specify rail access as one of the required criteria, it drastically winnows the range of available sites because coverage is so poor in some parts of the country. And they never just want "rail access". It has to be a rail line owned or managed by one or two specific rail companies, which further narrows the field. Imagine if USPS, UPS, and Fedex controlled various highways, and you could only send your goods down the highways controlled by one company. That's what you're dealing with when you ship by rail. Rail transportation has serious limitations that I don't think you are fully aware of, and they're not solvable by just telling the rail companies to improve their timeliness.
What's sad is that the US had double the amount of tracks it does now, and passenger service was fairly extensive. My hometown was where the Union Army stopped trains on the most important railroad in the South during the Civil War. Now we don't even have Amtrak. My dad's hometown of 600 people had passenger train service even when he was a kid.
You're basically saying we're not capable of doing again what we already did once with 19th century technology.
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I promise not to be (too much of) a dick if we have to reverse a few rails to trails projects in the name of public transportation.
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I promise not to be (too much of) a dick if we have to reverse a few rails to trails projects in the name of public transportation.
Most of the rails to trails projects I am aware of are abandoned local rail, not long distance rail lines. Road infrastructure crossing the rail lines has also often been developed in a way that would be incomparable with returning the line to rail service, so there likely would be push back from both the trail users and the drivers in the area.
Local passenger rail service was deliberately dismantled by the automobile industry in the mid twentieth century. They bought up the lines, converted them to bus lines, then shut them down when they were not profitable as bus lines.
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Local passenger rail service was deliberately dismantled by the automobile industry in the mid twentieth century. They bought up the lines, converted them to bus lines, then shut them down when they were not profitable as bus lines.
Yep, I learned all about it from "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"
https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/moviesandtv/features/14901-Who-Framed-Roger-Rabbit-Is-Based-On-True-Story-of-Los-Angeles-Fr
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What's sad is that the US had double the amount of tracks it does now, and passenger service was fairly extensive. My hometown was where the Union Army stopped trains on the most important railroad in the South during the Civil War. Now we don't even have Amtrak. My dad's hometown of 600 people had passenger train service even when he was a kid.
You're basically saying we're not capable of doing again what we already did once with 19th century technology.
I mean, we could do that trivially. The question is whether it makes sense.
You already see a lot more passenger rail transportation in areas where there is high population density. Mass transit in general is way more popular there.
Suburban sprawl though basically causes mass transit to either become super expensive or not effective. Mass transit works well when you can... well, mass transport people. Suburban population density is low enough you either need tons of routes running or people need to accept inconvenient schedules. Neither of which are that great along the "makes sense" perspective.
And that is all assuming that the cost and time for driving is enough of a difference to offset the convenience factors.
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What's sad is that the US had double the amount of tracks it does now, and passenger service was fairly extensive. My hometown was where the Union Army stopped trains on the most important railroad in the South during the Civil War. Now we don't even have Amtrak. My dad's hometown of 600 people had passenger train service even when he was a kid.
You're basically saying we're not capable of doing again what we already did once with 19th century technology.
I mean, we could do that trivially. The question is whether it makes sense.
You already see a lot more passenger rail transportation in areas where there is high population density. Mass transit in general is way more popular there.
Suburban sprawl though basically causes mass transit to either become super expensive or not effective. Mass transit works well when you can... well, mass transport people. Suburban population density is low enough you either need tons of routes running or people need to accept inconvenient schedules. Neither of which are that great along the "makes sense" perspective.
And that is all assuming that the cost and time for driving is enough of a difference to offset the convenience factors.
I think density is only part of it. A lot of places have no sidewalks, and the places that do are not in any way pleasant to walk. Also mass transit in low density areas generally tends to be buses mixed into regular traffic. They get stuck in the same traffic as cars, so there's no advantage. If there is enough traffic to back cars up, though, that means there are enough people to easily fill a bus. What would really work is to have dedicated bus lanes and to give buses priority at lights. BRT works really well.
People think mass transit won't work in the suburbs because when the suburbs try to do mass transit, they generally phone it in. If they did try to add real mass transit, people would be up in arms about having one less car lane or poor people getting access to their neighborhood.
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We're willing to invest billions and billions in a highly complex technology based solution to a problem that is largely solved by trains already. Yes, trains have problems. They have to go to a railyard to off-load goods and put them on trucks for local deliveries. Train scheduling needs to be improved for timeliness.
But these problems are much easier to solve than inventing self-driving technology. People like the idea of self driving trucks because they're flashy and cool, not because they're a great solution.
Citation needed?
Most of the United States doesn't have remotely the rail infrastructure to do what you are suggesting.
Yeah, seriously. I work for a firm that, among other things, helps big corporations decide where to build manufacturing facilities. When they specify rail access as one of the required criteria, it drastically winnows the range of available sites because coverage is so poor in some parts of the country. And they never just want "rail access". It has to be a rail line owned or managed by one or two specific rail companies, which further narrows the field. Imagine if USPS, UPS, and Fedex controlled various highways, and you could only send your goods down the highways controlled by one company. That's what you're dealing with when you ship by rail. Rail transportation has serious limitations that I don't think you are fully aware of, and they're not solvable by just telling the rail companies to improve their timeliness.
What's sad is that the US had double the amount of tracks it does now, and passenger service was fairly extensive. My hometown was where the Union Army stopped trains on the most important railroad in the South during the Civil War. Now we don't even have Amtrak. My dad's hometown of 600 people had passenger train service even when he was a kid.
You're basically saying we're not capable of doing again what we already did once with 19th century technology.
No, I'm saying that we can't do it cost-competitively. At least, not without accounting for the negative externalities of excessive fossil fuel consumption. Do you actually believe that transportation was more efficient in the 19th century?
Hell, I love trains. Riding from Hattiesburg to Atlanta on Amtrak was bliss when I lived in Mississippi. Comfortable, inexpensive, and almost as fast as driving. But the stars have to line up perfectly for it to make sense. We had an Amtrak station less than a mile from our house in McComb, MS. We once looked up what it would cost to go straight from there to visit my wife's family in Florence, SC (since they both have Amtrak stations). 40 hours and $800 bucks, with the route taking us through Chicago. The McComb rail line only runs north/south, so it was useless to anyone heading east/west. We had to drive an hour and a half east to the Hattiesburg station for the rail to be useful. Even then, there was no good way to get to Florence.
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Self-driving cars just have to be safer than the average person on average. As soon as that happens, it would be immoral to allow people to drive for themselves any more . . . because you know that it will cause more accidents/deaths/injuries than fully automated vehicle fleets.
Once we get to that point it will be difficult if not impossible to get insurance for self-driving.
I highly doubt that.
As a practicality even if we perfect the self driving aspect, the average age of a car on the road in the US is around 12 years old. So assuming a switch all self-driving all the time the second it become better than the average driver it will be decades before you have near-complete switch out (and that is a big assumption both in timing and going straight to self driving). In the between time there will be a need for insurance on the existing fleet.
Second you can still insure cars that are objectively less safe than a modern vehicle, even if it is through a collectible policy. A car that didn't come with ABS, air bags, pre-tensioning seat belts, or any host of modern safety and survivability features can still be registered, insured, and driven. I see no reason that self driving cars and the existing fleet wouldn't follow a similar pattern.
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We're willing to invest billions and billions in a highly complex technology based solution to a problem that is largely solved by trains already. Yes, trains have problems. They have to go to a railyard to off-load goods and put them on trucks for local deliveries. Train scheduling needs to be improved for timeliness.
But these problems are much easier to solve than inventing self-driving technology. People like the idea of self driving trucks because they're flashy and cool, not because they're a great solution.
Citation needed?
Most of the United States doesn't have remotely the rail infrastructure to do what you are suggesting.
Yeah, seriously. I work for a firm that, among other things, helps big corporations decide where to build manufacturing facilities. When they specify rail access as one of the required criteria, it drastically winnows the range of available sites because coverage is so poor in some parts of the country. And they never just want "rail access". It has to be a rail line owned or managed by one or two specific rail companies, which further narrows the field. Imagine if USPS, UPS, and Fedex controlled various highways, and you could only send your goods down the highways controlled by one company. That's what you're dealing with when you ship by rail. Rail transportation has serious limitations that I don't think you are fully aware of, and they're not solvable by just telling the rail companies to improve their timeliness.
What's sad is that the US had double the amount of tracks it does now, and passenger service was fairly extensive. My hometown was where the Union Army stopped trains on the most important railroad in the South during the Civil War. Now we don't even have Amtrak. My dad's hometown of 600 people had passenger train service even when he was a kid.
You're basically saying we're not capable of doing again what we already did once with 19th century technology.
No, I'm saying that we can't do it cost-competitively. At least, not without accounting for the negative externalities of excessive fossil fuel consumption. Do you actually believe that transportation was more efficient in the 19th century?
Hell, I love trains. Riding from Hattiesburg to Atlanta on Amtrak was bliss when I lived in Mississippi. Comfortable, inexpensive, and almost as fast as driving. But the stars have to line up perfectly for it to make sense. We had an Amtrak station less than a mile from our house in McComb, MS. We once looked up what it would cost to go straight from there to visit my wife's family in Florence, SC (since they both have Amtrak stations). 40 hours and $800 bucks, with the route taking us through Chicago. The McComb rail line only runs north/south, so it was useless to anyone heading east/west. We had to drive an hour and a half east to the Hattiesburg station for the rail to be useful. Even then, there was no good way to get to Florence.
No, transportation wasn't more efficient back then, and trains probably only make sense for routes between major cities these days. Some of the reason it doesn't work, though, is just that so much of the network is missing. Back in the day you could have gotten on at McComb then changed lines to go east from Jackson (same one my dad grew up by). The more of the network you take out, the less useful the remaining lines are.
Realistically bus works much better these days, but nobody is serious about making it work. It's really easy to get around in Latin America by bus. I think we could do the same.