There is a lot of chat about driverless cars-but this article from the New York Times and this one in the Atlantic Monthly identify a fear that is being expressed by many-how will driverless cars interact with those pesky uncontrollable pedestrians who will want to cross streets and otherwise get in the way? How do you build trust and share the road from the perspective of the driverless car passenger and those on foot or bicycle?
Drive.ai a California start-up is figuring out how a driverless car would communicate with other cars, and those pedestrians. John Markoff notes in his article
The company is emphasizing what is known in the artificial intelligence field as “human-machine interaction” as a key to confusing road situations.How does a robot, for example, tell everyone what it plans to do in intersections when human drivers and people in crosswalks go through an informal ballet to decide who will go first and who will yield?
There are five situations discussed where driverless technology is being challenged.You can control the behaviour of a driverless car, but what if it interacts with a car driven by a real human, subject to split second decisions and thought patterns? And what happens on snowy or icy roads when laser sensors may not compute where the road surface is. For a technology that is based on GPS, a temporary detour or a changed traffic pattern on a road could be an obstacle. Couple that with potholes that sensors cannot read and may be misinterpreted on the road surface. Lastly, and perhaps the most crucial in a life and death situation, does the car save its occupants, or does it sacrifice its occupants to avoid hitting a group of pedestrians? And who will make these ethical calls on autonomous car performance?
This year Drive.ai was licensed in California to road test driverless cars, and is relying on “deep learning” technology which is “a machine-learning technique that has gained wide popularity among Silicon Valley firms. It is used for a variety of tasks, like understanding human speech and improving the ability to recognize objects in computer vision systems.”
Drive.ai plans to revolutionize commercial vehicles for parcel delivery and taxi services.But in these investigations of new driverless cars (and there are over 20 initiatives with this technology in Silicon Valley alone) there is still no cogent discussion on street design or active transportation movement for bicyclists and pedestrians. It would seem to me that cities and citizens need to have an active say in how driverless technology will or will not impact city streets and the ability of people to randomly walk or cycle across streets. There is not much information on how this technology will interface with community liveliness and street use. It’s an important subject and I’d like to see it addressed.
As stated in Markoff’s article quoting a roboticist
“A lot of the discussion around self-driving cars has no human component, which is really weird because this is the first time a robotic system is going out in the world and interacting with people.”
I am totally not sold on driverless cars. Seems like a huge waste of money on a tech that is not really solving the issue. It’s ‘cool’ and fun to think about, but so are flying cars.
I see them as just an attempt by the auto industry to try to continue sales in an already oversaturated market.
How can a market be oversaturated when sales continue to grow each year? It obviously really pains some posters that given the means the private auto is the preferred means of transportation for the majority.
I see this as the only way to get to vision zero – no more deaths and injuries due to motor vehicles. Humans have shown themselves to be totally incapable of safely operating a motor vehicle.
That’s not true at all, don’t be extremist. Yes, there are crashes daily. But what % of trips end in crashes?
Humans are completely capable, there are just idiots, like any human doing any activity, you’ll have idiots.
Unfortunately, everyone thinks the other drivers are the idiots and when they do crash it is simply an accident and one of the to-be-expected side effects of default motordom
BC has a vision zero policy but no implementation plan and their actions like increasing speed limits, refusing photo radar and refusing even to give municipalities the ability to set lower speed limits all speak to the fact that we may have to wait a long time for the carnage to end.. Cars with automatic braking already exist. I’m rooting for improved technology.
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.
The future of driverless motordom will be determined by the first injured pesky pedestrian lawsuit which will likely be the largest claim ever filed since the invention of the wheel. It’s all about the bodies in the street, expectations and setting precedents.
I believe that the time will soon arrive that humans will not be allowed to drive because it will finally be seen to be unacceptable from a safety point of view.
“soon” as in 2050 or 2080 ? We don’t even have Uber yet although it is over 5 years old. Even airplanes who really do not need pilots have them. Many subways in Europe have a driver although the track is a simple straight line, with few exit options. Life in nature and cities is very very complex, with hills, snow, weird situations, bikes, dogs, chickens in some countries, no lanes in others, weird traffic circles with 5+ “lanes”, emergency situations, torrential rain etc …
It will be a long long LONG time until we have fully autonomous vehicles that can handle all situations. It’ll come in stages. I’d say even in 2100 we will allow humans to drive as it means FREEDOM to move. CHOICES matter. Many folks will chose to not drive and have the machine do it for them, but many will chose not to.
Arno,
Disagree. People crash cars. People spill their drink. People trip on their cat. It happens. We, society have been dealing with car crashes and resulting deaths for 100 years now, why would you think society would suddenly care about those deaths?
Relying on tech to save ourselves from ourselves seems pretty silly, especially when practical alternatives exist.
Follow on from Jolson’s reasoning. If the first autonomous vehicle crash results in the largest law suit claim ever, then the next crash, with a driver at fault, will have a precedent to follow for the damages. Insurance rates will then rise so high that most won’t be able to drive. It won’t be outlawed, simply priced much higher than today.
Don, I believe you just reinforced my point that humans are incapable of safely operating a motor vehicle. However, I would be happy to see what your “practical alternatives” are.
Yes, humans are capable of safely operating a vehicle, as millions do every day. And yes, some humans who are capable still crash their car. Just like millions of humans are capable of drinking coffee and yes, some humans who are capable still pour hot coffee on themselves. I’m not, nor is society waiting for a robotic coffee dispenser to follow me around because some humans spill coffee on themselves, not sure why I’d wait for a robotic car to drive me around because some humans crash their car.
We all know what the alternative are. They won’t eliminate the need for cars and are really specific to urban areas, but they would make a big difference.
We may see dedicated lanes, say on Hwy 1 for AVs only, zipping by at 140-200 km/h in AV mode only, tighter spaced. Like most machine-human interfaces it will take a long time. I was promised in the 1980s when I did my MSc in Computer Science that speech recognition is coming “soon” and that automatic language translation is “just around the corner”. So yes, we have now some simple voice recognition when you phone 1-800 numbers at banks or utility firms, or some basic voice instructions on your car such as “phone Joe”. We also have some basic text translation today, 30 years later, for very simple sentence structures such as “George is eating a yellow banana while sitting at the table” but as soon as you type in something even moderately complex such as a newspaper article let alone a page from a book it is merely hilarious. As such, we will see AVs mode only in some limited instances “soon”, perhaps on a stretch of highway in one lane.
Don – what are the practical alternatives? What should we do in order to stop the slaughter on our roads? Just accepting this as the cost of motordom in simply unacceptable. Why should I get off scot free if I kill you with a car but not if I kill you by other means?
Don, further to above, surely you can’t compare spilling coffee to killing someone while driving? I have been seriously injured two times in crashes where the driver was 100% at fault. In both cases, the police refused to even write a ticket. Please tell me how you would fix our current traffic system which causes close to 2000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of injuries every year.
@Arno: by holding the police accountable ? By paying them less and hiring more ? By enforcing laws better and with far higher fines ? By limiting speeds AND actually enforcing it ? Speeding is a real concern, and could be automatically enforced with cameras and software systems !
Thomas – I’m in total agreement with your comment! But I believe that technological improvements like automatic braking and collision avoidance systems will arrive much faster than all those excellent suggestions you made.
Limits to liability and no-fault insurance will solve any legal issues.
Unprotected train crossings exist all over the world and this does not appear to be problematic. In fact, a vehicle or pedestrian is hit by a train every three hours in the U.S.
Driverless vehicles are in our future. Just like living with trains, we will learn to get out of the way.
Arno should look at this clip. Humans are extremely adept at dealing with moving vehicles.
The day my chicken crosses the road and gets squashed by an autonomous vehicle is the day my chicken is going to make me a millionaire.
Not in all provinces.
You mean to say not all chickens are equal when it comes to crossing roads?
The residual value of a chicken that is squashed while crossing a road varies by provincial insurance limitations laws.
I’m not aware that The Charter has been tested on this.
One distraught farmer is rumoured to have claimed that a judge told him to go cluck himself.
Surely rights are granted to chickens such that they can enjoy a free range life. Without such rights the whole organic movement would collapse. This could be the end of the organics.
There’s a difference between a free range chicken living on a rubbish dump and a free range chicken only feeding in a barnyard meadow. The freedom to live on a rubbish dump should not automatically confer organic certification on said chicken, nor its eggs. It’s just not kosher – either.
The problems mentioned are not significant if all vehicles are driverless umder control of a central computer system. Vehicles would be hired like taxis by the trip amd not personally owned. Thus less than 10% of the current number would be required. Money for old rope!
Only grey coats too. Too many choices of colors are so overrated. Let’s shut down the fashion industry too. Individually owned cars ought to be illegal indeed. Who needs choice and individual freedom. So overrated.
It’s a bit blinkered to think that the legal liability issues won’t be resolved before autonomous vehicles are common. Just as there are smart techies working on the technology, there are smart lawyers working on the legal framework for their operation. Several US states already have laws on their books concerning driverless vehicles. Ditto for countries in Europe and Asia.
Just because we sit in Vancouver and gaze at our navels mostly, we shouldn’t think that people around the world in all professions do the same…
Arno,
“Why should I get off scot free if I kill you with a car but not if I kill you by other means?”
I never said that. Stop being extreme with your examples and using the inane logic that because I think this I therefore think all this other stuff. That’s not how life works.
I have repeatedly argued on this blog for more cycling, more transit, more ped friendly everything. Ask Eric or whoever else. The practical alternative to just hoping robotic cars will save us is to design our cities so we don’t need anywhere as many cars as we have now. It’s a simple idea, but hard to do.
I don’t have the ‘fix’. If there was a simple ‘fix’ it’d be done by now. Change takes time and it’s hard and you upset a lot of people–and I’m fine with that. I’m fine with drastically reducing car use through planning and investment in all the things that would reduce car use.
And of course I’m not comparing coffee to car crashes. It’s called making a larger point. Surely you get it but just don’t want to address it. That’s fine.
It behooves you to also look at BENEFITS of individual car use or ownership: freedom to move around, not just 2 blocks but 2000 km at a whim, in comfort in both cold weather or in hot, with music blaring or not, windows open or top down or covered, in a cheap functional vehicle or a luxurious expensive one, by yourself or with 4 good friends, to stop at multiple locations in an afternoon etc.
While robotic cars might be the answer to urban congestion they run counter to individual freedoms that people have worked for very hard. So, what may make sense from an urban design point of view or even an economic or ecological one does not necessarily make sene from a personal choice point of view. Yes, many folks do not mind sharing or renting a vehicle, but a large % prefers to own even if they use it only 2h a week or 2x a month, and others would never share a ride.
In the end it comes down to pricing as the state can price things such that certain choices are forced or channeled.
What surprises me in Vancouver is the relatively low number of motorcycles. Why is that ? Is gasoline too cheap still ? Is parking still too cheap ? Is it not congested enough yet ? If you look at many Asian or European cities you see far more motorcycles, or scooters. Worthy a while blog post actually.