Unexpected Consequences of Self-Driving Cars

http://rodneybrooks.com/unexpected-consequences-of-self-driving-cars/

by ghosh • 9 years ago

183 209 9 years ago

umberway2• 9 years ago

If and when all cars are computer-controlled another consequence may be that children will be free to roam about. This assumes that those same cars are built to be incapable of hitting pedestrians. Is this possible?

bamboozled2• 9 years ago

Children will be able to manipulate the cars and therefore create a bottleneck for others, this is a major issue outlined in the article.

michaelbuckbee• 9 years ago

Well, this sort of behavior has (presumably) already happened [1], but this also gets to the crux of "unintended consequences". Will we see kids deliberately walking in the street, knowing full well they aren't going to get hit and extorting drivers to let them pass?

1 - https://electrek.co/2016/07/21/tesla-autopilot-saved-life-pr...

umberway2• 9 years ago

Yes I'm sure this sort of thing will happen however I imagine the overall social consequences would be beneficial. Children are highly confined at present and the ability to roam and talk to different people, walk to school, etc, has been lost. Largely for fear of their being run over by traffic.

noonespecial• 9 years ago

I expect as far as the social aspect of driverless cars making their way through our neighbourhoods goes, eventually most humans will just come to see them as an odd type of animal. Like a horse. It probably wouldn't hurt to give them some active animal-like cosmetic features that help nearby humans anticipate what they are "thinking".

Delightful symmetry there, no? The first great task of mechanized transport was getting rid of the horse aspects, the second was building them back in.

amelius4• 9 years ago

Nice thought, but as the article states, car manufacturers do not want their cars to be recognizable as autonomous, because others might take advantage.

eriknstr• 9 years ago

Having the description of abbreviations all the way at the bottom of the article so that one has to scroll a mile to read what they mean is a bit annoying. Instead of:

When the first IMPs^1 for the fledgling ARPANET were being built starting in 1969 at BBN^2 in Cambridge, MA, I think it safe to say that no one foresaw the devastating impact that the networking technology being developed would have on journalism thirty to fifty years later.
[A million words]
^1 Interface Message Processors. Today they would be referred to as Internet protocol routers.
^2 Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, MA, a company that was always known as BBN. As distinct from BBN, the Buckingham Browne and Nichols school in Cambridge, MA — no doubt many employees of BBN sent their kids to school at BBN.

I would have preferred for at least the first of these two to be baked into the text itself.

MikeTLive• 9 years ago

While I agree to some extent, I find it funny that I've somehow been around long enough to not realize people needed your example acronyms and names to be defined. Including the reference in the BBN definition to the other bbn :) I guess that's what happens when you live it first hand.

Daishiman4• 9 years ago

Whenever people jump up enthusiastically about autonomous cars being right around the corner, I remember taking a cab in Lima, Peru, in the middle of some horrendously chaotic traffic, where drivers were navigating with little regard for lanes, negotiation for merging is done eye-to-eye, and impatient pedestrians would throw themselves into the street, tired of waiting for minutes to cross and trusting that the driver ahead wasn't suffering from some murderous rage that day.

I also remember run-down suburbs where massive potholes and ditches make navigations of certain streets a puzzle by itself, compounded by garbage trucks ahead just doing their thing, improperly placed signage ahead, and those badly-designed intersections where you can totally count on drivers misjudging distances.

As the designers move away from the relatively trivial confines of well-maintained urban spaces and into different countries and cultures, I seriously question their ability to keep things reasonable for the rest of the human drivers. So far nothing in the near-future horizons of this technology indicates that the software would be able to navigate in many of these adverse situations without incurring huge time penalties or causing unacceptable delays.

I really do think that a lot of the hype happens to be because certain actors (Uber comes to mind as the most significant) have basically placed all their bets in these edge cases being small enough that a small number of human drivers should suffice to get around them. I remain skeptical.

stale2002• 9 years ago

Sure, those scenarios you pointed out are difficult, but what about highway driving?

Replacing highway driving with autonomous vehicles is still completely game changing for the transportation industry. It means that 90% of truck drivers are out of a job. (Truck drivers of the future will just handle the last mile).

That is certainly something that is going to be disruptive.

mcgrath_sh• 9 years ago

I'd love this as a private vehicle too. Imagine if you could turn a 12 hour drive into an hour on each end (from highway exists to local destination) with the ability to just relax or sleep in the middle? I don't think I'd fly anywhere within 10 hours of me, because an overnight drive suddenly isn't a burden!

devdoomari• 9 years ago

well, there can be 'autonomous-car-friendly-zones' which would automatically entail ridiculously high rent prices : )

Groxx• 9 years ago

I'm not sure those "well-maintained urban spaces" are as simple as you seem to be implying. They have plenty of quickly-changing construction in the middle of active roads, out of date / invisible signs, and far more crazy drivers and pedestrians to interact with per day than in Middleonowhere Pennciltucky.

As to garbage trucks: ever seen people pull U-turns randomly in the middle of the road in a busy city, or dive across 4 lanes to make an exit? Garbage trucks seem simple by comparison, and at significantly lower speeds.

rifung2• 9 years ago

Is there any reason we can't just rely on autonomous cars in areas where these edge cases don't happen? Then as the companies behind this technology make more money, they can start working out the edge cases, but before then, even getting it to work in a given city seems like a huge win.

qball• 9 years ago

Is there any reason we can't just rely on autonomous cars in areas where these edge cases don't happen?

Because there are still ripple effects to doing this affecting areas with edge cases.

So let's say you've reduced the number of manual-driven cars. That has implications for:

* Economies of scale. Autonomous cars will likely be of a different design than manual ones so the price of a manual-drive will likely increase- where will the increased money to buy them come from?

* Insurance costs. Drivers in less-dense cities are currently safer than the national average: what does the risk and cost for a safer driver become now that the bad urban driver benchmark disappears?

* Government regulation and other politicking. What happens to everyone else in, say, California or New York State or a European country if an urban-focused legislature creates laws restricting ownership/use of a manual-driven car in some way (anything from a tax to an outright ban)?

Whether these implications are small or large (or whether they cancel each other) isn't adequately answered right now; but I suspect that at least one (or all 3) will turn out to be a major hindrance to autonomous car deployment. Or they don't, and some section of the population gets screwed anyway.

arjie• 9 years ago

If twenty percent of the population controls eighty percent of the wealth, why should you ever care about the remaining eighty percent of the population? They can't pay you, so your success or failure in their markets need not determine your success or failure in general.

Just like with electricity, the Internet, and air travel, the poor will be last. And a lot of people can do very well for themselves by putting the poor last.

aninhumer7• 9 years ago

I'm not really sure what your point is here, other than "global inequality sucks"?

Should we arbitrarily stop development of self-driving cars until poorer countries' infrastructure can support them? How would that help anyone?

thewhitetulip5• 9 years ago

This is the same case in India, no way an AI is able to drive on Indian roads before they pull the plug on the project altogether. I feel that self driving cars will become fancy toys for the ultra rich. Our roads are not predictable, they are good in a few places, but mostly, they are exceedingly bad. For a human itself they are impossible to travel let aside have a robot driving it. There are crazy pedestrians who don't move out of the way, they walk in the middle of the f* road, crazy people try to squeeze through the gap between your vehicle and the next one even if there is no discernible gap.

In India, in majority of roads you don't just have to look sideways, you also have to see if some stupid idiot is driving at the speeds of higher than 60 while you cross an intersection. Plus in places of high traffic the self driving car would be deadlocked because here, nobody gives anyone a lead, you have to "earn" the lead by stopping others, no way a robot is going to do that.

cypherpunks01• 9 years ago

Good point about India! I wonder how a self-driving car would handle someone coming towards you on the wrong side of a divided highway, or know how to get a cow out of the middle of a crowded street..

farm_code• 9 years ago

When Google maps came, we said the same. It won't work in India. There's no order in door numbering or Street names. They have to use landmarks and all that. But that's what Google did. In the driving directions in India, you can see lot of landmark references. We always underestimate what a tech can do. I am hoping we are wrong on this one too.

djsumdog2• 9 years ago

I remember when I first went to India and saw the traffic. My family would say that traffic in the US and Europe was more "streamlined."

You make some good points, as does this article. In the article though, I think at least some of these points will just involve more visual indicators on cars themselves that people will need to get use to (and yes, I do realize that won't solve many of the other class issues the author raises).

I have my own concerns. So much money, even tax money, is being poured into this tech that I don't see as viable for at least 7 ~ 10 more years. We could be building automated trains, which do exist, are viable and can operate even on late night runs without drivers or strikes. All of Singapore's lines are automated and several of London's are; both which have trains arriving on platforms at less than two minute intervals at peak hours.

Self driving cars also will not solve the capacity problem at all:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...

You'd have to have self-driving car only motoways to even being to approach the theoretical maximums of car capacity, and it still pails in comparison to train capacity, or even bus capacity for that matter.

The other thing I don't think people realize is that we (most likely) won't be owning self driving vehicles. I feel like if States get their acts together, we're going to need FAA style regulations. Cars need to be inspected at regular intervals to ensure all the sensors are functioning. Software updates need to be audited, and safety algorithms will need to be shared. I mean, do you want to live in a world where Audi claims their driving algorithms are safer than Nissan's, or Honda charging extra for more comprehensive sensor packages?

I don't think we can have a self driving where people own vehicles, which goes well against the OSS creed of "Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?"

rebuilder2• 9 years ago

"Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?"

"The new, maintenance-free iCar! So reliable, we welded the hood shut!"

Add a better copywriter, and an actual product, and I think a lot of people would buy that. Same with car-as-service. A lot of people don't actually want to own a car, they just want the transport capabilities and convenience.

dagw3• 9 years ago

"Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?"

Sure why not? When do most people open the hood on their car? To top up fluids and, occasionally, to jump start the battery. Both of those things could be done without opening the hood with a slight redesign. Modern cars are both so reliable and so complex that there is hardly anything under the hood that most people either can or have to do, and this is only getting more true for electric cars.

aninhumer7• 9 years ago

I think self-driving cars can make trains much more viable by providing last-mile support to extend the practical range of stations. With self-driving shuttle taxis, a single station could serve a vast sprawling suburb easily.

And a switch to a transport-as-a-service model can make the advantages of the train much more apparent. Open Google Maps and ask for directions: Do you want to take a single 1 hour drive, or a 30min train ride with 5min connections at each end that costs less?

And then when people in the office hear about how your commute is 20mins shorter thanks to the new train line, maybe they want one too...

rebuilder2• 9 years ago

It seems to me the autonomous car is a car for wealthy countries, where wages are high, personal time valuable and roads in good shape.

morgante5• 9 years ago

Why is the situation in Peru at all relevant? I too have been to lots of places where self-driving cars would have a ridiculously hard time.

Those places are also very far from the cutting edge of technology.

Even if self-driving cars are confined to US highways, cities, and suburbs they have terrific potential. The future doesn't have to be evenly distributed to arrive on time.

Seriously, I don't even understand you argument. Why would the existence of challenging backwaters in Peru prevent the development and deployment of self-driving cars in the US?

paganel5• 9 years ago

Not the OP but I think he gave Peru just as an example. I would personally say that "normal" and non-hazardous traffic like that from the US and some Western European countries is the exception rather than the norm if we look at the whole planet.

bambax• 9 years ago

Even if self-driving cars are confined to US highways...

Self-driving cars "confined" to anywhere are not self-driving cars, because you obviously need a human driver to get to and from that special place.

gambiting• 9 years ago

Because there are 1st world countries where the situation is not that different? Poland for example, actual road: http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/FESuhya2Ig0/hqdefault.jpg

Signage is absolutely atrocious, there's too many signs, some of them wrong, some of the rules are implied(speed limit ends at any intersection, but if a road is going to a private property, then it's not an intersection, so good luck knowing where a speed limit ends), people drive like crazy, there's loads of unpaved roads.....and yet a person from a very rich western country(say UK or Germany) can drive over there in few hours driving time.

Every time someone makes an argument for self driving cars, I keep thinking if they would work back home - the answer is, they wouldn't.

Daishiman4• 9 years ago

Peru's a poor country but it doesn't mean you don't see your fair share of midrange Corollas, BMWs, and Mercedes. You're not going to get commercially successful self-driving cars if they can't target that market.

ConceptJunkie• 9 years ago

You don't have to go to Peru. Just try driving in Boston.

Acalyptol• 9 years ago

Well they're not gonna wait the whole world to be ready to start introducing self-driving cars in areas where they're ready, so it really depends on where live those people who "jump up enthusiastically"

dunkelheit• 9 years ago

I think you missed the point of the post entirely.

You talk about technological problems, which, while formidable, are not insurmountable. Surely they are hard but at least we have a direction of attack (as opposed to say teleportation or time travel or AGI, where we don't even know where to start). Just as in the case of Go, the performance of artificial systems will at first be borderline acceptable, then it will be on par with strong amateurs, and then it will surpass performance levels of the best of humans.

The post in contrast talks about social problems and shows how they will cause much strife and friction and will delay the adoption of driverless vehicles even after all technological problems are solved.

Asooka• 9 years ago

As the designers move away from the relatively trivial confines of well-maintained urban spaces and into different countries and cultures, I seriously question their ability to keep things reasonable for the rest of the human drivers

And why should we support and enable unacceptable infrastructure and a broken culture? Isn't it better to force everyone else to conform to a single well-thought-out and managed system?

realo• 9 years ago

You are right in saying that autonomous cars, as we envision them for the near future, require some form of "proper" infrastructure to be able to perform (safely). However you are wrong in seemingly thinking that this infrastructure will never come.

As with many technologies, it is the infrastructure that is important ( cell phones vs cellular network, ethernet-enabled computers vs the ISP broadband installations, iPhone vs iTunes store, etc...).

Here it is similar and it is not so far fetched to think that in some future the road system will be modified in some ways in order to accommodate level 5 autonomous cars and people.

For example, the city of Drachten in the Netherlands has no traffic lights, road signage (stop signs, etc...) at all. They modified their infrastructure and got better pedestrian security.

From Wikipedia:

"Drachten received international attention for a traffic experiment known as shared space, a concept pioneered by Hans Monderman. Almost all traffic lights and signs have been removed in the town's centre in an effort to improve traffic safety, based on the theory that drivers pay more attention to their surroundings when they cannot rely on strict traffic rules. Previously the town's centre had an average of 8 accidents per year. In the first two years after the system was introduced, yearly accidents were reduced to 1."

It would be very interesting to see how level-5 autonomous cars would fare in Drachten...

yomly• 9 years ago

After a skim of this sub-thread I'm surprised no one mentions that it might be a benefit that as autonomous-car driving tech spreads around world (presumably with SF/SV being the epicentre), countries which are poorly equipped for autonomous cars start to find the momentum to overhaul their road network and driving education system.

Having been to several countries in Asia, it would be no bad thing to have a stepwise reform in how driving is done in these countries - think of the number of accidents that would be reduced.

Daishiman4• 9 years ago

Or take advantage of the car's systems to steal from drivers, scam them, or take precedence on the road.

celticninja2• 9 years ago

Self driving cars are designed for well maintained first world situations where the rule of law is followed (or at least the driving regulations are). Sure in India or Thailand where it is a free for all and the infrastructure is poorly maintained they will not be suitable but in these countries the death toll on the roads is also ridiculous. In the USA, Canada and Eurioe, the largest markets for these vehicles (at present) the cars work fine and will ultimately reduce the number of deaths on the roads. Eventually other nations will catch up and self driving or at least assisted driving will be much better for everyone.

wrsh074• 9 years ago

Self driving cars are designed to learn.

People are way overestimating how much time it's going to take to retrain them for cities in new locales.

Will they sell in India to start? No, of course not. Most tech in the US takes a few years to launch internationally. But I think it will transfer much faster (5 years for internationalization) than the doom and gloom prophets on here say.

joshwcomeau• 9 years ago

Potholes actually seem like a situation that autonomous cars would handle far better than humans.

And yeah I expect that the jump from level 4 to level 5 (assuming that level 4 does not include the most chaotic of world streets) will take decades, but that's fine.

xutopia• 9 years ago

I'm more skeptical that a human can deal with this complexity better than a computer could.

Balgair• 9 years ago

Many people think that self driving cars will lead to less cars on the road, but I believe they will lead to more cars and therefore worse traffic. Since you won't be actively driving the car, the time the commute takes will become less of a chore and you will put up with it taking longer. Think self-driving Winnebagos that go off and get cleaned and re-fueled when you are at work. Additionally, why pay for parking? Just send the car about the block for 2 hours while you watch the movie. The cost in gas/wear-n-tear will be less than the $12 for parking in some areas. That crowded concert that already has parking issues? Those are going to be much worse with a self-driving car. Also, what about teenagers? Take a blow-up doll, tie a rock to the feet, and put it in the middle of the road that leads to school. Do that in 5 places. How long would it take for a person to look up from their phone and realize the car is no longer moving? Essentially, taking the 'common sense' out of driving for an algorithmic approach is not going to work very well either. Yes, we may kill less people than before, but I believe that you can't just algo your way to less traffic. You have to use both the self-driving and the person's brain (what little motorists seem to have) together. Taking people of the picture won't work either.

naasking3• 9 years ago

Many people think that self driving cars will lead to less cars on the road, but I believe they will lead to more cars and therefore worse traffic. Since you won't be actively driving the car, the time the commute takes will become less of a chore and you will put up with it taking longer.

No, you just won't own your own car, you'll car share via a service like Uber. It would be way cheaper since you would no longer carry the maintenance and insurance costs for a vehicle. That's why it would lead to fwer cars on the road.

naasking3• 9 years ago

I also remember run-down suburbs where massive potholes and ditches make navigations of certain streets a puzzle by itself, compounded by garbage trucks ahead just doing their thing, improperly placed signage ahead, and those badly-designed intersections where you can totally count on drivers misjudging distances.

Even assuming your anecdote is at all relevant, why would any of these factors impact the ability of an autonomous vehicle to navigate these streets? The car knows where it has to go, and it senses its environment more frequently, with more precision, and with faster reaction times than a human ever could. Either the objects surrounding it are on vectors that will impact its chosen path or they won't. If they don't, then it proceeds. If they do, it must slow, stop, or find an alternate path that avoids those vectors. There's nothing earth shattering here.

Daishiman4• 9 years ago

Can an autonomous system judge the difference between a harmless piece of trash on the road and something spiky that's going to blow out a tire?

nicwolff• 9 years ago

We don't have to go that far; anyone who thinks an autonomous car could compete in normal weekday midtown Manhattan traffic hasn't had the pleasure. You have to change lanes constantly to avoid double- and triple-parked trucks and taxis, and street construction – and every lane change is a little game of low-speed Chicken, in which each driver pretends they don't care if they get hit, and presumes that the other will yield. Autonomous cars can't pretend; every human driver will know that they have to avoid accidents whenever possible. And paid human drivers will be particularly eager to block their progress, to penalize their passengers.

decker• 9 years ago

Don't forget that once we get to level 4, every time there's rain or snow, there might even be more loss of life as everyone gets to learn how to drive again in bad weather.

known• 9 years ago

Social mobility is a major problem in democracy http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-24936416

_ph_2• 9 years ago

Many good points in that article. Probably self driving cars are finally going to force us to review and to fix in many occasions the way we are using cars today. Especially the ways which are already broken today. A good example is the competition for the parking in front of a Starbucks or other similar shops. The common usage pattern is still crafted by how traffic was decades ago, and you could still just drive to a location and leave your car. But that depended on there being fewer cars than parking lots. In most locations, this is a thing long past - so I would consider the current situation already as broken. Self driving cars would make it worse and such could force us to finally find solutions for these situations.

There are two obvious ways of fixing that situation. The first, recognize that trying to reach a location by individual cars cannot work out and ban private cars. Many European Cities have large pedestrian zones where private cars are locked out of whole streets in city centers.

The other option would be, and fortunately self driving cars would be part of the solution, to create enough parking spaces. Parking in the streets would still be disallowed, creating large pickup areas instead. So the road sides would be free of parking cars, enabling drivers to stop at any desired spot. As soon as the passengers left the car, the car would leave immediately for a nearby garage. This would of course depend on the creation of the necessary amount of parking garages.

chx• 9 years ago

Banning private cards, I believe, will be unnecessary. I know free market is often folly but in this case, I believe, the advantages of just tapping in the app to call a driverless cab will be huge. In almost all cases it must be cheaper than owning a car which doesn't work most of the time just sits there.

_ph_2• 9 years ago

I was not speaking of a total ban of private cars, just banning cars from certain streets. Converting streets to pedestrian zones is quite successful in the center of large cities, where the distances are short and the traffic density higher than individual transport could deliver.

neuromute2• 9 years ago

Self driving cars could solve the problem of congestion and the problem of parking quite easily. If all cars were autonomous, then the flow of traffic could be optimised and things like traffic lights and roundabouts could be eradicated, this would drastically improve travel times. In an ideal world, no-one would own their own self-driving car, there would be a fleet (ideally state owned and taxpayer funded) that you simply order on-demand, like uber. This way there is no need to park. You simply arrange your pickup times either on-demand or ahead of time, so a vehicle is always there to scoop you up wherever you are.

Turing_Machine• 9 years ago

"(ideally state owned and taxpayer funded)"

Why "ideally"? That would be a recipe for broken, dirty cars. People won't take care of government property (or property that doesn't belong to them in general). You don't usually see privately-owned cars driving around with ugly graffiti tags, nor do such cars typically smell of urine, the way that public buses and train cars often do.

With respect to cars specifically, ask anyone who's worked for a rental car company what kind of condition the cars often come back in. People abuse the crap out of rentals to the fullest extent they think they can get away with. This isn't specifically a modern phenomenon, either -- consider the old-time phrase "I'm going to beat him like a rented mule."

nommm-nommm3• 9 years ago

The only problem with this is I can't imagine the logistics of out-of-town travel, say I want to go 200 miles away for a week. Have the car travel 200 miles and drive back? Have the car stay in the destination city? Then you have to have thousands of cities with some sort of ownership/maintaining agreement.

tony-allan• 9 years ago

If the advent of self driving cars corresponds with reduced private ownership then cars will not need to wait and our children just need to hop into the next free car and their phone or smart school bag will contain their home address. For adults, cars will not need to hand around near venues because we will just get into the next available car.

I agree that the transition will be messy. Perhaps we will need to redesign our local communities a bit to help. More off street parking for example.

pfarnsworth• 9 years ago

I had to stop reading because the blog poster's level of thinking is really superficial.

If you're going to think completely autonomous self-driving cars, why the hell would you bother with things like parking? Why would I even bother "owning" a car? What the more reasonable approach is time-sharing of multiple vehicles, like Uber.

So instead of worrying about parking, you order a car, and it picks you up, and then you get dropped off. It drives off and services other customers. Then, when it comes time to get driven home, you order another car that comes and picks you up. You only pay for the car while it's driving you, not while it's sitting there doing nothing.

Or, if you did own the car, when you are not using it, it could go off and service other people and earn you money, and then return to pick you up.

And why would you go to Starbucks to pick up your own coffee? Why not send a self-driving car through the special self-driving car drivethru to pick up the coffee and return it to you? It could wireless transmit the order and payment details for you, and have a special slot for the coffee or food order.

Seriously, the article is really superficial thinking when it comes to self-driving cars.

Hermel• 9 years ago

That's certainly true for some drivers. But there are still plenty of good reasons to own your own car without sharing it. For one, sharing it won't earn you much anyway, because everyone tends use their cars at about the same time, travelling the same direction. Then, it is very convenient to keep some stuff in your car that you might need but don't want to carry around all the time, especially if you have kids. So I don't think exclusive car-ownership will disappear.

djsumdog2• 9 years ago

I don't think you can own a self driving car (or at least regulators shouldn't allow it). Safety updates and inspections need to be on the level of FAA plane inspections. I mean really, these cars should drive themselves to a service centre at least once a month. When you couple all those costs together, and the liability from car modification compromising self-driving hardware, I just don't see it as a viability safe option.

bitJericho3• 9 years ago

I think a lot of jobs would become flexible with self driving cars. Imagine 8 hour commutes being completely viable.

vecinu2• 9 years ago

I keep hearing this rhetoric and one could say that this superficial thinking because it's very out of line with how people all over the world use their cars today.

I don't feel comfortable renting out my car to strangers while it's not being used. I'm afraid of it getting dirty, them not operating it properly and causing mechanical damage that won't be seen for weeks.

On the other hand, having an "on demand" car service as my only option would increase my transportation costs. My car is paid off, insurance is almost free and gas is dirt cheap in the US it might as well be free. If I had to Uber around with self driving cars my costs of getting around would skyrocket.

Are you suggesting having your own car as well? That's the only way I could see this working.

smileysteve7• 9 years ago

I'm afraid of it getting dirty, them not operating it properly and causing mechanical damage that won't be seen for weeks.

With level 5; this doesn't happen.

smileysteve7• 9 years ago

On the other hand, having an "on demand" car service as my only option would increase my transportation costs.

I've done some of the math on this; here are some very conservative figures.

- $50/mo for reasonable high deductible coverage.

- $100/mo gas

- $100/mo parking at the office

- $x /mo parking at home (not realized in my case)

- $80mo misc expenses (tires, wiper, diy synthetic oil change, taxes, car wash)

$330/mo pays for a lot of $5 uber pool trips.

And while our cars are paid of; The average American does not and is increasingly spending more. This adds an additional $300 to the amount I can spend on trips.

This says nothing of the current liability of driving a car. Where an accident with a > $50k car with over $100k of medical costs creates a gap in coverage for the average American.

aninhumer7• 9 years ago

On the other hand, having an "on demand" car service as my only option would increase my transportation costs.

I don't think anyone is suggesting it would be your only option, simply that most people would prefer it because it will be cheaper (since you're amortising the overheads of car ownership over many users).

And while owning a car might feel prudent, if taxis become cheap enough, it might not be the best investment for your money anymore.

marcosdumay2• 9 years ago

The fact that your car is paid off does not mean it will last forever.

The on demand service will have well maintained cars, where the biggest costs (depreciation and insurance) are shared between a large number of people. There's just no way¹ private cars will be cheaper.

1 - Ok, there's government intervention and monopolies. Given a competitive market, there's no way.

kayoone• 9 years ago

depends on where you want to go with the idea. Of course you can go all the way and say noone will own cars anymore and personal transportation will be ubiquitous everywhere, but it's much more likely that it will start slowly.

People owning cars like today that drive and park themselves, after that maybe people are willing to rent out those cars when they don't need it. Many people probably would not do this all the time because they don't want to risk the car not being present when they actually need it in some cases.

Only after that and only if enough of self driving cars are available at all times, would people really stop buying their own cars.

Your idea of the drive-thru for self driving cars will also take some time to actually happen, self driving will not happen from 0 to 100 with all possibilities a reality from the beginning.

developer22• 9 years ago

Keep in mind: at no point has any manufacturer stated that a self-driving car - even at level 5 - would be allowed to drive itself around without a person in the driver's seat. The idea that people will avoid parking by having their car drive around empty is absurd, and completely out of touch with how self-driving cars would operate within the next 20-30 years.

JimmyAustin• 9 years ago

Audi have already shown off something like that: http://www.zdnet.com/article/audis-self-parking-car-whats-st...

Tepix2• 9 years ago

Elon Musk has stated that you'll be able summon your car from the other side of the country. It will even charge itself itself on the way.

I think not having to deal with parking will be one of the major benefits of self driving cars. It gets even better if you just rent a car for a couple of minutes instead of owning it.

Hopefully it'll be like a taxi at a much lower cost.

nickez• 9 years ago

Me too, why would you even drive to UPS if self-driving cars are the norm? UPS would drive to you, where ever you are and pick up the package...

I think self-driving cars and the ever cheaper cost of electricity will fundamentally change everything.

Frqy32• 9 years ago

While there were some interesting insights in the article, they are not the unintended consequences alluded to at the start with the reference to IMPs and the early Internet leading to the disruption of journalism.

An example of an unintended consequence of fully autonomous vehicles would be what might happen to where people want to live and hence the structure of communities and property values.

hedonistbot• 9 years ago

Based on the journalism example in the introduction I was expecting the unintended consequence to be for the professional drivers to lose their jobs. Which will be more impactful on the labor market than any changes in journalism so far and can completely eliminate "driver" (truck, taxi, etc) as job title. Moreover, this is a part of a broader trend of automation that is real but still left out of mainstream political discussion. If Trump hopes to bring back employment with traditional protectionism, he'll just incentivise faster replacement of human workers with robots and automatic systems. I believe this is a more important topic for discussion than the social and antisocial aspects of driverless cars.

reacweb• 9 years ago

With the development of high speed internet, I would have expect a radical change of nature of work where teleworking would be the norm. Maybe this change is happening, but at a very slow pace. IMHO, the changes caused by autonomous cars will also be progressive.

mac01021• 9 years ago

The internet has been fast enough for 10 years. Something else is preventing teleworking from becoming the norm.

UweSchmidt2• 9 years ago

I might want to own my self-driving car if it is my private space where I sleep, eat, work.

Owning a self-driving car may be cheaper and therfore move viable if they are safe (a few sensors instead of expensive construction and safety technology).

Self-driving cars could be cheaper if they turn out to be domesticated nodes in a network instead of status symbols.

I wouldn't completely rule out car ownership just yet...

Svip2• 9 years ago

Are you suggesting car manufacturers should forego airbags and seat belts because self-driving cars obviously would not crash? You do realise that someone else could still crash into you? Like getting T-boned in a busy junction.

qznc• 9 years ago

Two reasons to own a car, even if level 5 autonomous is available.

1. Storage. As a family with little kids, the car is a mobile storage for diapers, toys, and other stuff. This was the main reason, why we got our own car. We used car sharing before.

2. Customization. Cars are still a status symbol and for heavy commuters also living space. Car manufacturers already provide more and more options to customize.

The second reason is not that strong. I can imagine that cars lose the status symbol appeal, because economic reasons always win. Eventually, only rich people own their cars.

The first reason is difficult. My prediction would be that many people will switch to car sharing. It is already happening even without autonomous cars. Families with little kids still want their own cars. Effectively, it becomes more expensive to have kids due to autonomous cars, relatively.

aninhumer7• 9 years ago

I think you could have a transferable storage unit for people who need it, especially if the cars were specially built. So once you get out, the car goes somewhere (probably nearby) and drops off your stuff, and then the next car picks it up again. It would probably be more expensive, but potentially still worth it compared to storing the whole car for people who need that capability.

That said, I don't think self-driving taxis will completely replace car ownership, at least in the medium term.

cameldrv• 9 years ago

Some people will still want to own a car, some won't. However, parking is going to be a lot less of a problem.

1. Some people will used shared ride services, so the shared car rarely needs to park.

2. Cars will be able to much more densely park. Autonomous cars that can communicate with each other can pack themselves in on the side of the street bumper to bumper. In parking lots with rows, spaces can be much narrower since people don't need to open the doors, the car can just pull forward itself. Even the rows between cars can be filled up. You see this at the facebook campus now because they don't have enough parking, but it takes an army of valets to move all the cars around.

3. People will own and drive smaller cars on average. Even for people who do own a car, the ability to have a larger vehicle available on demand will tend to make them buy smaller cars.

4. Even when it's hard to find parking in an area, the car can drive itself to areas where parking is less scarce.

Overall my guess is that all of these are going to effectively increase the amount of parking available by 4-5x. Parking simply won't be a problem anymore, unless of course this induces demand, we build higher, and without parking garages...

sametmax• 9 years ago

I agree. But a lot of people want to own the car because they want it to be clean and not used but others in a way they wouldn't.

riprowan• 9 years ago

Why would I even bother "owning" a car?

Talk about superficial thinking.

Half the time I get in the car it's for a spur-of-the-moment run to the store.

And while the bus stops 300 ft from my house I've never ridden it.

I don't want my car off earning money when I need it for something important like running up to Home Depot so I can finish whatever project I'm working on.

"The ideal state of a resource is idle and ready for work."

vanderZwan2• 9 years ago

I had to stop reading because the blog poster's level of thinking is really superficial.

And why would that bother you to the point of having to stop reading? Because if it causes rejection on an emotional level, I'm more inclined to think the discomfort is a consequence of it challenging your worldview. Which is likely one of driverless cars being the magical technological cure for all transportation problems. Especially since your suggestions, at least when formulated as briefly as this, are demonstrating quite a bit of superficial thinking in themselves:

So instead of worrying about parking, you order a car, and it picks you up, and then you get dropped off. It drives off and services other customers. Then, when it comes time to get driven home, you order another car that comes and picks you up.

A the car is being shared without supervision, and somehow this will all magically go right, because vandalism doesn't exist in public spaces right now while we still have human supervision either, right? As Nathan Pyle once wrote about NYC public transport: "Beware the empty train car, it is empty for a reason."

http://also.kottke.org/misc/images/nyc-tips-etiquette.jpg

I mean, come on, the tragedy of the commons is ancient and well-established economic theory by now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

You only pay for the car while it's driving you, not while it's sitting there doing nothing.

Except that in the scenario you suggested cars are never "doing nothing," they are constantly driving around. Even if they have no customers. You suggested we wouldn't bother with parking, remember? So we'll get into a scenario where swarms of empty driverless cars are clogging up the road waiting for customers.

And this can realistically happen if we don't pre-emptively regulate this, because we'd have competing different companies with swarms of cars who don't want to share their parking infrastructure for "resting" cars, so they'll use the shared free common infrastructure (the road). Tragedy of the commons again.

And why would you go to Starbucks to pick up your own coffee? Why not send a self-driving car through the special self-driving car drivethru to pick up the coffee and return it to you? It could wireless transmit the order and payment details for you, and have a special slot for the coffee or food order.

People don't bother with food delivery most of the time right now, why would the presence of driverless cars change this? More importantly, why would sending an entire car for a coffee be a good thing? What you describe is a form of Jevon's Paradox, where increases efficiency (or in this case, convenience abstracting away (externalising) the real cost from the user) actually creates more wasteful use of a resource

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

But don't take my word for it, how about Mark Hallenbeck, who is the Director of the Washington State Transportation Center (TRAC)?

http://humantransit.org/2015/11/self-driving-cars-a-coming-c...

Or this Elseview publication on how automation likely increases reliance on cars, creating more traffic and energy consumption:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965856415...

Seriously, the article is really superficial thinking when it comes to self-driving cars.

This isn't an argument. You're just asserting that we shouldn't even bother reading it. You are basically shutting down opposing voices before they are being heard, because they go against your own preferred line of thinking. And I have serious issues with this attitude, since we have more than enough of that in [current year] as is.

stymaar• 9 years ago

Why would I even bother "owning" a car? What the more reasonable approach is time-sharing of multiple vehicles, like Uber.

A huge problem remains though : how do you avoid having dirty/smelly/broken cars all the time when everybody is sharing cars ? People are usually way more cautious with there own stuff than with others'.

The city bike-sharing systems around the world usually chose «indestructible» bikes to deal with this problem, but as a result you get a really heavy and uncomfortable bike and I don't think you could do this for cars anyway: no matter how robust is your car, spilled drinks or food on the seats are still a pain … This kind of system definitely needs a way to avoid the tragedy of the commons.

Elinor Ostrom[1] showed that there are mechanisms to regulate this efficiently, but you need to actively deploy them and it's better not be an afterthought.

If you do nothing and let people be toxic human beings, you'll end up with shared cars in worst shape than public transport (because in public transport you have a kind of social pressure that limits the bad behaviors)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom

saint_fiasco• 9 years ago

They could put a button on the car to report dirty/smelly/broken car. When pressed, the button would let the car know that it should go to some place for cleaning/maintainance soon and also, depending on how comfortable we are with the required surveillance, fine the previous user of the car either for spilling the drink of for not reporting it.

_m8fo• 9 years ago

Weird, but somewhat relevant question (given that self driving capabilities combined with buses can potentially disrupt public transportation in urban areas): why do we even allow anything that's not a bus (say, 10+ passenger) or industrial vehicle on the road?

The downsides of such a thing seem small.

1. There would be less traffic

2. The speed limit could be raised

3. Due to higher occupancy, more people could go to places, faster.

4. Cheaper per person (maybe) than most other forms of public transportation

5. High density areas can have fleets of buses go there, express. This would have only a little overhead compared to driving your own vehicle, yet would be substantially cheaper.

amelius4• 9 years ago

Depending on destination, you might need to change buses several times, which is of course inconvenient.

OTOH, booking a busride far in advance might mitigate this. Also different price-levels could mitigate this to some extent. I'm not sure if it would be sufficient, though.

Larrikin• 9 years ago

I thought it was a very good article, but disliked the comparison to the sad state of US trains.

The author knew he was being a little disingenuous with his comparisons to the sad state of US infrastructure, which is why he was careful to preface every reference to poorly automated train systems with the US. There are a number of automated systems worldwide that work pretty well. The Yurikamome was the first line that came to mind. Its not an extremely packed line, but having safety systems similar, like door gates, works very well. Automating a more used line would of course be more difficult, but not impossible. Aggressive door closing seems to work pretty well in taming crowds. It might take an education period in the US, but once people realize holding a door won't allow you on the train and that it will only allow you to remove a trapped limb, people will be less inclined to do it.

jholman• 9 years ago

Haha, yeah. Entirely agreed.

There is, within 15 miles of the continental United States, a Level 4 automated train, that has been running for over 30 years, with 50 miles of track, and 300,000 passengers per day. And it works great. It's off-the-shelf technology backed by a moderately sizable 70-year-old company, so you can just go out and order a system like this yourself next year, if you want to (and you have a few billion dollars).

That doesn't solve any of the self-driving car problems in the article, so it's totally a side point, but Level 4 trains are a solved problem, for over 30 years.

wcummings• 9 years ago

I live in this area, completely agree, author is spot on.

jack9• 9 years ago

Bait title for blog hits. These aren't unexpected consequences, they are some of the specific benefits. It adds nothing to the discussion as it's neither comprehensive nor insightful. Why does the author think autonomous cars are a net good? Thanks, he went on and on about a few things he wants to pretend are "unexpected". SMH

njharman• 9 years ago

Most of #2 sounds fascinating and not anti-social to me at all.

Except, very few parents are gonna send a car and forgo helicoptering over their kids. Isn't having kid unattended in car illegal most places?

zby2• 9 years ago

One aspect that is not covered is armed conflict (or terrorism). Imagine what would happen if enemy take over a fleet of autonomous cars, be it through hacking or by physical attack on a control center.

Another thing: imagine robbery with autonomous robots and cars.

I am waiting for Hollywood to catch up on these ideas - this would be very cinematic.

ajmurmann• 9 years ago

Does the car need to be completely autonomous for that scenario to be a huge issue. Isn't completely controllable through on board computer bad enough? Someone could remote control and thus weaponize such a car already, could they not?

zby2• 9 years ago

Yeah - indeed, remote control would be enough. There is a problem with latencies though - so you need at least some autonomy in the car. And then there is also the thing that if it is remotely controlled - then it is easy to stop it - just jam the communication link.

smileysteve7• 9 years ago

I have to disagree with Social outcasts; A study this year concluded that driver pedestrian interactions are at an all time low; likely because of both parties using cell phones.

As the article states, I often enter cross walks to test if a car is going to slow down; and they often don't. Similarly, I recently had a near miss when a pedestrian ran across the street when I had a green light (late at night too).

(in Atlanta) Currently, cars are 1st class , Pedestrians are 2nd class, and when I bicycle, I'm often 3rd class.

Self Driving cars, I hope, will make this more equal because I'm tired of almost getting hit when I walk across the street in my residential part of town and a "showboat" enjoys flooring it (going 2x the speed limit) down my street for the 1 block between traffic lights.

nommm-nommm3• 9 years ago

Twice now in the last year I've waited at intersections for the walk signal and when it came on I almost got run over and got beeped and screamed profanities at by drivers taking a right. I guess now drivers believe that they have the right to the road 100% of the time and nobody should ever be allowed to cross, even at crosswalks during the prescribed time for crossing.

Drivers have become increasingly hostile in the last several years.

elihu• 9 years ago

One thing about self-driving cars that I'm not looking forward to is the proliferation of zero-occupant vehicles on the roads.

jakeogh2• 9 years ago

Remotely connected AI with ~1MJ of KE? No thanks.

argonaut• 9 years ago

taking away much of the rest of advertising revenue from print, radio, and TV

TV advertising revenue continues to grow, and is still larger than online ad revenue.

chernaborg• 9 years ago

What about that part where all of our computers are riddled with zero-days, and wide open to shadowy government organizations with massive technical budgets, and the part where we weren't 100% cool with that.

And like, what about the part where we were worried about nefarious anonymous super hackers cyber-attacking the electric grid, and the gas grid, and other critical infrastructure, and we were worried about that sort of thing spiraling out of control into a federal emergency, because heat and potable water were taken down in the middle of winter, when a utility worker's laptop was spearphish hacked, because internet of things? I guess that can't happen anymore?

So now, right in the middle of this, the cars get to drive wherever they want because computers, and nothing can go wrong. One has nothing to do with the other, and we'll all be safe and totally okay, right?

Tepix2• 9 years ago

The author is wrong, the manufacturers are already considering the problem of communicating with pedestrians.

Mercedes: http://www.electronics-eetimes.com/news/mercedes-benz-self-d...

Google: http://time.com/4129247/google-self-driving-cars-patent/

And this article in popular science: http://www.popsci.com/people-want-to-interact-even-with-an-a...

amelius4• 9 years ago

Do pedestrians now have to learn the UIs of different brands of cars in order to not be overrun?

aamederen• 9 years ago

At some point, we will debate against manual driver cars. As a petrol-head, I love driving and riding but that is the truth. the sooner we get rid of manual-drived cars, the faster we switch to self driving cars because the existence of manual cars are a big problem for self driving cars and they limit the potential the self-driving cars can achieve. We should at least do that in some cities. Imagine a town with no traffic lights and cars move in a harmony and scary precision in traffic.

yjftsjthsd-h• 9 years ago

Imagine a power outage. Imagine solar flares. Imagine a town with no backup plan for complex systems suddenly encountering events with 1 in a million odds.

bamboozled2• 9 years ago

What about privacy?

There could be some serious privacy issues introduced by self-driving cars if they take off.

Cameras and microphones patrolling neighborhoods of the world, constantly feeding data into "the cloud" with absolutely no accountability?

Just no!

lhopki01• 9 years ago

The comparison to level 4 or 5 trains doesn't make sense to me. For a train you've got millions of dollars worth of hardware and track so the driver is only a tiny component in the overall cost. For trucks and taxis the driver is the biggest costs. The incentives for autonomous cars are much higher than autonomous trains.

ck425• 9 years ago

This is very interesting to read from a UK perspective. We don't have the concept of jaywalking, except for on motorways (I was actually shocked when an american friend explained it at uni, how the hell does anyone get anywhere, then I realised they mostly drive). So these social interactions don't just occur in certain areas, they're widespread across most roads and pedestrians technically have right of way over cars. Could autonomous vehicles cause the end of walking places?

tahoeskibum• 9 years ago

I think that driving in places such as India with little traffic rules might be easier for an AI because the traffic flow is self-organized. There might not be any rules, but that is not relevant as we are not talking about expert rule based systems. If the AI car sees a cow it'll just slow down and move to the side to overtake.

MR4D• 9 years ago

This is a great article that covers not only edge cases, but almost subliminal behavior that people perform almost every day.

To me, it is clear that our behavior will change. As an American in Amsterdam a few years ago, I was horrified to learn that at some places pedestrians can just walk out in front of you, and you have to stop. After a few days of observing this (as a passenger, thankfully), I noticed that you could tell the tourists - the natives would walk into the street without looking, knowing the drivers would stop. Tourists would hesitate, looking to the driver for feedback. Oddly (to me, as an American), I found that the natives had it right, and that blind faith made things smoother. The tourists, in checking for driver feedback before waling into a street, would actually slow things down more than necessary.

This is but one anecdote of thousands, but it shows how the expected behavior of a person from one place does not necessarily translate to another place. I would extend that same thinking to the future, in that or future will be a behavior change from what we do today.

I'm sure it will come slowly (although occasionally startlingly), and there will be new signs, new laws, and new behaviors. But for me, the best comparison is to when we introduced cars into the streets that had previously been owned by horses and carriages. a bit of chaos, but fairly rapid adoption (within a decade). It wasn't uniform, and it was messy, and some places lagged the modern world by decades. But it came, we adjusted, and now we can't even remember what that previous world was like.

What's that quote about the future not being evenly distributed? I think it applies here perfectly.

webmaven• 9 years ago

Since there are no current ways that driverless cars can give social signals to people, beyond inching forward to indicate that they want to go, how will they indicate to a person that they have seen them and it safe to cross in front of the car at a stop sign?

There is no reason that autonomous vehicles can't give other rudimentary social signals in ways similar to drivers that can't see each other by using their headlights, turn signals, emitting short 'beeps' from their horn, and so on.

For that matter, autonomous vehicles can be given greater range of expression by adding a 100^2 pixel RGB LED display or similar behind the windshield or on the hood that can display emojis, or by actually giving them the ability to speak (KITT-style): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-UqF5ElduY

amelius4• 9 years ago

Eventually perhaps. But until then, there is a very large uncanny valley to bridge.

Unexpected Consequences of Self-Driving Cars

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