Google 'Disappointed' By Proposed Restrictions On Driverless Cars

H

HardOCP News

[H] News
Joined
Dec 31, 1969
Messages
0
Google isn't too happy with the proposal from the California DMV requiring all driverless cars to have a human driver with an autonomous vehicle operator certificate.

Google says it's "gravely disappointed" by proposed rules from California regulators that would restrict the use of driverless cars and would ban them from traveling on public roads in the state without a licensed human driver aboard.
 
So how much does it cost to get an endorsement that says you don't have to drive the car?
 
Google is being a big pouty puss right now. While I'm not exactly into the "when you can pry my steering wheel out of my dead hand" crowd, I like the idea of someone who knows how to drive being able to take over in case "bad shit happens"

I mean was Google expecting these to be "Johnny Cab" in nature? Screw it don't have time to drive kids to school, because I'm working extra to pay for a car that does it for me!
 
Guess Google didn't donate enough money to the right people...
 
I'm pretty disappointed too, I'd rather they be banned altogether until they actually test them sufficiently.
 
Unless they can provide a large number of redundant safety features that shut the vehicle down safely, a licensed driver seems a prudent precaution. Planes these days almost fly themselves with automatic takeoffs, landings, and cruising. They are still required to have two pilots (pilot and copilot) on board (even more for extended international flights). Although a car is safer than a plane, it still seems prudent to require the licensed driver until they have a firmly established track record and proven safety shutdown procedures.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Google is being a big pouty puss right now. While I'm not exactly into the "when you can pry my steering wheel out of my dead hand" crowd, I like the idea of someone who knows how to drive being able to take over in case "bad shit happens"

I mean was Google expecting these to be "Johnny Cab" in nature? Screw it don't have time to drive kids to school, because I'm working extra to pay for a car that does it for me!
Click to expand...

From what I understand, the current research and experience indicates that this isn't something humans can actually do. The time it takes a human to switch attention, understand the situation, shift into a driving position, and take over is far too long.
 
kumquat said:
From what I understand, the current research and experience indicates that this isn't something humans can actually do. The time it takes a human to switch attention, understand the situation, shift into a driving position, and take over is far too long.
Click to expand...

This is my take. Even if I'm a licensed driver riding in the car during my 1 hour commute if I'm not actively driving there is little chance I will be paying enough attention to take over quickly enough when the car doesn't apply the breaks fast enough to avoid hitting the car in front of me. In all honesty, after about 10 minutes of it driving itself, I'll either be asleep, daydreaming, or playing on my phone.. which is the whole point of a self driving car.

Either go big or go home. Baby steps are for wusses and wussy government ;)
 
I can understand Google's frustration, their project is supposed to be a boon for the elderly, blind and disabled, for example, so requiring a driver defeats the purpose in many cases. Still, it's a bit early for automated cars to gain that kind of trust so no surprise with the conservative approach, eventually they may get their wish if results are positive - or if having a human operator on hand actually makes things worse in future comparison statistics.
 
nutzo said:
Guess Google didn't donate enough money to the right people...
Click to expand...

That's what I was thinking.... Curious how much the insurance industry likes the driverless car, or does not know how the calculate probabilities for it yet.
 
heatlesssun said:
Seems like a sensible precaution until the technology is proven.
Click to expand...

Over a million miles and no accident that wasn't caused by OTHER people I would say is proven.

I personally think this is a strong-arm position of people who drive vehicles for a living such as truck drivers. I remember when they mentioned the driverless semi-trucks a while back I was thinking it'll only be a matter of time until protests and angry people come out of the woodwork.

Think about how many millions of people would lose their jobs once school buses, truck drivers, construction dump truck drivers, garbage trucks, city bus drivers, mail delivery vehicles all become autonomous. It's going to happen and I feel like this measure introduced has nothing to do with whether autonomous vehicle technology is proven but rather politicians don't want their positions jeopardized once the enormous strikes start to happen like they did in France when the taxi drivers shut down whole highways in protest of Uber.
 
zamardii12 said:
Over a million miles and no accident that wasn't caused by OTHER people I would say is proven.
Click to expand...
Yet an accident rate nobody than the average driver, suggesting that the cars were doing things not always expected. Plus a driver dedicated to intervening whenever the cars got into trouble. Plus never needing to drive in rain or snow. Plus most of the miles done on vehicles that can't go faster than 25 mph.
 
The regulations will evolve as the technology evolves. Google should already understand that emerging tech has these sorts of regulatory issues.
 
Google wants to regulate speech on the internet but gets butt hurt when the Govt wants some over sight over their self driving vehicles.
 
I'm not so against it right now. Let the tech grow and mature with a qualified passenger until the kinks are worked out.

I'm all for not having to actually drive the long road trips.
 
So apparently the California DMV has used Google's barely Beta products before.
 
bomni said:
The regulations will evolve as the technology evolves. Google should already understand that emerging tech has these sorts of regulatory issues.
Click to expand...

I'd think this is the logical way to see it. Of course there's always those that won't like this kind of change for any number of reasons but considering the life and death implications of this technology there's no choice but to go slow with this initially.
 
kumquat said:
From what I understand, the current research and experience indicates that this isn't something humans can actually do. The time it takes a human to switch attention, understand the situation, shift into a driving position, and take over is far too long.
Click to expand...

Well sure even if someone is perfectly alert, a human taking control "in a split second" isn't going to happen. It's more like when you have a car that seems to be driving out of control someone can hit the brake or something.
 
farscapesg1 said:
This is my take. Even if I'm a licensed driver riding in the car during my 1 hour commute if I'm not actively driving there is little chance I will be paying enough attention to take over quickly enough when the car doesn't apply the breaks fast enough to avoid hitting the car in front of me. In all honesty, after about 10 minutes of it driving itself, I'll either be asleep, daydreaming, or playing on my phone.. which is the whole point of a self driving car.

Either go big or go home. Baby steps are for wusses and wussy government ;)
Click to expand...

Would you like some coffee with your failing breaks?
 
Why is that so dissappointing?

Commercial Airplanes can practically fly themselves these days, yet no plane takes off without at the very least 1 pilot on board.

And Autopilot technology is far more developed than auto driving technology, I do not see any reason why Auto-driving is ready for full time driverless cars, especially when they don't run on rails.
 
I still cannot fathom how they think we have the technology to put driverless cars on the roads today. We may still be 50 years away from having adequate machine intelligence to discern enough possible ways things can get screwed up while driving to cope with enough of them to be considered "safe" by more than a handful of people.

People make mistakes when driving, yes. But the human brain processes more obscure stuff that happens faster than any computer ever made. And practical quantum systems aren't mainstream.

You could randomly toss confetti, various nerf balls and ONE bowling ball in front of a fast moving car.

Find me a computer than can, in less than one second, make the kind of mental overload subconscious decisions a human brain can.
1) instantly discarding confetti of various sizes as meaningless. Forgotten in less than a blink.
2) Nerf balls of various shapes and sizes. Prioritized, and in some dark corner of the mind recognized as a little scary in a car, but likely all made of foam despite their size. You can tell, the color, the way they move. In a heartbeat.
3) The bowling ball. In the midst of the storm of harmless objects, you see something smooth, round. The human brain connects it to having mass and being heavy and dangerous not because it is much different from all the other flying nerf items, but because you've encountered this random object before and is has no place flying through the air in front of your car. The size, shape, color and construction. The way it moves. You assume what it is before you even fully confirm it.

End result, in only a second or two of udder mayhem, the human will decide to plow through the confetti and nerf balls but may actually recognize the bowling ball among the objects and take just enough action to avoid a catastrophic hit.

This would be similar to the human collision avoidance systems in a car than looks for human form... but how does that work when it's a little girl wearing an apple costume Halloween night? Does she suddenly get reprioritized as an object that's potentially ok to hit as long as your air bag saves YOU?

I hate this crap. Computers don't make those kinds of decisions. Humans do.
 
I do wonder what kind of objects the lidr in those autonomous cars can even detect. Like a dry road all the sudden has sheet ice on it. Obviously, other things like traction control will detect it when it gets onto the ice, but will it detect the ice before it drives onto it?
 
Advil said:
I still cannot fathom how they think we have the technology to put driverless cars on the roads today.
Click to expand...

A million miles driven, zero at-fault accidents. I don't know anyone who has driven a million miles without causing an accident.

Advil said:
We may still be 50 years away from having adequate machine intelligence to discern enough possible ways things can get screwed up while driving to cope with enough of them to be considered "safe" by more than a handful of people.
Click to expand...

And what if we can demonstrate, through real-world experience, that they are safer than an average human driver? That they are safer than virtually all human drivers?

We let teenagers behind the wheel of vehicles on public roads with literally zero experience whatsoever. Some of you guys are massively inflating how good human drivers are.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Google is being a big pouty puss right now. While I'm not exactly into the "when you can pry my steering wheel out of my dead hand" crowd, I like the idea of someone who knows how to drive being able to take over in case "bad shit happens"
Click to expand...
And yet this is coming from California, the state that hands out drivers licenses to uninsured illegal aliens that can't drive for dick. I'll take a driverless Google car with a virtually perfect safety record over Juanita barely peeping over the steering wheel of her 1992 Taurus with bald tires and the original dampers bouncing down the road and making four unsignaled lane changes at once.

The real reason California is doing this is socialism. A huge portion of the lower class are involved in the transportation industry, and Google could drive them out of business almost overnight with driverless transportation vehicles of all sizes that have a far superior safety record and would be able to safely operate 24x7x365 unlike a human driver that by law you have to ensure has limited driving time and enough sleep.

For those that don't know, there was a big accident up ahead here on HW69 and traffic was virtually at a stop. An 18 wheeler was driving in the HOV lane (completely illegal) to get around the traffic, saw there was a cop up ahead, and then without signaling came to a complete stop with cars that BELONG in the HOV lane all honking behind him and then cranked the wheel over as hard as he could and forced himself in front of me when I gave him about 3" of space between me and the car in front of me. He almost hits me and the car in the lane next to me, and then when pulling forward the last tire of his trailer took my mirror out. He didn't notice my horn over the horns of the cars behind him, and after wards refuses to pull over. I get the cop up ahead to finally notice and pull him over, and then, oh yeah, he's not even insured. He also gives the cop a hard time and seems borderline retarded and nearly gets himself shot by sneaking up on the cop who was taking notes in his car and opens up the door to the officer's SUV when he was asked to wait next to me. You prefer this guy over a Google automated vehicle? Heeellll no!
 
Ducman69 said:
The real reason California is doing this is socialism. A huge portion of the lower class are involved in the transportation industry, and Google could drive them out of business almost overnight with driverless transportation vehicles of all sizes that have a far superior safety record and would be able to safely operate 24x7x365 unlike a human driver that by law you have to ensure has limited driving time and enough sleep.
Click to expand...

Nonsense. Self-driving cars won't put anyone out of business overnight. There are like 20 million cars in California. They won't all be replaced overnight. People in the government and industry are pushing this for a lot of reasons. No one wants to be that person who passed the legislation that let a computer-car run over a toddler. Elected officials don't like being the one to blame for controversial stuff that blows up.

Government by and large wants to maintain the status quo unless something bad happens, in which case they want to be the person going in and reforming the whole shebang. That's how people win elections and get promotions.
 
kumquat said:
A million miles driven, zero at-fault accidents. I don't know anyone who has driven a million miles without causing an accident.



And what if we can demonstrate, through real-world experience, that they are safer than an average human driver? That they are safer than virtually all human drivers?

We let teenagers behind the wheel of vehicles on public roads with literally zero experience whatsoever. Some of you guys are massively inflating how good human drivers are.
Click to expand...
A huge problem is these cars are slow. They only follow the speed limit and have difficulty in complex traffic situations i.e. merging onto a congested expressway.

This means traffic congestion problems will only increase severely. This means we will have to dramatically expand our transportation infrastructure. This means long commutes will only get longer.

We are decades (maybe centuries) away from the point where a self-driving car will be faster than the best human drivers. Until that time there will be a huge resistance to self-driving cars replacing humans. I'm an old-school American. I believe in self-reliance, individualism and assuming responsibility for my actions. Self-driving cars represent everything I oppose.

Elon Musk says the window for Mars Colonization is closing. A world war and the spread of religious fundamentalism will slow or halt the progress of technology. This likewise will slow or halt the development of the AI necessary to make self-driving cars practical. I say self-driving cars will "never" replace humans.
 
kumquat said:
A million miles driven, zero at-fault accidents. I don't know anyone who has driven a million miles without causing an accident.
Click to expand...

Ya, a million miles at slow ass speeds in perfect weather. You can talk with plenty of truck drivers that put in a million miles and have zero accidents, except they have to drive an assortment of speeds, assortment of different traffic, different terrains, in cars with like 20 gears, and 10 times the size, carrying cargo that could shift, while doing it in different weather and they have no accidents.

And what if we can demonstrate, through real-world experience, that they are safer than an average human driver? That they are safer than virtually all human drivers?

We let teenagers behind the wheel of vehicles on public roads with literally zero experience whatsoever. Some of you guys are massively inflating how good human drivers are.
Click to expand...

Some of you guys are massively inflating how good AI drivers are, when they really have only touched 1/1000th of driving.

Hell earlier this year, Christopher Urmson (leads the Google car team) has said they haven't test in snow, can't be tested in rain, can't drive in large parking lots or multifloor parking garages, and can't see traffic lights if the sun is behind it. It can't deal with construction zones, it can't deal with pedestrians, it can't deal with cops that are directing traffic, it can't deal with new roads (cause it won't be in GPS), it can't tell a big rock from a sheet of paper that's the size of a rock, etc.

That's only a little extra from where they're testing. I bet the car would drive right into a sinkhole filled with water, thinking it's just a slight pothole.
 
That all lends support to this legislation being unnecessary and meaningless.

Human drivers can and do exceed their capabilities regularly, even in excellent conditions. Driverless cars don't.
 
Ducman69 said:
And yet this is coming from California, the state that hands out drivers licenses to uninsured illegal aliens that can't drive for dick. I'll take a driverless Google car with a virtually perfect safety record over Juanita barely peeping over the steering wheel of her 1992 Taurus with bald tires and the original dampers bouncing down the road and making four unsignaled lane changes at once.

The real reason California is doing this is socialism. A huge portion of the lower class are involved in the transportation industry, and Google could drive them out of business almost overnight with driverless transportation vehicles of all sizes that have a far superior safety record and would be able to safely operate 24x7x365 unlike a human driver that by law you have to ensure has limited driving time and enough sleep.

For those that don't know, there was a big accident up ahead here on HW69 and traffic was virtually at a stop. An 18 wheeler was driving in the HOV lane (completely illegal) to get around the traffic, saw there was a cop up ahead, and then without signaling came to a complete stop with cars that BELONG in the HOV lane all honking behind him and then cranked the wheel over as hard as he could and forced himself in front of me when I gave him about 3" of space between me and the car in front of me. He almost hits me and the car in the lane next to me, and then when pulling forward the last tire of his trailer took my mirror out. He didn't notice my horn over the horns of the cars behind him, and after wards refuses to pull over. I get the cop up ahead to finally notice and pull him over, and then, oh yeah, he's not even insured. He also gives the cop a hard time and seems borderline retarded and nearly gets himself shot by sneaking up on the cop who was taking notes in his car and opens up the door to the officer's SUV when he was asked to wait next to me. You prefer this guy over a Google automated vehicle? Heeellll no!
Click to expand...

I agree - autonomous cars dont have to be perfect, to beat "competition" - most people are very bad drivers.
 
kumquat said:
That all lends support to this legislation being unnecessary and meaningless.

Human drivers can and do exceed their capabilities regularly, even in excellent conditions. Driverless cars don't.
Click to expand...
The capabilities of even poor human drivers far exceed those of the best Driverless car. Rain, snow, fog are all major obstacles to the driverless car.

One must consider the positives and negatives of driverless cars. The positives is a short list; the negatives would fill volumes...
 
Advil said:
I still cannot fathom how they think we have the technology to put driverless cars on the roads today. We may still be 50 years away from having adequate machine intelligence to discern enough possible ways things can get screwed up while driving to cope with enough of them to be considered "safe" by more than a handful of people.

People make mistakes when driving, yes. But the human brain processes more obscure stuff that happens faster than any computer ever made. And practical quantum systems aren't mainstream.
Click to expand...

The question is not if the computer can react to EVERYTHING better than a human. The question is if for 90% of the situations it will encounter, it reacts better.

You will very rarely find a situation where confetti, nerfballs and bowling balls are strewn across the road. It's irrelevant if the computer can't handle those. Most accidents happen under fairly routine conditions because someone wasn't paying attention. The computer never gets distracted, never gets tired, never gets sleepy, and doesn't forget to check the blind spots before maneuvering. That alone makes it safer than human drivers under almost every situation, and that means lives saved.

Saying you don't want to save thousands of lives every year because under rare circumstances the computer *might* make less than optimal choices and *maybe* cost more lives than a surprised human would under those rare circumstances is ridiculous.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top