My dad works in the airplane industry and had an interesting story to tell me that relates to this. (I'm not sure exactly how accurate it is or what the source is, sorry). Apparently, it is illegal for pilots to read while flying. Even if they are heading in a straight line with no one around for miles. This is because one time an pilot wasn't paying attention and due to a series of software failures, the plane turned into a mountain. Interestingly, the plane was tuning at a very exact amount so that the number of Gs remained constant.
In any case, this single crash caused regulation to state that computers can never fly planes by themselves. This strikes me as rather unfair. If a single human crashed a plane, it does not make it illegal for humans to fly planes by themselves.
Another example is that in London, subways must be driven by a human. Even though driving a subway may be trivial (there is no way to steer), Londoners apparently do not feel comfortable being driven by a non-living thing. They want to be sure that if they die, the driver dies too, adding a level of accountability.
It seems that this sort of wide-spread mistrust of machines is driven more by socially normal paranoia than any kind of logic. I for one am rooting for machines to take over all forms of driving. There may be a few mishaps, but it will probably become hundreds of times safer eventually.
It's certainly not "logic," I wouldn't call it paranoia. Consider that some people just like to be more in control of their lives than they are, and they see that small bit of control slipping away every day. If you don't understand computers -- and, granted, if you're reading this forum, it's probably hard for you to put yourself in those shoes -- you're putting your life in the hands of a black box. Nevermind that you do it (unknowingly) all the time. Everything you touch is starting to become alien because it incorporates some crazy technology you've never seen before.
There's a great section in Neal Stephenson's Anathem where the science-y younger brother is speaking to his older sister, who's mechanically talented but not very techy. He says there's always a better way to build something, that you can always take the inefficiency out of whatever system you're working with. But she doesn't want that, because she wouldn't be able to fix it herself. That's how most people see technology, and to be honest, we see it similarly, because we can fix it, so it's not a threat. In 30 years, will we be able to fix the things that are running to world, and will we be as inclined to trust them as we do now?
I'm not saying it's logical, or appropriate, but it's a natural response to the situation. I think it's important to work with it rather than dismiss it.
This argument (while good) won't apply to cars for simple economic reasons. Having a human pilot or subway driver costs 1 marginal person for hundreds of people. Having an extra driver per car costs 1 person per person. I will strongly bet that the two orders of magnitude difference in cost will overcome the bureaucracy.
Additionally, once cars become sufficiently advanced, it will be much cheaper to insure a self-driving car than to insure a human.
Once the change happens, it will be breathtaking how rapidly it occurs. Social stigmas are hard to sustain towards a large portion of the population. In 2000, if you were wearing a helmet skiing, you were crazy. Now, you're crazy not to. You used to be a loser if you were on a social network. Now you're a loser if you're not. Both these changes happened over perhaps one to three years. Critical mass may only be ~5% of the population. You only need enough to avoid individuals being singled out as odd.
Your phrasing of that statistic is misleading. What you mean is, "90% of Americans have used illegal drugs or used legal-drugs illegally." When you say "illegal drugs" people think of marijuana, heroin, cocaine, etc. Casually lumping in underage use of alcohol and tobacco is purposefully misleading.
Does it count underage drinking? I didn't even notice that if it does. Regardless, around 85% of Americans use marijuana alone, so it wouldn't change the statistics by more than one or two percent. So I don't see how that would be misleading.
You're really misreading these statistics. Nowhere do they say anything close to "85% of Americans use marijuana".
On page 103, it says that 82% of fifty-year-olds (who attended high school during the heaviest-drug-using period in America's recent history) have used marijuana at least once in their lives. But only 10% of that same group have used it in the last year.
Among current 18-year-olds, only 42% have ever tried marijuana even once. And among most age groups under the age of 30, only between 23-34% have used marijuana within the last year.
However, I don't see evidence that the study you posted counts underage drinking in among illicit drug use.
"Nowhere do they say anything close to '85% of Americans use marijuana'."
I said 'have used' in my original comment, which is what I meant. (In my reply I was thinking lifetime prevalence, i.e. around 85% 'use' marijuana at some point during their lives. Poorly phrased, my bad.)
"Among current 18-year-olds, only 42% have ever tried marijuana even once."
The age of first use of marijuana is highly variable. By age 25 around 65% of people have used marijuana, and more people keep trying throughout the next couple decades of their life. The important statistic is what percentage of people use marijuana at least once in their lives, not what percentage use it on any given day.
"On page 103, it says that 82% of fifty-year-olds (who attended high school during the heaviest-drug-using period in America's recent history) have used marijuana at least once in their lives."
The 82% figure doesn't count people who didn't make it to fall of their 12th grade year in high school, so you actually have to adjust it up a couple percentage points. Also, even if less high schoolers were using illegal drugs for a decade or two, that probably won't have much effect on the overall lifetime prevalence. It might eventually decline a few points, but probably not that much.
85% sounds pretty wild. Hm, looking at pg 78 of the linked document, it says among people surveyed who were exactly 50 years old when surveyed, graduating in 1977, those who tried marijuana were 82%.
1977 has got to have been the historical peak of high school usage. I notice they don't mention 51 year olds or 49 year olds, they have specifically pulled out this one exact age for this statistic.
It then goes on to say that 29-30 yr olds have a 68% "adjusted" lifetime prevalence. What does that mean adjusted? It means the actual number they measured is lower (32% for 19-30 year olds), and they tweaked it upwards because they wanted a bigger number.
About this time is where I say a study has too many methodological flaws and should be disregarded.
Only 50-year-olds are mentioned because this is a longitudinal cohort they've been testing since 1977, and this year (2009) it's their turn to be reported.
The "adjusted" number is higher than the measured number because some people answered the survey ten years ago saying they'd tried marijuana in the past year but then in the current survey the same respondent said "no" when asked if they'd ever tried marijuana in their lifetime. So they're publishing both the actual numbers and the "we know you're probably lying" numbers.
"About this time is where I say a study has too many methodological flaws and should be disregarded."
Try actually reading it. It's really not that difficult to understand. The 'maturity recanting effect' section here also gives a brief summary of what they did and why:
I feel very comfortable stating with 100% certainty that your claim that the study said 85% of all people report being marijuana users (exact words: "around 85% of Americans use marijuana alone") was completely and outrageously inaccurate. It's humorous but a touch sad that you can't admit you were completely and utterly wrong. Lay off the stuff, clear your head, and re-read the report, dude.
It's also charming that you cite erowid.org as a reliable unbiased source. I am familiar with the site and have read it. It is a radical pro-drug site.
Where did he call them unbiased? (I would call them reliable, though they certainly have an agenda. But they've always struck me as working hard to present facts, or at least label opinion as such. Certainly I can't think of another site about drugs that I would trust over Erowid. And I would be very interested indeed to hear of deliberately misleading information posted there.)
I think Erowid is about as unbiased as it gets. All they do is provide information about drugs, they are neither advocating drug use nor condemning it.
Even their legal articles don't take any position on what drug policy should be, all they do is explain the case law that exists.
There are lots of stigmas against behaviors which are widely considered, well, stupid. Or immoral. Or degenerate. Even if lots of people have tried them (and perhaps still occasionally imbibe).
Hypocrisy is demonized. Sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly.
> Having an extra driver per car costs 1 person per person.
If the car has some sort of payload (like a Semi or UPS truck), then this makes total sense. If the human is the payload, then there is no benefit at all. (Well, other than being able to multi-task -- but if you're working from your car, why not just work from home and skip the commute?)
You can multi-task in areas other than work. You could be reading a book, playing a musical instrument, making phone calls, or even enjoying some recreational refreshments that impair your ability to operate a motor vehicle.
Much like taking public transportation to work, it turns commute time into time that can be spent doing something other than paying attention to the commute.
Very interesting! I never thought about the insurance issue. The current systems rates premiums mostly according to personal driving record, right? [1] Hence, if I never drive myself, my premium should only depend on the crash record of that type of robot car.
This would also imply, that my premium could raise, because that kind of robot, recently crashed a bit too often. At the same time, I might be able to reduce my premium by installing a software or hardware update.
[1] I have a license for years but never owned a car. AFAIK it is not just the drivers record but also the statistical likely hood of a crash, according to gender, age in car. Though, cars today are not rated as 'unsafe' because they are buggy but because they are popular with reckless drivers.
We do not leave in the same world. I mean, really, I am in East asia, not the same world. People do not ski much here, and if they do it is without helmet.
I know it is a bit tiring to recall this but it is a good habit to think about the reality of the generalization that one write. What I like on HN is that it is usually not too provincial. Sorry for the nit-thing.
But it's not the same - as one Frenchman put it: "it's like an elevator, only it goes horizontally instead of vertically".
That is not the case with driverless cars - not that I'm against them.
The use cases put forth in the article are quite compelling, but we still haven't been able to eradicate "elevator operators" ("ascensoristas") here in Uruguay, it will be far more difficult to remove drivers' unions !
There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005. The financial cost of these crashes is more than 230 Billion dollars. 2.9 million people were injured and 42,636 people killed. About 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in the United States -- one death every 13 minutes.
I will wage anyone that if all the cars on the road were computer driven there would be no where near 42,636 people killed per year.
I too can imagine the number dropping down far lower than that, even under a thousand, let's say.
I can then imagine the newspaper headlines the few times per year that computers do end up, for whatever reason, being responsible for a small handful of deaths: "COMPUTER GLITCH KILLS FOUR PASSENGERS IN HORRIFIC CAR ACCIDENT!"
Never mind that human "glitches" are responsible for dozens of such accidents every day at present. For whatever reason, I have a strong feeling that headlines such as those will scare people worse than the way things are now.
This suggests that any effort to introduce driverless cars should be preceded by a multi-year ad campaign that (ahem) drives home the >40k dead/yr. figure.
Presumably, it would be paid for by insurance companies. It could be rolled out as a general public awareness effort (i.e. packaged with generic reminders about wearing seatbelts, maintaining proper tire-pressure, etc.), combined with localized elements that included maps highlighting particularly deadly times and places where drivers should be especially vigilant.
Once the figure is widely accepted, the companies who would be offering the technology would have an established base against which they could run ads that credit themselves with lives saved. Assuming that these claims are backed up by public data assembled by trustworthy parties, even the most vociferous "if it bleeds it leads" news agencies would have a hard time terrorizing people BACK to the days of a 9/11 every month.
Also, while I hate to be cynical, there's an upside to corporate mass media, in that a lot of ad dollars spent by pro robo-car interests WILL make news agencies think twice about scaring the daylights out of people just for a ratings bump. After all, the whole point of ratings is to boost the price of ad sales.
I realize that this may seem like a lot of effort, but no industry takes a longer view than the insurance industry. If there's one group that has the time, money, and motivation to make the push, it's the guys who are paying costs associated with all the current grief and mayhem. Moreover, our not-so-clean political system does mean that legislators can be easily persuaded once insurance companies are comfortable that the technology is truly secure.
My guess is that any push would need Federal backing, and would be focused - initially - on the Interstate highway system, where much less reactive driving takes place.
A little siren goes off, warning you to break. Navigation tells you where to go, and how.
An override button appears, allowing you to give the computer control in an emergency. Eventually, the button becomes a switch, and the switch gets left on.
"Autodrive" licenses (similar to automatic licenses) are introduced, allowing people to pass their driving test in full auto mode, provided they only drive cars in full auto.
Why? If computer-driven cars are much less likely to crash than human-driven cars, it would be entirely appropriate for there to be a social stigma against humans driving cars (because it would show disregard for the lives and safety of others). It would also be entirely appropriate to treat human drivers more harshly when they were responsible for accidents, as they would have had the choice of instead allowing a computer to drive and statistically probably avoid the accident.
You misinterpreted my sentence (but perhaps it wasn't your fault since I elided a crucial piece of information).
I did not say that human-driving ought not be morally blameworthy but, since I enjoy driving, I am understandably worried about a time when something that brings me pleasure will become unethical.
I suspect you will then be able to exercise driving in a more controlled, and most likely more interesting than everyday city driving, environment the same way it is now for kart circuits and the like.
One problem is that even if there are far fewer road casualties with driverless cars, there will still almost certainly be some casualties, perhaps many. Who do we hold responsible for those?
If we blame the car makers, there may not be any car makers because nobody will want to take on the liability.
If we don't blame anyone then there is no incentive to improve the situation and no way to hold people accountable for sincere negligence.
We would have to accept that a consumer product will occasionally kill us, and come up with some standard to judge whether the manufacturer "tried hard enough" to prevent it.
I can't think of any precedent for that. There are plenty of products that can kill us, but only if we misuse them. A driverless car will have a few deadly design flaws that we only learn about from experience.
Maybe this should be publicly acknowledged up front and a legal framework established. That seems better than pretending it's completely safe, causing a shitstorm when something inevitably goes wrong.
Perhaps a new entity is needed? Think of a zipcar like service which is accountable for the vehicle. Large enough to absorb the occasional accident, and pressure automakers for safety/efficiency improvements.
I can't help but think that people may not drive well with computer-controlled cars on the road. The decisions that a driver makes sometimes depends what they think the decision of other cars will be. Unless the computer-controlled cars account for this in their decisions, then there may actually be more crashes, as the other cars don't do what human drivers expect. Another interesting result is that computer controlled cars may not be able to use the most efficient behavior until most cars on the road are computer controlled.
I imagine they would be designed to drive using under the assumption that other cars are going to make unusual maneuvers, and to compensate for that.
During the period where both human and computer driven cars share the road, I suspect the human driven cars will get a speed advantage because of this.
Personally, I'll be more than happy to add ten minutes to my commute if it means I don't have to drive. I think a lot of people will be with me on that one.
In Chicago, there was a case some years ago where a woman was pulled under a train by a door.
She was carrying a very expensive violin. She got off the train and the doors closed between her and the violin, with the strap around her shoulder. Because the strap was thin, it didn't activate the door's obstruction detector.
Because the violin was so expensive, she didn't want to lose it, so instead of crawling out of the strap, she stood there and waited for the conductor to notice her. One of his jobs was to verify visually that there were no problems in the station before the train started moving -- but he didn't do that. She was dragged under the train and the wheels sliced off her legs.
Point being, those people are likely serving an important safety function. The conductor didn't do his job on the Chicago train and so a woman lost her legs. But a system with no human conductor would be an unsafe system by design.
As your story illustrates, humans and machines both have failure rates. Sometimes the presence of humans actually makes a system less safe. The meltdown at Three Mile Island, for example, would not have happened if a panicked human operator had not overridden the automatic emergency cooling system.
> The conductor didn't do his job on the Chicago train and so a woman lost her legs. But a system with no human conductor would be an unsafe system by design.
Perhaps, yes. But in this example, with no human conductor, the woman would have just sacrificed her violin instead of relying on the unreliable human conductor.
The system has an automated track safety system. It can get a little annoying at times as a rider — I've heard blowing leaves on the tracks can trigger the system, which is significant given the large majority of stations are elevated and can be exposed to the elements. This article from a few years back has described some of the more unfortunate cases: http://thetyee.ca/News/2008/11/18/SkyTrain/
Unions aren't against technological improvements they're just against how quickly those improvements would be put into place because a LOT of jobs would be lost. If driverless subways for example were phased in as workers retired, I'm sure there wouldn't be a problem. Or if re-training were provided for the workers before they were let go, that might be acceptable as well. It comes down to the fact that humans have to eat and educate their children: machines don't.
Also (as a separate issue) I thought the governments of the world wanted to create more jobs, not fire everyone who is currently working... ;)
Counterpoint: as an airplane passenger, my experience is the same whether there's a human pilot or not; I sit in my seat until the ride is over.
But in my car, if it could drive itself, I could get in the back seat and sleep. I could have a tiny apartment back there and read or play video games.
I think that if people will text while they drive, risking their lives for a tiny message, they will gladly let their car drive for the payoff of getting to do whatever they want during the trip.
Side effect: if people can sleep comfortably in the back seat while their car drives, suddenly a 4-hour commute may sound reasonable. That's going to screw with city planning, pollution, etc.
The fact that pilots are willing to travel on a plane is the best guarantee that the plane is safe, better than any regulatory licence/permit anyway. That's one thing you'd lose, as well as not having someone to hold directly accountable.
As for driverless cars... It just seems folk are getting a bit ahead of themselves - can computers really handle all the edge cases that come up while driving? Like when you have to break some road rules temporarily in order to circumnavigate an obstruction. Or when the car gets stuck. Etc.
"Londoners apparently do not feel comfortable being driven by a non-living thing."
Does not surprise me. Most Europeans have not even adapted to automatic transmission in cars, and still believe that a human can switch gears better with manual transmission (which has not been true for decades now). Makes me wonder if they ever adapt to fully automated driving.
A lot of automatic transmissions plain aren't that smart; I can think of several I've driven that were too conservative about changing down on a hill which made the cars much less responsive than they should have been. Also there's the old chestnut about autos being less fuel efficient / less powerful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_transmission#Benefits
Either way, I don't think the prevalence of manuals in Europe is entirely (maybe not even mostly) about not giving up control to the machine.
Clearly that's not universally true, otherwise racing drivers would use automatic gearboxes. It may be true for everyday driving, but I'd need to see some citations for this claim.
Frankly, I'm a little dubious of automatic transmission. Perhaps I've just been driving the wrong cars, but I haven't found an automatic gearbox that can match a human being. For instance, if I'm descending a steep hill, I'll stick the car in a lower gear, but an automatic always chooses the higher gear.
Automatic transmissions avoid engine braking. If you want it, you need to choose it manually.
And personally I never do for the simple reason that brakes are a lot cheaper than transmissions. And I rarely descend a hill long enough and steep enough that brake heating is a serious problem. (And when I do I usually just slow down, and stay slow.)
I downshift on hills because that keeps more of my stopping power ready to use. Brakes heat up when you use them continuously, reducing their effectiveness.
Unless you create a transmission that reads my mind, or can see the road and surrounding traffic it will not shift "better". Faster? yes. More smoothly? yes. Better? No.
What do you mean not mature? This has been on the market in cars since the sixties. Audi has had it in their top models for over a decade. It's just expensive
A quick search for "CVT reliability" produces pages of horror stories related to the Audi (and other) CVTs.
The CVT is only available on the A4 and A6 (not the A3, A5, A7, A8, Q5, Q7, et al). Also, the CVT is only available with the smaller engine options. Finally, the CVT cars are front wheel drive only, no quattro available.
It's also difficult to drag the car with automatic gearbox (you have to do it very slowly or put it on a trailer) and you can't start the car by pulling it if battery gets flat.
The pilot should be there when the Software fails, and that's why he shouldn't be busy with something else. It adds to security, and it's worth it (from my point of view) whatever is the cost.
You can't say "whatever the cost". What if it were $1 trillion per passenger? Obviously it's not, but there's some point at which you would change your mind. You have to assign a cost to these decisions in order to have a well reasoned discussion. The EPA, CPSC, NRC, OSHA, and OMB for example all use varying costs of life to make decisions with the value of one human life ranging from $1-$8 million.
I appreciate the rest of your comment, and I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "illegal" but if you mean "breaking an actual law" it is not "illegal" for a pilot in command of an aircraft "to read". Having said that, if you're doing something in the cockpit as pilot in command that doesn't pertain to piloting your aircraft, you're doing it wrong.
Autopilots are adjunct flight controls. They are not...the pilot in command.
In any case, this single crash caused regulation to state that computers can never fly planes by themselves. This strikes me as rather unfair. If a single human crashed a plane, it does not make it illegal for humans to fly planes by themselves.
Another example is that in London, subways must be driven by a human. Even though driving a subway may be trivial (there is no way to steer), Londoners apparently do not feel comfortable being driven by a non-living thing. They want to be sure that if they die, the driver dies too, adding a level of accountability.
It seems that this sort of wide-spread mistrust of machines is driven more by socially normal paranoia than any kind of logic. I for one am rooting for machines to take over all forms of driving. There may be a few mishaps, but it will probably become hundreds of times safer eventually.