#Readwrite autonomous car landscape driver#
#Readwrite autonomous car landscape full#

Today, we laugh at the brute force techniques proposed in the last century, and we ponder how perilous it would have been for astronauts had we blindly pushed ahead back then. New techniques for shielding against solar flares in transit and on the Martian surface are in the works. Today, we’re thinking about robots going first, building habitats, finding water, and providing assistance to humans when they arrive. The more we learned, the smarter we got about the challenges and the required technology. For example, we thought going to Mars in the 20th century was a doable proposition. In my opinion, the public threshold for accidental death tolerance is a lot lower than the developers of autonomous cars would like to believe. I suggest that isn’t going to work with people who believe that contrails in the sky from the condensed jet engine exhaust of airliners are a government conspiracy to cool the planet. It’ll almost be like, if I can paraphrase, “the higher our estimates of lives saved in the long run, the more palatable will be the loss of life in the early states of technology.” But because these companies are in the business of selling a product, I have the feeling that as tragic test and production accidents mount, the corporate estimates of the eventual lives saved will start to be doctored and improved. The results of Chernobyl and Fukushima show what happens when the engineering design doesn’t achieve the near zero probability of failure.įinally, it’s been estimated by the developers of autonomous cars that this technology will save lives in the long run. In other words, it’s not an option to trade human lives against engineering compromises. I remember an article from Scientific American a long time ago, which I can no longer find, which described events of such catastrophic magnitude that the engineering must push the probability of failure to, essentially, zero.

But the specter of a semi-intelligent, robotic entity killing a human carries with it such emotional baggage, the stakes change. To be sure, humans die in indirect, human caused ways. These are events like major oil spills, bridge and dike collapses, nuclear reactor runaway chain reactions, or banking collapses for which even a very small, even minuscule, probability of failure is unacceptable.

A contrasting point of view, one which I favor, is that this is one of those famous “ Low Probability/High Consequence” events that have been studied of late. Secondly, the car makers would have us believe that, for the sake of technical advancement, there are going to be some fatalties. That could slow down sales to a point where the technology becomes unviable. Notable accidents in which cars in autonomous mode, either in the test phase or production phase, kill a human being could well create a public resentment and pushback against the technology. Obsessed as we all are with the prospect that technology can someday provide a fully autonomous car, many difficult issues remain.

#Readwrite autonomous car landscape full#

We write about it here because of Apple’s involvement, even though the full scope of that effort, Project Titan, seems to have shifted, realigned, and fallen into obscurity lately. There has been much written about the technology of autonomous vehicles (AVs).

#Readwrite autonomous car landscape driver#

We might also surmise that someone crossing the street at night, not at an intersection, would take even a human driver by surprise.īut what I want to focus on here is the reporting in the Washington Post, that: “supporters say fatalities are an inevitable part of the learning process.” I question that view. What most people might gloss over is that the pedestrian was not in a cross-walk and that the accident occurred at night.