Harrow said..
Is anyone that is sitting behind the wheel 'supervising' an autonomous car going to be ready for that 1 in 5600 miles intervention? I'd say just about never.

That's right you're either in charge and concentrating or just a dozy passenger. Maybe it'll turn out to be either fully autonomous or just emergency over-ride. Maybe after all the experimentation we'll still be steering cars but with our thumbs outside the steering wheel.

Trains are pretty autonomous they need a dead man switch.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch
jalopnik.com/video-shows-driver-in-fatal-autonomous-uber-crash-was-l-1823970417

Ian K said..

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_man%27s_switch

I did read the article carefully and couldn't find any dead man switch that we could attach to our pedestrian bicycle to prevent an accident.
Say something that will stop bicycle from being pushed on the public by a person that is drunk or dead.
Oooops.
That is dead man switch we talk about but here we need actually dead women switch.Same with supervising driver.
Your dead man switch could be completely useless since the driver was women too.

Harrow said..
Is anyone that is sitting behind the wheel 'supervising' an autonomous car going to be ready for that 1 in 5600 miles intervention? I'd say just about never.

Agreed

However I repeat my assertion that is still too often, with a switched-on safety driver in there or not

Who here has a crash every 10,000 km?
None of us I bet.
But companies are pursuing this idea for seemingly no reason than to be the first and to make $$$$- if the best best we have now is a crash every 10,000km I think they should be on the roads at all yet.

^^^ strange analogy

But ignoring that - there is all kinds of issues with that system, it is nowhere near as easy as they make it sound....... it only works in perfect light with a reasonably reflective target vs background, and can't compensate for wind as well as is needed to replace the human factor. I'll spare u the sniper specifics, but it ain't that good and most of the coverage is by media who want to scare us all into thinking average Joe can buy one and be a sniper in 5mins.

No offense intended Macro - but stick to what you know, which doesn't seem to be firearms.
It looks very much like you have the traditional "Hollywood" education when it comes to ballistic topics.

Our rifle club often has the WAPOL Trogs borrow our range - training with their taxpayer funded tools, and often testing firearms that are waaaay out of any regular civilian's budget.

A while back, the Police turned up with another pricey toy to test, a big doo-whopper calibre [that civvies cant have], in a scary black stock [that civvies cant have], computer assistance with range finding, mirage - wind - humidity and temperature compensating, fancy everything you can think of and a lot of stuff that needed a tame geek to translate if you had any chance to understand WTF was being used.

Anyway, long story short - incredibly expensive hi-tech shootsenboomer being operated by young, fit, highly trained demonstrator bloke, was consistently outshot by a diabetic retiree using his 1970's rifle with olde schoole iron sights.
The only high tech he could claim was a pacemaker and a stainless steel hip.

Actually, I want to do some experiment is with dog trainers on my new cattle stock. No needed for my dogs anymore -either they did learn properties boundary or just get bored to escape.

Now I want to check if the same device could be used to steer a steer!
It is not easy to chase or direct a beast of hundred hectares plot.
So why not to remotely steer it to water, food, medicines or cattle crush yard!

If the experiment is successful, that same we could do with humans.
O irony, the future looks like that:
cars will be autonomous, self-driving
humans will be remotely operated like dogs and my cattle..

Statistically you have more chance of being killed by a shark if your in the self driving cars domain you have to accept the risk.

Macroscien said..
Actually, I want to do some experiment is with dog trainers on my new cattle stock. No needed for my dogs anymore -either they did learn properties boundary or just get bored to escape.

Now I want to check if the same device could be used to steer a steer!
It is not easy to chase or direct a beast of hundred hectares plot.
So why not to remotely steer it to water, food, medicines or cattle crush yard!

If the experiment is successful, that same we could do with humans.
O irony, the future looks like that:
cars will be autonomous, self-driving
humans will be remotely operated like dogs and my cattle..

put a salt lick in paddock , once they find it move it to where you want them to go usually hay will do the same .

im sure as the product matures it has the potential to get safer than people. especially japanese female drivers.
but when it fxcks up, or blue screens or whatever, and it wipes out a kid. When. It's always going to end in tears and there's no one to blame other than a software glitch. It's fatally flawed in that we will never trust a computer that we make to make life or death decisions for other people. Imagine catching a plane with no pilots? You need a person whose entire life savings and freedom are at stake if they fxck up (as you are when driving a car). Our legal system and our sense of justice is centered around that. Not because some pointdexter forgot a few lines of code a few software builds ago. How often does your phone or laptop or whatever bug out. Remember the milennium bug?
How many people are we prepared to kill till we get it right? Wont be long before the trials get very unpopular and we have the NIMBY effect.
I dont want my kids being pedestrians while elon irons the bugs out of his crappy device

myusernam said..

How many people are we prepared to kill till we get it right?

Pick a number. But when they do get it 99.999% right in 5 years time, I'll guess it'll make up the debit in about 5 minutes.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate

"According to the World Health Organization, road traffic injuries caused an estimated 1.25 million deaths worldwide in the year 2010. That is, one person is killed every 25 seconds. "

^^
Look at these numbers: conventional car crashes killed 37,461 in the United States in 2016, which works out to 1.18 deaths per 100 million miles driven.
www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-releases-2016-fatal-traffic-crash-data

Uber announced that it had driven 2 million miles by December 2017 and is probably up to around 3 million miles today. If you do the math, that means that Uber's cars have killed people at roughly 25 times the rate of a typical human-driven car in the United States.

And Uber ordered 24 000 Volvos !

Edit: was reply to Ian K

We know surprisingly little about the victim.Beside mention that possibly homeless and without family.

On another hand some families will be quite happy in similar case to sacrifice one of their own as compensation could be astronomical.
We don't know if victim was under influence of something that could explain why she did walk straight onto the road without looking. We don't know if her vehicle had obligatory lights turned on? Lets remember - 10 PM at night. Robot car had the same chance to avoid lady as you kangaroo jumping in last second.

If she was wearing helmet? Did she left suicide note by any chance?If she jump to the bridge to the river? Should bridge builder being sued too?

Macroscien said..

Ian K said..

"According to the World Health Organization, road traffic injuries caused an estimated 1.25 million deaths worldwide in the year 2010. That is, one person is killed every 25 seconds. "

It is unrealistic to expect the introduction of SD Car will cut the number 1.25 mln to Zero (instantly) .You always could smash your head, hand or leg while closing door. On another hand it is quite difficult to imagine the now proud mother will run over their own child while reversing in one of thous automatic vehicles. But this sort of accidents hurt family hearts the most.

...Or a self driving hand-brake fail parked on a hill, after the owner has switched it off and left it now that would be something for an SD truck or bus!

Can someone explain the point of having a self driving car.....if it needs a human [awake and alert] with feet on the pedals, hands on the wheel and eyes on the road - "just in case" the electronics have a hiccup??

might as well disconnect the electrickery stuff, or not bother with it at all.

sn said..
Can someone explain the point of having a self driving car.....if it needs a human [awake and alert] with feet on the pedals, hands on the wheel and eyes on the road - "just in case" the electronics have a hiccup??

might as well disconnect the electrickery stuff, or not bother with it at all.

Not me, I agree with that assertion, what's the point if you have to babysit the contraption, that makes it basically worthless.
Would the babysitter really be paying that much attention if it's a SD car, even if you're supposed to? I say no.
You're either driving the car or you're not, there really is no in-between.