Are self-driving cars a good or bad idea?

[Nebulous]

Are self-driving cars a good or bad idea?

Would you own one?

Would you trust it not to crash?

 

[Tiffany]

Not there yet with my trust on a self driving car.

 

[Arantor]

I‘m really on the fence.

On the one hand, I am only too aware that people make mistakes and that there are way too many factors involved in driving. It’s one reason I don’t drive myself: it always seems like 10% avoiding your own mistakes and 90% avoiding everyone else’s. With that in mind, autonomous vehicles that make fewer mistakes are a win.

However, I am not yet convinced that our tech level is there yet. Tesla’s autopilot isn’t really meant to be used for 100% autonomous driving though people *do*...

 

[Crims]

A self driving car needs actual safety unlike Teslas. I'm not particularly against electric cars, but the recent China crash confirmed my suspicions: A lot of electric cars go to 200 mph and then crash, and Tesla has been blaming the drivers.

I also think that safety would include a killswitch, which is politically a not acceptable solution for many reasons.
What is likely to happen is the capability will be developed by Google and be introduced in the US first.

 

[Retro]

Now there's a question. I think it's a real grey area with lots of unanswered questions.

To answer it, I'm going to assume that all new cars sold are capable of full autonomy and all cars on the road are now autonomous which we don't have at the moment.

I likely wouldn't get one, because they're naturally suited to being used as taxis, so none of the high costs of ownership apply. If I was very rich, then I would own one though as the experience is much better.

To keep this short, I'll list some pros and cons off the top of my head.

Pros

• Safety would be much better than what we have today as computers don't do the daft / stupid / malicious things that people do and true AI will solve the edge cases we have nowadays. Even now, safety is much better than a human driver and that's with mixed human / AI cars, too. It will improve massively when it's AI only. The trolley problem issue will be weighted towards survival of the occupants, not the schmuck being run over or no-one would get in them. And that's as it should be
• Make great taxis obviating the need for car ownership. It will be Uber without the driver
• Great for getting around when sick, very tired, drunk, or otherwise unable to drive

Cons

• Heavy surveillance of a user's every movement, with consequent control of where they can or can't go. This is Big Brother writ large and it's coming
• Just like a regular taxi, you can lose stuff in them by forgetting stuff on the seat
• Likely will be very expensive to own and use, including taxi services, relegating most people to the misery of public transport

There are more, but that's all I can think of at late o'clock and should be enough to be getting on with.

 

[Retro]

@Nebulous how do you feel about these cars?

 

[wolfdeer]

I personally don't like the idea of self-driving cars. I mean, it sounds cool, but it's not exactly safe. My dad told me what he had heard about self-driving cars a few months ago. One guy was in a wreck because his car ran into a semi, I believe it was. For some reason the car didn't sense the presence of the truck, so it just kept going! That incident has forever ruined the idea of self-driving cars for me, although I'm sure manufacturers will find a way to fix that.

 

[Arantor]

We can't come up with an operating system that doesn't crash, what makes us think we can do the same thing with something orders of magnitude more complex?

 

[Retro]

@wolfdeer That's one of those edge cases that confuses current "AI", as it's a cheap imitation of the real thing. That wouldn't get confused like this. Hopefully...

@Arantor Perhaps we build enough of it that it builds the rest itself? Wishful thinking, I know. It's also the kind of capability that could give rise to Skynet and terminators...

 

[wolfdeer]

That's one of those edge cases that confuses current "AI", as it's a cheap imitation of the real thing. That wouldn't get confused like this. Hopefully...

Yeah, hopefully. Lol

 

[Arantor]

Perhaps we build enough of it that it builds the rest itself?

I've seen the stuff turned out of GitHub Copilot... no thanks. Like most AI it's all about patterns and not enough about context.

 

[Tiffany]

Self-driving car systems were involved in 400 crashes since 2021 - 273 were Teslas

Six people died in car accidents over the last year involving self-driving cars

news.yahoo.com

Nope, not ready yet for a self-driving car. I still trust my driving of x-plus years better then AI.

 

[Crims]

Self-driving car systems were involved in 400 crashes since 2021 - 273 were Teslas

Six people died in car accidents over the last year involving self-driving cars

news.yahoo.com

Nope, not ready yet for a self-driving car. I still trust my driving of x-plus years better then AI.

The amount of Tesla crashes that don't get reported is way too much.

 

[Tiffany]

The amount of Tesla crashes that don't get reported is way too much.

Not surprising at all, especially with the aggressive push towards electric cars.

 

[Retro]

The amount of Tesla crashes that don't get reported is way too much.

Not surprising at all, especially with the aggressive push towards electric cars.

A classic inconvenient truth...

 

[Arantor]

And the engineers who can't write software that doesn't crash, are now the ones code reviewing Twitter, as though they were competent enough in a completely different set of disciplines to do so...

 

[Tiffany]

And the engineers who can't write software that doesn't crash, are now the ones code reviewing Twitter, as though they were competent enough in a completely different set of disciplines to do so...

Just laughing at this....maybe I shouldn't be, but it's been one of those days personally for me, and I read some maybe humor, and needed it!