Autonomous driving in a city? We're '95% of the way there' Universities, carmakers, local authorities and tech and insurance firms are involved in an array of part-government-sponsored self-driving vehicle pilots across the UK. More than £20m is being funnelled into projects to build and refine autonomous technology, understand human-vehicle interaction, and assess risk. It’s an era …
The saying as I first heard it went
"The First 90% Of A Project Takes 90% Of The Time, The Last 10% Takes The Other 90% Of The Time."
So we're still a long way off. If we suddenly went 100% autonomous then it could work fairly well, you'd only have to deal with those pesky cyclists, pedestrians, animals etc.as all the other vehicles would be able to coordinate with each other. But anything much less than that is just going to be a mess.
One of the issues is that autonomous vehicles don't have a face.
Driving in heavy city traffic often involves a fair amount of negotiation, people look at each other to determine who's going to give way and who is just going to barge in regardless. If I see an autonomous vehicle then I know I can just cut them off since they will back off. Essentially autonomous vehicles behave like nervous new drivers, and we know how they can mess up traffic and cause tempers to rise when they hold up rush hour traffic.
I suspect that there will be situations where the machine "intelligence" (really a hyped-up and limited state machine) will not cope because it can't adapt and will cause avoidable accidents which would get a human driver mocked, insulted, attacked, or prosecuted for!
I also expect a rising number of vandalized/rammed vehicles after "driver-less" vehicles start to make serious inroads into commercial and transport driving, because they'll put loads of people out of work. What are all those people going to do, given most work will become more skilled? They'll eventually rebel/riot! Also, demand for the vehicles will ironically decline, because there will be less people with sufficient income to afford to use them or the goods they deliver, compared to earlier human driven vehicles!!!
Blindly adding more technology for (fake) "progress" (a common communist-like misuse of the word), which mostly benefits rich people, is a very bad idea, and only will speed-up the on-going decline of developed countries, warned about by "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto, and others referenced by the "Return of Kings" web site. We should have learnt the dangers of fake "progress" from the rise, stagnation, and collapse of Rome, and earlier civilizations!
Making everything thing easier (e.g. by automation) is dangerous, because it gradually encourages parasitic rentier corpocracy, encourages parasitic socialism, encourages r-type degenerate humans, rots the spirit of Man, and eventually leads to nation and/or civilization collapse!
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@Alan Johnson,
This was going to be my point. It sounds like they are 95% of the way there, in that they have A) the car, B) the concept of driverless operation and C) the basic software principles involved. That took the last 100 years, and the final 5% to true driverless operation is going to take at least the next 5 years.
"Never underestimate the capabilities of a driver who expected a company BMW or Audi and got a Mondeo instead."
Of all the drivers on the road, it seems that it's those saddled with a Vauxhall Insignia that are most filled with loathing of their fellow man. I'm guessing that the Insignia is the punishment car. You can guarantee that the car that swoops onto a motorway and into lane 3 without looking or use of indicators will be an Insignia. Once there the driver will never leave that lane. Not even if he has an ambulance 3 inches off his rear bumper with all the blues on. The drivers also seem to think that their asthmatic diseasel engine makes their car the equivalent of a Ferrari 430 and they will force a queue of traffic to build up behind them as they try to wrestle the car up to the 90mph that they prefer to drive at, taking a glacial epoch to do so. But they get there eventually so they can feel proud that they are going faster than anyone else.
to be a true BMW / Audio driver you missed>
Sit in the right hand lane, even when the other lane is empty.
Tailgate, especially if there are 500 other cars in front of the one you are behind.
Do 120 mph everywhere until you come to a bend, where upon you shit yourself and slow down 20mph, UNLESS it is a blind bend at which point you MUST traverse the white lines.
A lot of trucks (here in the US at least) have a toll free number listed with "how's my driving?" You can call it "rate my driving" but it is obviously a complaint line. How can one see another driver and determine they are driving well? You can only determine when they are driving badly (and even then it may be a matter of opinion in some cases)
OK, maybe they stay in the appropriate lane and signal when they change lanes so for the few minutes you are near them they have done everything right, but calling that "driving well" is like giving an employee a good rating because he shows up on time and doesn't surf porn sites - they are basic expectations. Unless you follow a truck for a couple hours I don't see how you judge the driver to be good, and even then if it is a long lonely stretch of road where everyone is operating on cruise control it is hard to do anything but drive well. It is when something unexpected happens that separates the really good drivers from the average.
A lot of trucks (here in the US at least) have a toll free number listed with "how's my driving?"
Also in the UK. Presumably the recorded response is "You're a fine one to complain. You drove close enough to read the number and either you're either phoning or you wrote the number down whilst driving.
Even if and when Ocado get to 100% they still need to tackle the much more complex problem of getting the shopping the last nine yards from the vehicle to the customer's kitchen over possibly rough broken ground, squeezing past badly parked cars, past overgrown hedges, up and down steps etc.
Nor does taking any firm trying that to a small claims court for violations of your rights under the Consumer Rights Act of 2015, Part 1, Chapter 2, section 28 (delivery of goods).
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/section/28
"(2) Unless the trader and the consumer have agreed otherwise, the contract is to be treated as including a term that the trader must deliver the goods to the consumer."
So saying "we drove up outside and sent a text saying "PICK THEM UP FROM THE CAR PARKED OUTSIDE WITHIN TEN MINUTES OR WE CANCEL YOUR ORDER AND CHARGE YOU 10%" won't fly because they weren't delivered and the trader is therefore in breach of contract.
You don't be able to get around statutury rights by including a line saying "by using our service you waive your statutory rights" as the courts of England and Wales are of the opinion that they decide points of law like this, and not companies trying it on and so have a habit of simply declaring the entire contract null and void, hence lawyers inserting lines like "if one provision is declared unlawful then whatever remains shall stand" in the hope that the judge will be a bit more restrained and not strike out literially the entire thing.
Additionally, even if this was changed, you'd have to overcome :-
"(10b)the trader must without undue delay reimburse all payments made under the contract in respect of any goods for which the consumer cancels the order or which the consumer rejects.
All you've got to do is say that you had a bad back and didn't accept the delivery, and by exclusion it becomes a rejected delivery and a full refund is due.
And i'm not even a Solicitor! Think how many holes an expert could blow through something as fundementally illegal as this.
.... if I recall from Dr Who the Ocado bots will reach the bottom of the stairs and start screaming "elevate" at which point we'll realize that AI hasn't turned out the way we'd hoped. (Though the ability for level 5 autonomous cars to exterminate other drivers who get in their way will be a clear demonstartion of their ability to mimic human drivers thought processes)
'So the Ocado vehicle drives autonomously to the nearest bit of road to the 5th floor flat. How does the parcel get up the stairs? Will a small delivery bot be carried as well? And will it be able to read the scrawled note "If out, please leave in coal bunker"'
A coal bunker? For a fifth floor flat?
> A detailed TRL whitepaper (here: PDF) in July expressed concern over what it called a “strong technology push for autonomous vehicles rather than a societal pull”.
So, people are getting always-on, connected autonomous cars shoved down their throats, rather than it being something the people want.
Really makes me wonder why government and megacorps are willing to throw so much money, time and effort at something unwanted by the masses, unless there is an ulterior motive they have not told us about, but will benefit them immensely at our expense.
I do wonder, if they finally release autonomous cars, and find out that barring a small minority, nobody wants to use them. Would they restrict or ban driving? Make it really expensive to drive yourself? Somehow force people into using them (after all, all that time, money and effort was used, and they need to get some return on that investment).
That's a ridiculous question. Almost everyone will want to use self driving cars, at least once the cost to own/operate/insure is not much more than that of a regular car. Sure, many will be reluctant because they won't trust them at first so they'll let others "work out the bugs", but once they come around it will be left to a small minority (the same group who refuses to fly) who will absolutely refuse due to fear and another small minority who will resist because they "enjoy driving".
The vast majority would love being able to do their own thing instead of having to pay attention. Look at the millennials who walk about like zombies with their face in their phone everywhere they go? Do you think they will resist? Do you think the older folks who know they aren't as sharp as they once were and drive 5 mph under the speed limit are going to have a problem with it? For the rest of us who are older than the young and younger than the old, there are so many advantages I won't even bother to list them. Will I miss a bit of driving myself? Sure, and I'll bet people missed running their horse at full gallop when they traded him in on a Model T, but it didn't stop them from doing it.
Basically it will be the people who are afraid of technology / lack of control like those who won't fly, and people who think about driving in terms of power slides on the PCH and ignore the fact that 99% of their driving is stuck in traffic on the 101. There are no more concerns about the market failing to materialize than there are for the market for fusion power to fail to materialize should we ever get it working.
Its a revenue stream - if you buy your own autonomous car then you only pay once. There will come a tipping point when autonomous cars take over the roads - you will be able to take your porche on the road but you will be part of the smooth laminar flow generated by the autonomous cars and any attempt to disrupt that will get you nowhere.
Ocado can go and get fucked though - the only way this is going to work properly is with open designs and no patents on the bleeding obvious.
Its a revenue stream - if you buy your own autonomous car then you only pay once.
I suspect that history should give us a clue that that may not be the case. You'll buy the car and then pay a subscription for the cloud-based processing. We used to have this idea that you buy software once and then only pay if you want a newer version, but thats gone out of the window with subs being preferred, why would a brand new market start with the less profitable option?
I suspect, at most, you'll see the first n years of that sub being rolled into the purchase price.
Autonomous driving is definitely progressing fantastically well, but for my part I'm still far from convinced that where we're heading will actually be better.
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