Meetup : Berkeley: How Robot Cars Are Near
Discussion article for the meetup : Berkeley: How Robot Cars Are Near
Location and time for this Wednesday’s meetup are confirmed! It will be at 7:30pm (not 7pm) at Zendo. I will not be there, but Michael Keenan will be giving a talk about robot cars.
Michael Keenan is an entrepreneur, activist and futurist who works with The Seasteading Institute and the Center For Applied Rationality. His talk, How Robot Cars Are Near, describes how robot cars will save millions of lives, billions of hours and trillions of dollars.
Michael will also be speaking at the Extreme Futurist Fest on December 22.
For directions to Zendo, see the mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/bayarealesswrong
or call me at:
For those of us not in the area and unable to attend, this is an interesting topic to speculate on. Here is my take on how it might unfold:
Robot cars are permitted for test and demo purposes on public roads (already happening).
Autopilot becomes a high-end feature on some stock vehicles, marketed as a “designated driver”.
Some models are shipped with no manual human interface beyond giving directions to the autopilot, for limited use by people who are incapable of driving, marketed as “accessibility”.
These “accessible” cars displace human cab drivers, effectively eliminating the whole industry. Car-pooling services like ZipCar switch to the robot cars exclusively, to save members money on insurance and liability.
The price of a cab ride drops to a fraction of the original cost, pulling in more customers.
Owning a car slowly becomes a status issue, like keeping horses, rather than a necessity.
Select jurisdictions start prohibiting human drivers within city limits, in order to reduce accident rate.
City lots and parkades become redundant, as cars need not wait all day for the owners and can be summoned as cabs are now.
As human-caused accidents become increasingly rare, the safety features like airbags, crumple zones and seat belts fade away.
Limited range of electric propulsion becomes less of a problem (you can always summon another car if yours is out of juice), so gasoline engines become a rarity, and eventually outlawed by municipal clean air bylaws.
Public transit will not have any human drivers, either. This is already the case for light train in many areas. Eventually the distinction between private cars, cabs and public transit disappears, with various options in size, occupancy and speed available at the right price.
Traffic lights, except maybe for pedestrian-controlled ones, disappear, as robot cars negotiate between themselves the right of way.
Most pedestrian crossings are replaced with tunnels or overpasses, to avoid unnecessarily impeding traffic.
Speed limits? Gone.
Driving becomes something to be learned in history books.
What have I missed? Will those born in the next 10 years be the last generation to learn driving?
9 seems implausible due to bureaucratic inertia.
If you add the caveat that this probably does not apply to rural areas I think your claims are reasonably likely.
There is no reason to expect this to be true. Outside of densely populated urban centers, it is likely that most people would still have good reason to prefer ownership. Providers in less dense areas could not deliver cars as quickly to riders as they could in densely populated areas. The main benefit to consumers of cabs in big cities is that you don’t have to worry about parking, which is expensive, rare and time-consuming. In suburban and rural areas parking is very easy.
Bike-share programs have been noted for a tragedy of the commons, with people vandalizing, stealing, and just generally abusing their borrowed bikes, because they don’t own them and security is hard. Robo-cabs will have similar problems, which will increase costs and reduce desirability at the margins.
Think of cities that already can’t be car cities, like Manhattan or London. I live in London and owning a car would be an expensive liability. I borrow or hire one roughly once a year.
Think of robo-cars as public transport infrastructure—more so than cabs.
The more robotic cars on the road we have, the less accident there will be. Insurance companies will notice this fast. Once they do, government will as well, and the production of purely manual cars may be forbidden less than 10 years after successful commercialization, so around 2030. (Most police offices in France have pictures of car crashes hanging on their walls, so I expect the government will listen when it’s told that robots save lives.)
If all goes well, no one will ever need to drive again in 20 years (at least in rich countries). Given the time it takes to grow up, I think less than half of the children born today will get a manual driving licence.
This is mildly offtopic, but: I’m curious what LessWrongers’ thoughts are on just how near robot cars are. The general impression I get from people is “they’re going to be here any day now, and Google already has some”. I wonder/suspect if Google’s are actually very much demo-quality devices, meaning they only work under controlled conditions. If so, then the first 80% of the engineering is done, but the last 80% is still to go, and we may not see consumer robot cars for quite a while.
In particular, I’m curious about how they intend to solve problems like: navigating in the presence of work zones and human flaggers, navigating two-way streets too narrow for two cars to pass, 5/6/7-way intersections with specific lanes restricted in which way they can turn, etc.
I imagine some of these problems will be solved by blacklisting particular places for the robot cars to go, or even whitelisting a small set of places they’re allowed (i.e. major highways) at first.
Thoughts?
Some of the equipment for Google’s car is still expensive:
The lidar is the most expensive component and several companies have promised bringing much cheaper lidars to market over the next couple years. I expect the typical drastic reductions in cost as they start being produced in large numbers.
These are all solved problems or nearly so, as far as I can tell. Robot drivers are safer than humans in most cases.
Details / citations? I conjecture that they are not, based on my beliefs about the quality of demos, the limited circumstances in which Google’s vehicles have been demonstrated, and my perception of the difficulty of solving the AI problems involved.
From the little I know, it looks like google cars are at least able to tell when they need a human to take over (and stop when said human doesn’t). One could also imagine a semi-automatic mode where the driver helps the car in unusual situations.
I for one would be very happy to have a car that would drive itself most of the way, calling for my attention only once in a while. Solving only the common case (highway and traffic jam) is already very useful. Now I can read in my car!
Okay, this makes perfect sense, thanks.
It does feed into another conjecture I heard (I forget where), that most deaths from robot cars are going to happen when they unexpectedly hand control to a human, who needs time to transition into the right mental context to drive.
Yep. It already happens with airliners, where pilots do errors specifically because they are too used to automation and fall prey to boredom induced sleepiness.
If there are sufficiently few special case, we could have the car stopping before it switches to manual mode. The goal being that the human would take control at leisure, and not in the midst of motion.
Or, switch to a semi manual mode, where safeties are still on. Even when lost, the car can still see nearby obstacles, sense weather the tires stick to the road etc.
We could also keep a fully manual (and unsafe!) mode, which is activated only by a pull on a lever followed by a push on a red button beneath the lever. Hopefully that should eliminate most “context switching” errors. (And the human could be blamed, and the car insurance may not activate etc… making you think thrice before you actually switch).
For those of us not in the area and unable to attend, this is an interesting topic to speculate on. Here is my take on how it might unfold:
Robot cars are permitted for test and demo purposes on public roads (already happening).
Autopilot becomes a high-end feature on some stock vehicles, marketed as a “designated driver”.
Some models are shipped with no manual human interface beyond giving directions to the autopilot, for limited use by people who are incapable of driving, marketed as “accessibility”.
These “accessible” cars displace human cab drivers, effectively eliminating the whole industry. Car-pooling services like ZipCar switch to the robot cars exclusively, to save members money on insurance and liability.
The price of a cab ride drops to a fraction of the original cost, pulling in more customers.
Owning a car slowly becomes a status issue, like keeping horses, rather than a necessity.
Select jurisdictions start prohibiting human drivers within city limits, in order to reduce accident rate.
City parkades
Not only that, but Nevada, Florida and California have legalized robot cars, and Nevada has issued at least one license for such a car already. (1, 2).