Self Driving Cars And Moral Decisions - Who Will Live, Who Will Die?
While lots of companies in Silicon Valley work on self driving cars many people remain skeptical of these. The introduction of such cars raises technical, legal and most importantly moral problems.
'Self driving' comes at various levels. A parking assistant may help those people who otherwise can't park in a decent manner. Cars that drive automated on clear roads but with the oversight of a driver can fail because the supervising driver gets bored and stops to concentrate on the traffic situation. Fully autonomous cars, who do not need a driver, are still far from the state of the art.
The Society of Automotive Engineers defines the full driving automation of a vehicle as:
the full-time performance by an automated driving system of all aspects of the dynamic driving task under all roadway and environmental conditions that can be managed by a human driver
Autonomous cars depend on sensors to have situational awareness. Sensor can fail. They can be spoofed by weather phenomenons or willful attacks. Autonomous cars need an immensely complex software to make decisions. Paraphrasing Tony Hoare:
There are two types of computer programs. One is so simple that they obviously contain no error. The other is so complicate that it contains no obvious errors.
All self driving cars will have bugs. Their software is extremely complicate and it will have errors. They will receive updates with more errors and unpredictable consequences. Even Microsoft, the biggest software company in the world, recently screwed up a regular Windows 10 update. It deleted user data on the local disk and in the 'cloud' where it was supposed to be safe. Who will be guilty when an autonomous car bluescreens and causes an accident?
Next to the technical and legal problems autonomous cars also create moral ones. They need rules to decide what to do in extreme situations. A kid jumps into the path of the car. Should it continue straight on and hit the kid? Should it veer left into the group of chatting seniors? Or to the right where a policeman is issuing parking tickets? What set of rules should the car's software use to decide such situations?
Researchers asked people around the world how a 'Moral Machine' should behave. The respondents faced thirteen different scenarios with two possible outcomes and had to click on their preferred option. If it is inevitable to kill one person to let another one survive would you prefer the woman or the man to live on? The older person or the younger one? The passengers of the car or the pedestrians who cross the road in spite of a red light?
bigger
Check out the scenarios and decide yourself.
Preliminary results of the large but not representative study were recently published in Nature. The people who answered preferred strollers, kids and pregnant women the most. Cats, criminals and dogs lost out.
The study found cultural and economic differences. People from Asian countries with a Confucian tradition showed a higher preference for old people to survive. Countries with a Christian tradition preferred younger ones more. People in Latin American preferred the survival of a male person more than people in other cultures. As an older male person in Europe I am not really comfortable with these results.
Inevitably the inclusion of such preferences in decision making machines will at some point be legislated. Would politicians regulate these to their own favor?
The people who took the test disfavored 'criminals'. Should the 'Moral Machine' decision be combined with some social scoring?
The Chinese government is currently implementing a social credit system for all its citizens. A person's reputation will be judged by a single number calculated from several factors. A traffic ticket will decrease ones personal reputation, behaving well to ones neighbors can increase it. Buying too much alcohol is bad for one's score, publicly lauding the political establishment is good. A bad reputation will have consequences. Those with low ratings may not be allowed to fly or to visit certain places.
The concept sounds horrible but it is neither new nor especially Chinese. Credit scores are regularly used to decide if people can get a loan for a house. Today's credit scoring systems are black boxes. The data they work with is often out of date or false. The companies who run them do not explain how the judgment is made. The U.S. government's No-Fly-List demonstrates that a state run system is not much better.
The first wave of the computer revolution created stand-alone systems. The current wave is their combination into new and much larger ones.
It is easy to think of a future scenario where each persons gets a wireless readable microchip implant to identify it. In a live-or-die scenario the autonomous car could read the chips implants of all involved persons, request their reputation scores from the social credit system and decide to take the turn that results, in sum, in the least reduction of 'social value'. The socially 'well behaved' would survive, the 'criminals' would die.
Would we feel comfortable in such a system? Could we trust it?
Posted by b on October 26, 2018 at 18:18 UTC | Permalink
« previous page@ passerby | Oct 27, 2018 4:11:59 PM | 95
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The scenario of a self-driving vehicle autonomously taking occupants to "sponsored" locations is hilariously funny because it rings so true.
One might imagine endless variations on this commercial "HAL 9000" domination. I'll just mention one: if the occupant declines the "recommended" location, the vehicle will cheerily reply, "Got it! We'll tune your recommendations!".
Then, on subsequent trips, it will either return to the same declined location, or make new "recommendations" that are virtually identical to the declined ones. YouTube has been "tuning" my recommendations for years, and yet it keeps spewing the same unwatchable garbage and spam that I've repeatedly declined.
Posted by: Ort | Oct 27 2018 21:22 utc | 102
Many "tech" types are enamored of the idea that an automated/Machine controlled system can be constantly "learning" and improving no matter the cost or time involved or lives injured or lost and will persist in projectes --- particularly those that can (theoretically) pinpoint (and apportion) liability -- even when available technology is (and always was) adequate and certainly available to be improved upon. They believe that it's all worth it by the elimination of million dollar liability judgments (even better when limited liability is baked into user the contract)
Posted by: Susan Sunflower | Oct 27 2018 22:34 utc | 103
https://youtu.be/5Oq--MeUjgI
2001: A Tesla Odyssey (HAL 9000 parody)
This would be funny if not for the terror ...
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 28 2018 0:06 utc | 104
102
My great-grandpap came out the Oregon trail in a Conestoga wagon as an infant. He lived a hard life to see jet planes in commercial flight. My memory of him was in a wheelchair pointing out the window at a 747 grinding up into the clouds.
I grew up in dial-phones and ice chests and steam locomotives era, before TV and airplanes, and have lived long enough to see Dick Tracy wrist phones (sort of) and talking ice chests (gimmick) and 200mph bullet trains (still trains), why, even astronauts sent around the moon and back (we both know they never set foot on it).
Now the Metallurians of Scientocracy will tell you that progress doubles every 10 years, but that's horses*t. Your i-Watch is still a dial up (at $150+ a month in lease and fees), your ice chest is still an ice chest, and the steam or maglev or hyper-poop train will never again serve the public. If anything, like the SST and Tesla X and i-Phone X, it will serve only a vanishingly small elite, soon gone.
Autonomous vehicles will never 'disrupt' personal vehicles into the buggy-whip dustbin of history. They will smolder, and smoke, then burst into flames, there by the side of the freeway, with their passengers trapped inside, hand outlines burnt in greasy smudge onto the windows, like those old cave paintings in France.
It's all Ghost Dancing with Wovoka, until your New Age privileges get Wevoked for non-payment, and you become a non-person. 97% Old White Male Scientocrats can't be wrong! We must excommunicate the deniers!
No tamales, si Martes! Vámonos a Tehran! Arriba!! L-07 to I-Day! Have you told your kids how much you love them? A bank holiday, Treasury bill and SS payments suspended, grocery shelves emptied in 60 seconds. And you can live stream it to Instagram, until the cell network dies!
11/05, another Chosen '11' Event.
Posted by: Anton Worter | Oct 28 2018 0:44 utc | 105
A variation of the problem is where you are standing on a bridge over a track and a runaway trolley is coming down the track towards a group of people unaware that the trolley is coming straight for them. The trolley can only be stopped by something heavy. An obese person is standing next to you. Do you push the person onto the track to prevent disaster, knowing that the person will die?
Posted by: Jen | Oct 26, 2018 3:40:28 PM | 14
If you push the obese person on the track that is outright murder. I would hope that the court will dismiss your pretence of trying to save peoples' lives and give you a long jail term. There is another solution to stop the trolley - jump onto the track yourself. Wouldn't that be better than murder?
Posted by: BM | Oct 28 2018 6:19 utc | 106
100
Pretzellogic hides behind his/her chicken bones and tea leaves and $400 a ton carbon tithe to save Baby Jebezus.
A barrel of oil produces 22 gallons of gasoline. Pretzellogic wants you to pay $400 a ton carbon tithe. Wait, but
what's that in $s per gallon? A barrel of oil produces .477 tons of CO2. That's $190 per barrel, or $8.67 a gallon.
$8.67 a gallon carbon tithe surcharge is over $12 a gallon for petrol under the New Carbon Catholic.
There's your 'Inconvenient Truth', brought to you by the 97% Old White Male Scientocrats who brought you napalm.
Even if 3W countries give fuel away free, $8.67 carbon tithe to the New Energy Revelations Syndicate will bankrupt
those nations and starve some 3 BILLION humans to death, not counting another 2 BILLION indigents pushed off their
freeland farm holdings into ghettos, so tin-pot dictator generals can plant palm oil and get $Bs in carbon credits.
Have no misinterpretation!. The Third Temple Final Solution is global depopulation, by tithing our energy supply.
"It's Pay-Up Time!"© Pope Albertus 'Glorious' Goreius
Posted by: Anton Worter | Oct 28 2018 7:11 utc | 107
1. The passenger inside a self-driving car has chosen the luxury of being transported in a car, therefore, he/she must be sacrificed, not pedestrians. Pedestrians have priority because walking is natural for humans. Drivers/passengers of self-driving cars should bear the costs of their desire to use dangerous machines for fast individual travel.
2. The hackers will, of course, release unofficial mods that will always protect the passenger. Many people will install these. The police will stop cars to check that the installed software is legal.
3. Ideally, the system should calculate the momentum of all objects around it and automatically slow down the car if even a slight possibility exists that someone might be run over (Asimov’s 1st Law). This might result in road rage when an irresponsible pedestrian approaches a driveway, slowing all passing cars down.
Posted by: S | Oct 28 2018 7:19 utc | 108
Oh, and I will never voluntarily use a self-driving car. Killing people will be as easy as hacking their car software. Recent Meltdown/Spectre revelations have demonstrated that horrible exploitable hardware bugs can persist for years without anyone noticing.
Posted by: S | Oct 28 2018 7:32 utc | 109
anton i don't know why you're catapulting fossil fuel company propaganda. you keep babbling about "tithes" and "religion" and ignoring science. if you jump off a tall building, you will fall. there isn't a "big gravity" conspiracy to convince you it is true. there is however a fossil fuel company funded conspiracy to make you believe the science is bogus, as i've mentioned to you before. they used the same ad agency as the tobacco industry did, hill & knowlton, because the tobacco propaganda campaign was successful in avoiding and minimizing regulation for years. the fossil fuel caused climate change is going to kill more people than smoking tobacco if we don't address it by decreasing emissions. you are extremely confused about the whole subject. switching to renewable energy isn't going to starve people. not dealing with climate change will. if you can try to construct a coherent argument showing you know better than the royal society about what good science is, by all means do so. otherwise your arguments drift all over the place--old white men! carbon tithes! mass starvation!
Posted by: pretzelattack | Oct 28 2018 7:48 utc | 110
My first thought was —- ‘b’ has a difficult dilemma!! A parodox ! And this is his way of presenting it to us. As i have been clearly aware ‘of it’ for some time, And most forward in my mind at the very moment this post came up, i’m pretty sure it’s a metaphor for this —-real dilemma and paradox
‘B’runs a cutting edge, high standard, current affairs blog taken , With generally speaking a very high standard of commentators /sleuths contributing news and information from all corners of the world. The most sensitive and ‘volatile’ subjects are discussed here. I sense some times,wheather ‘b’ likes it or not!!
And this is b’s version of his posted dilemma.
If ‘b’ allows discussion on truly dangerous topics. Topics that get sites taken down or journalists killed ! Will it put. This site at risk and himself at risk!! And thus be counter productive ,or press forward with the truth.
Finally
B M @ 71 72 73 84 105 wins by light years !!! If i’m right.
Posted by: Mark2 | Oct 28 2018 8:15 utc | 111
To add to my above—
So now we here,each as individuals have a real live dilemma do we risk the above ( truly a massive disaster) and play our small part in tying to save the world !! Or do we stay silent, save ‘b’ this blog and risk the planet.
I note 90% of the public stay silent !!!
Posted by: Mark2 | Oct 28 2018 8:39 utc | 112
Vague memory emerges -- I first heard about self-driving vehicles in relation to the "crisis " (ongoing) replacing the boomer career long-haul (and even local) drivers. Even the kids of those who owned their rigs, had no desire to pickup the reins and lifestyle (even less so figuring in insurance and payments). Where I live many driveways had rigs parked that came and went ... they are few and far between. American commerce depends on long haul truckers (whose treatment,rule-breaking and lack of union protections) have long plagued the industry (graft and hijacking too probaby) Diabetes, hypertension and other obesity/sedentary ailmments were striking hard and many (don't know if it's changed) resulted in lifetime bans (insulin-requiring diabetes, some poorly controlled hypertension, etc.)
A lot of professions are suffering trying to simply replace retiring staff... teachers, nurses, and other long-hours small business jobs.
Posted by: Susan Sunflower | Oct 28 2018 8:40 utc | 113
How many angels can be fit on thee head of a pin was the subject of discussion by some rather disolute aristos in Casanova's circa 17th century journal which included a facile post prandial conversation. Fans of Jules Verne may remeber the conversation the protagonist of 'around the world in 80 days' had down his London Club the night before he decided to embark on his wager, it was "If someone offered you one million pounds to pull a lever which the result of which was the death of one anonymous chinaman from among tens of millions of anonymous chinamen, would you do it?
These hypotheticals are as pointless as they are callously decadent.
No one ever answers truthfully. Most virtue signal while a few 'show off' by picking the blatantly immoral option, thereby assisting in the essential for the PTB, task of reducing all of humanity aside from the handful of humans every human feels an affinity for, to non-human cypher status.
No one gives an honest answer because they cannot, there are simply too many unknown variables, particularly regarding human's individual moods.ie moods swings from a capricious species. Changeable rarely predictable ...pointless.
Posted by: Debsisdead | Oct 28 2018 9:08 utc | 114
————— AND THE ANSWER IS ———————
We all have our own personal free choice !
I have answered my own personal dilemma both in my own personal life and on this particular subject ——
In my personal life as a proffesonl tree climber by choice. I take life threating risks daily. I am an Adrenalin junky !
To the point where in my leasure time I take risks with the company I keep. Company the public beleave to be bad people, but I have found to be the best. Saveing my life a hundred times !
The dilemma I personally have with putting ‘b’ and his blog at risk by what I say ? I figure that b has also assest his risk, made his own personal decision ! But also I am aware if I ‘step over his line ‘ he will take my comments down. And has done so !! But you will never here me complain !
Posted by: Mark2 | Oct 28 2018 9:11 utc | 115
Autonomous cars will free us further from the onerous operations of situational assessment and decision making.
This is pure Darwin Award Design. Eat the apple, it will make you wise.
Enough autonomy transfer and we end up like the salmon: safely confined to a net and swimming in a circle.
Posted by: rjj | Oct 28 2018 9:35 utc | 117
Far from pointless, very serious, very topical and transcending our individual egos. Take a look at reality.
https://mobile.twitter.com/dgaytandzhieva/status/1055771082354016256/photo/1
Posted by: Mark2 | Oct 28 2018 9:50 utc | 118
Driverless vehicles will struggle on the fringe until the makers decide to outsource supply of the software. If history is any guide a dominant software supplier will emerge. Eventually their offering will become so unreliable that owners will be forced to switch to an open source alternative. I recently rid my house of the Microsoft plague and am now a happy Linux Mint user. To those who say "What about Apple? I presume there will be an automotive equivalent. It will probably be called a Volvo.
Posted by: Corkie | Oct 28 2018 11:35 utc | 119
@117 that bulgarian journo has some cohones for sure... she needs to be careful she dont get Serena Shim'd... the subject matter of the tweet is quite alarming...I hear for the rest of 2018 there will be a crackdown on hysterical leftish banshees so you may need to lay low for a while Mark2...or even a good while longer...hope this helps...
Posted by: MadMax2 | Oct 28 2018 12:27 utc | 120
Mad max @ 119
Not my style ! not our style ! My advice to you is take your own advice ! Over there on the far right. But thanks for your input ! If I remember right we had ‘ an exchange’ A while back regarding refugees ! I was on there side you basicly wanted to’let um drown’ you ended up butt hurt and went pop ! I told you I enjoy that as an insight into a persons personality! I ‘m not out for a ‘row’ but coverts! It’s us against the 1% . So good luck and see you on the street. One side or the over.
Posted by: Mark2 | Oct 28 2018 12:45 utc | 121
Mark2 @ 120 opp’s typo second line from bottom — should be converts. not coverts ! Bit critical that one ! Pesky smart phone !
Posted by: Mark2 | Oct 28 2018 13:39 utc | 123
The death throes of the Age of Prosperity 1850 - 2050!
The general principle was that using a machine is easier, more efficient, cheaper, but most importantly more ‘powerful’ than using a human. For ex. the tractor killed the slave trade, yes, it truly did.
Machines, for 90% or more, are run with fossil fuels -exo-energy- and pack a mighty punch. In F, a person on minimum wage has about the equivalent of 200 human slaves working at full strength for him or her 12 hours per day, in energy terms.
—> The machines that heat the water for heating and bathing, the stove, the coffee grinder, the car, the metro, bus, the paint gun, the lift, the lathe that made the furniture, others that built the building like cranes, extraction of the raw materials, the computer, the cargo ship from China which brought the clothes, the lighting of streets at night, even the basic vaccum cleaner, the factory that makes bread, yoghourt, muffins, the trucks that shunt all the stuff, etc. etc.
Imagine the human work (e.g. generating electricity by churning bike-pedals) required to move one 70 kg. person to his work station 15 kms. distant at the speed of 60 km/hour.
An upper-class French twat uses 1000 slaves, because he has several large houses, takes the plane often, etc. (ref. Jancovici and others.)
The energy available for constructing cars, running them, maintaining and repairing, and, most importantly, seeing to it that the infrastructure around needed for their use is in good order, is subject to physical and so in part financial limits. In the US, just like for the Roman Empire, the infrastrc. is challenged, as one can see.. The 'automation' aspect is very interesting but not the no. 1 point in RL.
Posted by: Noirette | Oct 28 2018 15:20 utc | 124
The rich will not cease in their efforts to extract the juice from anywhere and everywhere. Mass Public Transportation is a much more practical and purposeful endeavor than self-driving personal transportation.
The USA once had many cities with tracks and trolleys which were very practical, but the rich tore them all out. No money in it - perhaps no money in it for the right people. There was no money in it for the car people or the tire and rubber people.
Just as Hemp is a far more efficient and eco-friendly fiber than cotton; the money for the right people was in cotton. So they wrecked the Hemp by calling it Marijuana - a drug used by blacks which causes insanity.
Posted by: fast freddy | Oct 28 2018 15:43 utc | 125
The establishment wants to convince us that ethics are just a matter of taste.
Posted by: paul | Oct 28 2018 15:58 utc | 126
109
I love being called a non-scientist when I AM a scientist and I DID work at both Fed and State EPA! But because I'm a heretic and a denier of Pope Albertus 'Glorious' Goreius, you have excommunicated me, even though you are a mere priest in the Order of the New Energy Revelations.
The autonomous vehicle that slaughtered that poor woman was not driven by Climate Chains. It was driven by Bad $cience. by science corrupted by capital. Science gave mankind gasoline and Science gave mankind napalm. $cience is completely AMORAL, and just as dishonest and corrupted as any politician. $cience gave us Neil Armstrong, and Bikini Atoll. $cience gave us Tesla X and the M1 battle tank with depleted uranium nuclear rounds. $cience is AMORAL.
Tom Hartman is CONSTANTLY talking about Climate Chains how all the earth's insect and amphibians are being lost to Climate Chains. Tom, wake up, buddy! All of the insects and amphibians survived CO2 levels 100x higher than today, and then an Ice Age. Climate Chains is not what's killing them off. What's killing them off, like the denuded reefs in Queensland, is PESTICIDES and HERBICIDES and FERTILIZERS and CLEAR-CUTTING for palm oil plantations, to grab those Carbon Catholic Credit Bucks.
What is destroying the Earth is not Climate Chains. What is destroying the Earth is BAD SCIENCE.
Charging everyone an $8.47 a gallon carbon surcharge on their gasoline, is NOT going to bring back the Garden of Eden. THAT IS SATAN'S LIE. Charging everyone $8.47 a gallon carbon surcharge will create the Third Temple of 1,000 Years, and plunge the now-genocided globe into a New Dark Ages.
And THAT'S the Inconvenient Truth.
Posted by: Anton Worter | Oct 28 2018 16:02 utc | 127
What problems AV are intended to solve?
So far no studies have been published that would demonstrate any statistically significant advantage of the AV in the real traffic in a sense such as shortening travel time on the same road in the same traffic while surrounded by human drivers on the same roads or reducing overall miles driven. Some studies even suggest that no decrease of travel time could be achieved at all unless massive investment in dedicated AV smart road infrastructure is made, although that would make human driving much safer as well.
As a matter of fact some other analysis and studies of autonomous traffic suggest that AV will substantially slow down traffic flow since it will not exceed even temporarily legal velocity, not to violate traffic laws, which commonly are factors that smooth out and increase traffic flow are often tolerated by highway law enforcement in rush hours.
Also as it was demonstrated, combination of unreliability and imprecision of environmental sensors and poor event prediction technology into deeper future (over minute or so), much more inferior to that of human caused driving algorithms to be extremely cautious and defensive, generally slowing down vehicle velocity.
Such a phenomenon is making an assertion of superiority of AV safety in comparison to human driver a moot point, since decrease of average speed of the traffic flow practically decreases expected accident rate anyway for all drivers. If AV effect would be slowing down traffic it would decrease all accidents but not because of intelligence of AVs but a general rule of slower traffic.
Another extremely serious problem is viability and durability of the sensors including LIDAR, LEDAR, RADAR, ultra-sounding. sonar and optical SfM technologies all with well documented weaknesses and propensity of phantom readings, picking up false reading from environment what any Radar detector user can attest to or those who use LiDAR mapping in bad weather conditions. Most radar technologies are prone to similar deficiencies. Also optical sensors are extremely vulnerable to bright-light due to specular reflection, dust, mud and strong wind, all of them easy damaged from mud, debris forcing system to request manual driving or it will cease driving and seek shelter for repairs when human driver would continue with caution.
Also already demonstrated by UT fatal flaw of GPS spoofing while military refused to allow access to secured GPS leaving autonomous driving dangerous to rely on GPS, that’s why AVs are designed to not entirely rely on GPS but instead use pre-acquired and updated hi-resolution mapping data along the testing routes. In any practical implementations, a sub-centimeter resolution geospatial data for all the US roads would be impossible to even obtain or load directly to a vehicle in a mass production of low-cost AVs and even in a commercial transportation setting, not to mention updating it while driving without ultra speed WIFI system deployed along the roads.
The WIFI/cellular spoofing is another potential, fatal problem that may cause AV to leave the road or hit a barrier. The Snowden NSA revelation disclosed that such a WIFI/cellular/GPS spoofing technologies and even specific, available on black market, tools, are in private hands and in application to AV could be readily used for criminal purposes such as assassination, or assault on a third party.
Posted by: Kalen | Oct 28 2018 16:05 utc | 128
...
I presume there will be an automotive equivalent. It will probably be called a Volvo.
Posted by: Corkie | Oct 28, 2018 7:35:52 AM | 118
Well, it won't be called a SAAB.
In the 1960s SAAB ads demonstrated the safety of their sedans by sending one tumbling sideways down a snow-covered mountainside.
In early Noughties, SAAB offered a third row of seats for kids in the cargo area of their wagons and called it "Something you don't get in a Volvo" to which Volvo replied "That's right. We recommend that passengers never be carried in the crumple zone of a vehicle."
Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Oct 28 2018 16:22 utc | 129
The establishment wants to convince us that ethics are just a matter of taste.Posted by: paul | Oct 28, 2018 11:58:23 AM | 124
Yeah, we've seen these sorts of "precious" moral debates before wrt to genetic testing and genetic fixes ... Monsanto's green revolution from my childhood -- cumulatively it feels as if there were some counsel of wise folks discussing and settling the matter .... like the last years (several) debacle of similar assurances wrt internet privacy and safeguarding of personal data ... all meant to lull-lull-lull consumers...
The cult of Musk is strong as far as I can tell -- and he may end up NOT being Enron revisited. The perversion of "research" science I suspect is tied to the necessity of funding and grants to not only keep careers alive but also keep research infrastructure intact (and its hierarchy) particularly as dollars become harder to come by more clearly a matter of corportate favoritism. If research cannot make or save money -- what good is it?
Posted by: Susan Sunflower | Oct 28 2018 16:29 utc | 130
@ BM | Oct 28, 2018 2:19:38 AM | 105
If you push the obese person on the track that is outright murder. [...] There is another solution to stop the trolley - jump onto the track yourself. Wouldn't that be better than murder?
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I don't disagree; I had the same thought. But the condition of the bystander being "obese" is an obvious attempt to foreclose the option of noble suicide. The implication is that the "protagonist" in the problem is a non-obese person whose body mass may not be sufficient to well and truly stop the approaching trolley.
In this scenario, I suppose that the moral is that for obese persons, there are worse fates than fat-shaming.
Posted by: Ort | Oct 28 2018 17:27 utc | 131
@ Anton 128
Preach brother... its dark,but closer to the mark than the truth we're sold.
It's at moments like these I'd have liked to ask Michael Hastings what he thinks about the future of AV... but, you know...
Posted by: MadMax2 | Oct 28 2018 21:24 utc | 132
@Kalen: Regarding GPS spoofing and the unavailability of secure GPS for civilian applications, one can expect Russia’s GLONASS, China’ Beidou-2, or Europe’s Galileo to implement secure satellite positioning. It won’t be a problem. The problem will be hacking, including software, firmware, and hardware exploits.
Posted by: S | Oct 28 2018 21:31 utc | 133
The first Russian domestic unmanned vehicles were presented in Moscow - video.
The last report I saw which covered "driver assists" showed that there has been no improvement in the intervention rate in the last 3 months. This is highly negative for the technology because it means that so-called continuous improvement machine learning algorithms may have reached the limits of capability.
Secondly, the economic aspect has been completely ignored.
Is a self-driving machine with $100,000 of extra gear truly more affordable transport than a regular car?
We have already (finally) seen public validation of what I have been saying for several years: "ride sharing" does not decrease pollution; it increases it because there are more miles driven per delivered passenger than for passengers to drive their own cars or take public transport.
Increasingly there is also validation that "ride sharing" takes people off public transport, so it also increases congestion.
A more expensive, more congestion inducing, more polluting solution is somehow going to be transportation's savior?
Posted by: c1ue | Nov 5 2018 1:44 utc | 135
The comments to this entry are closed.
@95 Passerby
Thanks for the laugh!
I figure, this would make obesity win.
Posted by: Hmpf | Oct 27 2018 20:46 utc | 101