self-driving cars

TRX
March 5, 2012
156:

Self-driving cars is a recurring trope. Despite DARPA and Google and their press releases, the state of the art is very much pre-alpha. Also, they're attacking the problem from the wrong end. If you put all the smarts in individual vehicles, you're still limited to reactive algorithms. A better system would be to network all the vehicles together, plus the street cams common in some areas, and put all the vehicles under an area controller run by some government authority. Such a system could "see" vehicles and pedestrians in blind spots, at least sometimes, and manage traffic before handing it off to the next controller or back to manual.

The biggest problem, though, is liability. You're propped behind the wheel of the Family Truckster, i-Pilot is engaged, and you're reading USA Today when there's a loud noise and you're battered by the air bags. Your car just ran into another vehicle, then a couple of pedestrians.

Who is at fault?

You? The car company? The company that subcontracted the software? All of the above? And you're *really* willing to put your life into the hands of some code jockey in Stuttgart or Detroit? When you might personally be subject to confinement or prison?

There's also the social problem. Once asshole drivers and gangbangers figure out an automatically-driven vehicle will have to yield to avoid a collision, there are endless opportunities for messing about with people, from simply cutting them off in traffic to herding them to a quiet location for carjacking.