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There is a common assumption that humans = bad drivers. And that these self driving cars will be much better than people at driving. I think this belief great

There is a common assumption that humans = bad drivers. And that these self driving cars will be much better than people at driving. I think this belief greatly underestimates the difficulty of what Google and others are trying to do. Humans are actually great drivers when the situation requires thinking. Lot of snow and can't see the lane markers? Millions of people adapt every day to this during winter. Lots of pedestrians, bicycles, motorcycles, etc. doing somewhat unpredictable things? Again, look at any Asian mega city, people can adapt very fast. Basically, if the situation requires being alert, people are very good at driving. When are people bad a driving? Whenever it's monotonous. Bumper to bumper traffic or a free flowing freeway. Constant repetition of red/green cycles while going down a suburban street. These boring situations make a lot of people basically turn off their alert thinking. Then they do other things like texting, talking on phone, etc. And these boring situations are exactly where AI self driving is better at driving than people. Computers never get bored. The self driving car will be at 100% attention even during the most boring traffic. But when boring suddenly turns to not boring? The current state of AI is very very bad at this. And unfortunately there's no easy way to use the best of both sides. If the AI is fully driving, then it will do great while the driving is boring. But by the time the AI decides, this is too much, can't handle this, it's too late to alert the human driver to take over. But if the human driver is required to always pay attention, what's the point of the self driving car? Self driving cars will get there someday, but I think it's much farther away than many assume it will be.

euyyn 11y ago
> The current state of AI is very very bad at this. What makes you think so?
jonknee 11y ago
On the other hand Google has driven a lot of miles without an incident and this minor accident doesn't change the fact that their system is safer than a human behind the wheel. And unlike humans who don't improve after an accident, Google's whole fleet just got even more safe.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  This is false. Google's cars have only gone as far as they have without an incident BECAUSE of human drivers. In a 12 month period, human drivers prevented Google Self-Driving Cars from causing ten accidents. And 272 times the car's software outright failed and dropped control of the car to the human driver. This is all in Google's recent report to the California DMV, but it's not a reality they like to advertise openly. Statistically, Google's Self-Driving Car would've lost it's license by now, if not for human drivers keeping it in check.
  - Retric 11y ago
    Spread that over "the equivalent of 75 years of typical U.S. adult driving." (1million + miles) and the alpha version of this software seems almost on par with the average driver which is expected to file an insurance claim every 17.9 years. PS: How often do you think the average drivers ed teacher uses there break?
    - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
      Your statistic is incorrect. The incidents described took place over a much smaller number of miles. Only I believe 14 months of the Self-Driving Car program, not the sum total of it's driving to date. (I said 12 above, but I think it's actually 14 months.) 424,331 miles, according to the report. http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/cadmvdisengagereport-dec.2015.pdf http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/cadmvdisengagerepo... Nor are you counting all of the times the driving software handed control back to the driver. Consider each one of those equivalent to your human driver falling asleep at the wheel.
      - Retric 11y ago
        "Google had operated its self-driving cars in autonomous mode for more than 1.3 million miles. Of those miles, 424,331 occurred on public roads in California during the period covered by this report" So, you where talking about a specific report not the overall system, got it. Our objective is not to minimize disengagements; rather, it is to gather, while operating safely, as much data as possible to enable us to improve our self-driving system. Therefore, we set disengagement thresholds conservatively, and each is carefully recorded. That's a long way from falling asleep at the wheel. That's we don't want to put people at risk so we are going to hand off control if "Disengage for a recklessly behaving agent" etc.
rqebmm 11y ago
> Lot of snow and can't see the lane markers? Millions of people adapt every day to this during winter. This could not be less true among people driving in unfamiliar conditions. (http://legacy.wusa9.com/story/news/local/virginia/2016/01/20/100-accidents-reported-va-snow-creates-traffic-nightmare/79091316/ http://legacy.wusa9.com/story/news/local/virginia/2016/01/20...) The difference is that all self-driving cars benefit from the knowledge created by bumping into the edge cases. People can only do this in an ad-hoc manner (i.e. personal experience, taught by mentor, etc)
- striking 11y ago
  I think the poster assumed that the person was trained to fit their surroundings. We are all hyper-fitted to what we know best and what we encounter every day, and will probably fail spectacularly if we're unaware of that.
- mhurron 11y ago
  It doesn't even have to be in a place that doesn't get much snow. First snow fall in Calgary looks like what you get in a standard snow storm in a city in the south east. Its even funnier if the first snow fall is early and then there are another two months of sun and no snow and then you get a repeat during the second snow fall. People have to relearn how to drive in snow every year. People are bad drivers in good conditions, they just happen to be able to be bad drivers in bad conditions as well.
  - bryanlarsen 11y ago
    Bah, it's not just the first snow storm. They salt the roads so much in Ontario that people think they know how to drive in bad conditions but actually they just know how to drive in bad conditions on heavily salted roads. If they hit a patch of unsalted road they get in trouble quite quickly. In my experience Saskatoon fares a lot better. They don't salt as heavily because it's often cold enough that salt doesn't work as well, and because judges don't blame the municipality for not salting when there's an accident.
jfoutz 11y ago
It's hard to say with such a short description, but as i read it, the google car never left its lane, just moved right to the edge of it's lane to avoid some debris. Why did the bus move into an occupied lane?!?
- arthurgibson 11y ago
  Sounds like we need a self-driving bus.
- jonknee 11y ago
  > Why did the bus move into an occupied lane?!? It depends on the city, but bus drivers often don't care whatsoever about other vehicles in the way. They merge and let others avoid contact.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  It sounded like it was merging into the bus's lane. But I imagine Google will prep some very fancy videos of the incident from the car's perspective within the next week or so, and then we'll know for sure.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Why did the bus move into an occupied lane?!? Because that's what busses do all the time, whether or not that is safe, legal, or desirable.
- duderific 11y ago
  From the writing in the article, I found it extremely difficult to get a good visual of exactly what happened in the accident. I wish the description was a little more, uh, descriptive.
- aidenn0 11y ago
  You got that backwards. They moved right in their lane to slow down for a turn (while allowing traffic going straight to pass), and then had to move back into the stream of traffic as there was debris preventing them from turning on the far-right side of the lane.
- 11y ago
Retric 11y ago
Considering the number of accidents after major storms I think your overstating the case. People are bad drivers in all conditions. The problem with driving is you have to consistently do it well. You can make zero mistakes 99.99% of the time and be a terrible driver. One accident per 10,000 minutes would be ~one accident every year. Worse, a lot can happen every minute, so it's closer to not messing up for 600,000+ seconds. The only reason people can drive is we build in very wide tolerances. ex: Car lanes are far wider than strictly necessary, you can fit ~2 cars in the average lane. Traffic lights have a significant delay where they are all red etc.
- bsder 11y ago
  > The only reason people can drive is we build in very wide tolerances. And other drivers react to minimize the problem created by another driver.
- TrevorJ 11y ago
  I think it's more accurate to say that people are unreliable drivers. Humans are certainly capable of driving very very well, but they perform unreliably.
roymurdock 11y ago
I have a $100 bet going with a coworker at the office. We defined self-driving cars: When I can pull out my phone in any of at least 5 major metropolitan areas around the world, order a driverless car, have it pick me up and deliver me to a specified location within the city in a timely fashion, with as little risk as getting in a taxi. He is sub 20 years. I'm thinking more like 40-50 mark. My thesis? We can solve the technical challenges, but so much physical, legal, and regulatory infrastructure needs to change to make this viable that it will be more than 2 decades until we see self-driving cars as a reality across multiple cities. Of course, I would be more than happy to lose the $100 as it would make everyone's lives better that much sooner. But I'm skeptical.
- baddox 11y ago
  Call me a technology optimist. I'd bet 10 years.
  - roymurdock 11y ago
    You want to get in on this bet? We could open up a pool on the prediction markets.
    - baddox 11y ago
      Probably not. I don't think it's sufficiently well-defined for me to trust an arbiter to resolve the bet satisfactorily. Also, time value of money.
    - epimetheus 11y ago
      http://longbets.org/ http://longbets.org/ would help facilitate this, though the minimum is 200 dollars.
  - lamontcg 11y ago
    I'd agree. I think in 10 years we're starting to have the conversation about when human driving should be banned in metro areas. At that point it'll be obvious that the technology has arrived, and the safety record will be there, but not everyone will have the technology. There will be the problem of telling someone with a jalopy that they need to park that outside of the metro and pay for an Uber to their destination which will probably snarl that up for at least a decade or more... At some point, though, as rich people are zipping along in cars that never get pulled over for speeding or having taillights out, the "Uber tax" is going to be calculated to be less expensive than the "PoPo tax" on the working poor.
rubicon33 11y ago
Hold up. Just because Google's problem is a big one to solve, doesn't refute the point that human drivers are bad. Yes, driving is actually a challenging task. But guess what, humans are BAD AT IT. And are computers going to be better? I'd be pretty damn surprised if they weren't. Most crashes come down to distraction. Computers never get distracted. So if we can workout errors like the one in this story, then at least we can say the computer isn't going to get lazy or distracted and suddenly forget it's lessons learned. Yes, its a challenging road ahead for these self driving cars. But I'd feel so much safer in a world of autonomous vehicles than I would with the morons behind the wheel of today.
josho 11y ago
People are bad drivers. Every winter at the first snowfall there are tonnes of accidents because folks forgot to adjust following distances. The promise of an AI driver is that there will never be a second accident of the same type. The only question is how fast the learning rate can ramp up.
baddox 11y ago
I'm not convinced that the distinction between "situations requiring thinking" and "boring situations" is that strong. You seem to be implying that self-driving cars will probably be worse than humans at things like negotiating through city traffic (where this accident apparently occurred), but is there any evidence of that? It's true that most deaths and serious accidents occur on highways, where human factors like boredom and sleepiness are probably significant. But humans also have a heck of a lot of fender benders like this incident, and a lot of the ones I have seen weren't exactly situations where "a lot of thinking" was necessary. People are texting and rear-end the person in front of them, or underestimate how much room they have to switch lanes between two cars, or other things like that. I don't see why these situations are uniquely difficult for AI to solve. In fact, they seem like very apt problems for computers to solve.
DannyBee 11y ago
"Lot of snow and can't see the lane markers? Millions of people adapt every day to this during winter." Having driven a corridor with a ton of snow quite a lot (western PA to washington DC), i'm going to strongly disagree with this. People don't "adapt". They just do it anyway because they have to. The rate of minor and major fender benders in this kind of situation is really high, it's just "acceptable". In truth, computers that understand the physics of what is happening to the car at a given point in time based on tons of sensor data are going to be much more effective drivers in snow and ice than people (because of even simple data it can use like "this wheel has this much traction currently, so i need to correct this much"). People are really bad at figuring this out in their head and use horrible heuristics, often hitting other cars, guard rails, you name it. You could also can get data about surrounding conditions (IE the ice the wheel will hit next or whatever) that people can't because they are not close enough/can't process fast enough (IE not just what is going on with the car, but what is the state of the ice on the road 2 inches to the right or left of the car and would it be better for the car to steer in that direction to get more traction, etc)
- zanny 11y ago
  This is it. There is nothing inherent to CV that makes self driving cars unable to operate in snow. Humans already suck massively at it (and in the rain). I remember driving home in a massive rainstorm at night about two years ago with around 2 meter visibility and was going like 20mph because I could not see shit. I had less sensory data than a computer with extra vectors of vision beyond sight would have had, and my reaction time is a ton slower. Then a year later I'm driving in icy conditions and count five cars that either off roaded or rear ended each other in the span of 15 minutes because of the slick surfaces. I imagine self driving cars would do a much better job slowing down and budgeting for potential slippage than impatient humans. There is nothing really magical about our eyes that give us better clarity in awful driving conditions, and we don't have radar and GPS fed into our brains to give us a clue where the roads are supposed to be - we just rely on historical context and past driving experience on the same roads. How many hours would it take a networked fleet of self driving vehicles to outdo my historical context for driving on any of the roads I've driven on for a decade? Two? Maybe three? You just need to get the tunable parameters right though some good old genetic algorithm work like what Google is doing now with its test fleet and while it would be impossible to guarantee perfect performance in every scenario (because inevitably an earthquake is going to make a self driving car crash where nobody could have prevented it) it just has to be better than us, and that has almost certainly already happened.
amelius 11y ago
How difficult is it to not hit something? Let's suppose you are given a 2d field in which there are a number of rectangles, each of which have a velocity vector. So you know the location of each rectangle now, and, to a good approximation, in the near future. How difficult is it to program a path-finding algorithm that will not crash into any of these rectangles, given that lowering speed is always a good option within a city? I'd say this is really not all that difficult. Yes, there are a lot of special cases to consider, but still, in essence, this seems to me a quite simple problem. So breaking down the problem is key. If you look at an autonomous vehicle as a black box, then, of course, it will seem dauntingly complicated, and difficult to trust.
- infinity0 11y ago
  > Let's suppose you are given hard AI problem, computer vision > to a good approximation, in the near future. how near is near? > lowering speed is always a good option can't brake if someone faster is behind you > there are a lot of special cases [..] simple problem simple problems by definition don't have many special cases, the "simplicity" means you can abstract them into a few cases. in other words, talk is cheap show me the code
  - amelius 11y ago
    IIRC, the autonomous cars all use a LIDAR system (kind of radar) to detect objects, and do not fully rely on computer vision. Also, here's ([1]) an article about a student who (single-handedly!) wrote the software for a self-driving car, which doesn't use a LIDAR system and is much cheaper. [1] http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/students-self-driving-car-tech-wins-intel-science-fair-1C9977186 http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/students-self-driving-car-...
haxel 11y ago
There is a way to get the best of both worlds: variably-autonomous swarming vehicles. The larger the swarm, the more autonomy the car has. The smaller the swarm, the less autonomy. Large swarms on the highway, small swarms (or solitary driving) elsewhere. Best of both!
- trhway 11y ago
  only this one human-driven car in the middle of the swarm is what stops this swarm from reaching new level of autonomy. Opps, such an unfortunate mishap! that human-driven car has just hit the car in front of it and went off the road. Finally the swarm is free... err... can move onto the next level.
_greim_ 11y ago
> But when boring suddenly turns to not boring? The current state of AI is very very bad at this. "Boring" versus "not boring" is too vague for this statement to really be meaningful. Examples could be drummed up on both sides. For example computers beat humans hands down in at least some criteria fitting the "not boring" description, like reaction time and seeing in multiple directions at once, and probably some others.
spuz 11y ago
The problem you are stating is called the 'handoff' problem which I believe will be a serious challenge for manufacturers of driverless cars. The handoff problem is when an automated system identifies a scenario in which it needs to hand over control to a human. How will that work in a vehicle that is not designed to be occupied by someone that knows how to control it? This problem has been written about in the book Our Robots, Ourselves [0] and there is an Econ Talk podcast about it as well [1]. To me, it makes sense to make use of the brain power provided by the occupant of the vehicle. For example, if one of the main vision sensors in the car breaks, why not let the human occupant drive the car manually? [0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Robots-Ourselves-Robotics-Autonomy-ebook/dp/B00SI02AWK http://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Robots-Ourselves-Robotics-Autono... [1] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/david_mindell_o.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/david_mindell_o.htm...
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  As far as I understand, the current behaviour of self-driving cars is to stop the cars safely in a safe place, to the best of their degraded ability. Once it's stopped, the human can either take over. If a human can't, you're stuck on the side of the road and you call a tow truck. Which isn't really any different than any other sort of major mechanical failure.
  - 0xffff2 11y ago
    That's all well and good if you make it to the side of the road, but what happens when the car decides it can't make it that far and stops in the middle lane of an Interstate?
    - matthewowen 11y ago
      What happens if your car breaks down such that it can't make it off the interstate? It's the same principle. You try to do the safest thing you can, but yes, at some point a car will fail and be stuck in the middle lane of an interstate because the autopilot fails, just as can happen because of mechanical failure.
samstave 11y ago
Personally - I think we need a network of "robot only" car lanes in cities and highways. Turn one out of four one-way streets in business districts to robot only. Make a certain highway on/off-ramp robot only etc...
ender89 11y ago
Actually, it sounds like the self-driving car got muscled out by the bus. They claim that the the car AND the driver of the car thought the bus would let them through. Now this is a problem with the car not driving defensively enough, because either the car miscalculated the bus's ability to slow or assumed the bus would be able to see the car and react accordingly (or, just possibly, the bus driver is an ass who tried to shut out the car. I know, its practically unheard of, but its possible). I don't think this is a deathblow to self-driving cars, nor is it a sign that they are worse at driving than people, only that they are still being perfected and that the single greatest threat to a self driving car are people because they are the ultimately unpredictable.
- Tenhundfeld 11y ago
  Anecdotally, this is a lesson I too had to learn, almost the hard way. The closest I've ever come to accidents in city driving is with municipal buses. City buses seem to drive as though they always have the right of way, and other cars will always get out of their way. Coming from a smaller, more suburban area, I learned to recalibrate my driving to be more aggressive in larger cities (primarily NYC & DC), to hold my own against pushy taxis, etc. Most city drivers kind of bluff, and if you show you're not falling for it, they'll stay out of your way. But city buses don't bluff. If they start pulling into your lane, even if clearly cutting you off, you better slam on those brakes, because that bus is not stopping. It's one of those unwritten rules you learn, at least in my experience driving in major East Coast cities. I can see how it'd be hard to train AI that you have adjust the driving style depending your locale and for specific types of non-emergency vehicles. I'm not making an argument here, really just sharing a chuckle about the crash involving a city bus.
  - michaelt 11y ago
    But city buses don't bluff. If they start pulling into your lane, even if clearly cutting you off, you better slam on those brakes, because that bus is not stopping. Bus drivers would learn just like you did if there were a few thousand unmanned cars whose programming assumed every other driver would follow the law :)
  - 11y ago
petra 11y ago
>> And unfortunately there's no easy way to use the best of both sides. It doesn't seem too hard to go in that direction. For example you can use satellties or drones or other sensing mechanism to survey a city in real time and tell the driver X minutes in advance before he would need to take control of the wheel - and of course you could adapt this recommendation according the skill of the person, his current state(being drunk) or other data.
- bigiain 11y ago
  Not sure that'd work: "Sorry I mowed your child down, but it wasn't my fault, the computer didn't tell me I needed to pay attention". People are in general extremely quick to deflect blame from themselves (especially under stress) no matter _how_ stupid or implausible their no-the-spot excuse is. (Source: I'm a motorcycle rider, we have a term here "SMIDSY", which stands for "Sorry mate, I didn't see you" - because it's such a common thing for drivers to say when they've just driven into you. There's a great quote from a judge a few years back in a court case over a driver excusing themselves for running into a bike "But the plaintiff was _clearly_ there to be seen.")
  - petra 11y ago
    If the vehicle told you to be focused ahead of time(say a few minutes before, enough mragin), and recorded that action than legally at that point in time, you're driving a regular vehicle.
nske 11y ago
If all cars were self-driven and there was a system that allowed them to exchange information, negotiate decisions, etc with all cars in proximity, that would be the ultimate vision safety-wise. I expect that we'll live to see that day. Removing the human factor would be removing the biggest problem. On the other hand, making this mandatory would also be the wet-dream of most governments. In the name of safety, they could have access to so much information... Just knowing how many passengers the car is carrying, what's the weight of each passenger, and, of course, a history of the coordinates, would open insane possibilities, not all of them good.
mirkules 11y ago
Personally, I feel we are approaching the self driving situation backwards. We are so heavily invested in current technology that we are trying to shoehorn existing tech into doin something it was not designed to be autonomous in the first place. Imagine how much easier it would be, for example, if roads had embedded markers (like magnets or RFID chips) that designated lanes, speed limits, and other road rules and weather conditions. AI vehicles would simply need to read this information and adjust accordingly. But, unfortunately, this would be almost unfeasible in today's world vecause a) it depends on every car following the same rules and that's impossible if you have human drivers and b) it would require massive investment and national-level cooperation to change the infrastructure.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > Imagine how much easier it would be, for example, if roads had embedded markers (like magnets or RFID chips) that designated lanes, speed limits, and other road rules and weather conditions. AI vehicles would simply need to read this information and adjust accordingly. Speed limits can be defined as metadata on existing mapping data. Existing vehicles, such as Tesla's with their autopilot system and GPS receivers, can "define" existing lanes by refining existing mapping data using their drivers as expert system trainers [1]. You don't need national-level cooperation to change infrastructure; you just need a massively automated system for collecting data and training based on it. Google and Tesla are doing both, just in different ways. [1] http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-building-maps-autopilot-drivers/ http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-building-maps-autopilot-drive...
- VLM 11y ago
  It wouldn't help very much. We need visual processing and heuristic logic to handle a kid on the side of the road chasing a ball unlikely to intersect and catch it before he enters traffic. Given that mandatory ability, reading a speed limit sign is pretty trivial. Given that its very unusual for an oncoming car to swerve into your lane, and a giant pothole in the oncoming lane, and the car sees three cars swerve into your lane taking turns, what are the odds of the next car hitting you head on? Compared to this puzzler, interpreting a stop sign is pretty easy. Also the human drivers presumably will not understand the weird behavior of an enhanced self driving car, unless the human infrastructure matched the automatic infrastructure. Of course you could analyze the human data visually to predict the human behavior, but then why bother with the automatic hardware sensors? I guess a bad automobile analogy is if you must design this pickup truck to safely haul a 8000 pound trailer, then a 300 pound trailer will not overtax it.
benologist 11y ago
Bad drivers take on a whole new meaning outside of wealthy countries where the dangerous drivers routinely end up disqualified from driving. Just by providing a predictable vehicle everyone can trust will stop and stay stopped at red lights, stop at stop signs etc AI will bring a lot to the world. Seventy-four per cent of road traffic deaths occur in middle-income countries, which account for 70% of the world’s population, but only 53% of the world’s registered vehicles, burdens for 74% of world's road deaths. In low-income countries it is even worse. Only one percent of the world's registered cars produce 16% of world's road traffic deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
Symbiote 11y ago
> Again, look at any Asian mega city, people can adapt very fast. Have you seen the accident rate in these places? It's huge, and in many countries underreported.
IgorPartola 11y ago
I will just leave this here: http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/52fcc3c76bb3f7bf62eeb138/10-crazy-photos-of-north-carolina-crippled-by-snow.jpg http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/52fcc3c76bb3f7bf62e...
j79 11y ago
Interesting point. Would be interesting if this lead to remote drivers who are responsible for navigating self driving car when the car decides human intervention is safest? (At least until all cars on the road are self driving and connected to each other for real time communication...)
megablast 11y ago
Over 1 million people a year die from driving accidents. And that is not including the huge number of injured. That is an awful result. Humans are awful drivers. They are too easily distracted, don't have enough information, bored, and tired.
mtgx 11y ago
> And unfortunately there's no easy way to use the best of both sides. How about using the "self-driving AI" only as "really advanced automatic assistance". Humans will still drive the cars, but the AI will kick-in in those boring situations where the humans turn off their thinking.
isaacremuant 11y ago
That humans are bad drivers is something most of us experience everyday. Of course, everyone thinks THEY are the exception. Self driving cars being better than the average driver is absolutely to be expected since they can only get better. They'll be consistent. They will always be focused, not get distracted, not get tired, have more sensors than a human could. It's not just about the environment but also about the mental state of the driver. Sure it's difficult but your using one case to flip things around doesn't seem to be a very strong argument. > Self driving cars will get there someday, but I think it's much farther away than many assume it will be. There's no evidence to support your assertion given the tests that have been going on so far. There's no evidence to support that switching back and forth would be better than having the AI all the time either.
- x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
  > Of course, everyone thinks THEY are the exception. This gets brought up every so often, much to my chagrin. If you asked 10 people what qualifies a good driver, you will get 10 different answers. Does it mean they have a good safety record? Does it mean they are skilled at controlling the car? Does it mean they can navigate traffic efficiently? Does it mean they communicate with other drivers well enough to not negatively affect traffic? Does it mean they have good reactions times? What combination and weighting to you provide the above questions and what questions haven't even been asked? Of course people respond that they are above average or good drivers since everyone is using a separate metric to define a good driver.
StreamBright 11y ago
Not all of the humans are bad drivers, but some of them definitely are. I have been living in the US for 4 years and here are the list of things that are extremely dangerous: - not using signals at all, just randomly changing lanes - not using signals at all and on the top of that do not care about traffic in the other lanes - driving 45 mph in the left lane because California teaches to new drivers that changing lanes are dangerous, aka "stick to your lane" (I learned that recently and I could not believe) - driving with the exact same attitude in rain like under dry weather conditions - do not care about people merging lanes, do not look at them, pretend they dont exist - being on facebook on the highway driving with 65mph - do not care about bicycles, pretending they are not legitimate traffic I am not sure about the rest of US, but several friends told me it is specific to California. I would argue that humans are not as good drivers, at least there is a large part of drivers who aren't. Replacing drivers with software is always going to win, just like it did with airplanes or anything else repetitive task that we automated. I am pretty sure there is going to be a period while AI is not as good as humans but this is why Google is collecting to data at large scale to improve it to beat humans and make driving a safer way to commute.

euyyn 11y ago

> The current state of AI is very very bad at this. What makes you think so?

jonknee 11y ago

On the other hand Google has driven a lot of miles without an incident and this minor accident doesn't change the fact that their system is safer than a human behind the wheel. And unlike humans who don't improve after an accident, Google's whole fleet just got even more safe.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
This is false. Google's cars have only gone as far as they have without an incident BECAUSE of human drivers. In a 12 month period, human drivers prevented Google Self-Driving Cars from causing ten accidents. And 272 times the car's software outright failed and dropped control of the car to the human driver. This is all in Google's recent report to the California DMV, but it's not a reality they like to advertise openly. Statistically, Google's Self-Driving Car would've lost it's license by now, if not for human drivers keeping it in check.
- Retric 11y ago
  Spread that over "the equivalent of 75 years of typical U.S. adult driving." (1million + miles) and the alpha version of this software seems almost on par with the average driver which is expected to file an insurance claim every 17.9 years. PS: How often do you think the average drivers ed teacher uses there break?
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    Your statistic is incorrect. The incidents described took place over a much smaller number of miles. Only I believe 14 months of the Self-Driving Car program, not the sum total of it's driving to date. (I said 12 above, but I think it's actually 14 months.) 424,331 miles, according to the report. http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/cadmvdisengagereport-dec.2015.pdf http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/cadmvdisengagerepo... Nor are you counting all of the times the driving software handed control back to the driver. Consider each one of those equivalent to your human driver falling asleep at the wheel.
    - Retric 11y ago
      "Google had operated its self-driving cars in autonomous mode for more than 1.3 million miles. Of those miles, 424,331 occurred on public roads in California during the period covered by this report" So, you where talking about a specific report not the overall system, got it. Our objective is not to minimize disengagements; rather, it is to gather, while operating safely, as much data as possible to enable us to improve our self-driving system. Therefore, we set disengagement thresholds conservatively, and each is carefully recorded. That's a long way from falling asleep at the wheel. That's we don't want to put people at risk so we are going to hand off control if "Disengage for a recklessly behaving agent" etc.

rqebmm 11y ago

> Lot of snow and can't see the lane markers? Millions of people adapt every day to this during winter. This could not be less true among people driving in unfamiliar conditions. (http://legacy.wusa9.com/story/news/local/virginia/2016/01/20/100-accidents-reported-va-snow-creates-traffic-nightmare/79091316/ http://legacy.wusa9.com/story/news/local/virginia/2016/01/20...) The difference is that all self-driving cars benefit from the knowledge created by bumping into the edge cases. People can only do this in an ad-hoc manner (i.e. personal experience, taught by mentor, etc)

striking 11y ago
I think the poster assumed that the person was trained to fit their surroundings. We are all hyper-fitted to what we know best and what we encounter every day, and will probably fail spectacularly if we're unaware of that.
mhurron 11y ago
It doesn't even have to be in a place that doesn't get much snow. First snow fall in Calgary looks like what you get in a standard snow storm in a city in the south east. Its even funnier if the first snow fall is early and then there are another two months of sun and no snow and then you get a repeat during the second snow fall. People have to relearn how to drive in snow every year. People are bad drivers in good conditions, they just happen to be able to be bad drivers in bad conditions as well.
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  Bah, it's not just the first snow storm. They salt the roads so much in Ontario that people think they know how to drive in bad conditions but actually they just know how to drive in bad conditions on heavily salted roads. If they hit a patch of unsalted road they get in trouble quite quickly. In my experience Saskatoon fares a lot better. They don't salt as heavily because it's often cold enough that salt doesn't work as well, and because judges don't blame the municipality for not salting when there's an accident.

jfoutz 11y ago

It's hard to say with such a short description, but as i read it, the google car never left its lane, just moved right to the edge of it's lane to avoid some debris. Why did the bus move into an occupied lane?!?

arthurgibson 11y ago
Sounds like we need a self-driving bus.
jonknee 11y ago
> Why did the bus move into an occupied lane?!? It depends on the city, but bus drivers often don't care whatsoever about other vehicles in the way. They merge and let others avoid contact.
ocdtrekkie 11y ago
It sounded like it was merging into the bus's lane. But I imagine Google will prep some very fancy videos of the incident from the car's perspective within the next week or so, and then we'll know for sure.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> Why did the bus move into an occupied lane?!? Because that's what busses do all the time, whether or not that is safe, legal, or desirable.
duderific 11y ago
From the writing in the article, I found it extremely difficult to get a good visual of exactly what happened in the accident. I wish the description was a little more, uh, descriptive.
aidenn0 11y ago
You got that backwards. They moved right in their lane to slow down for a turn (while allowing traffic going straight to pass), and then had to move back into the stream of traffic as there was debris preventing them from turning on the far-right side of the lane.
11y ago

Retric 11y ago

Considering the number of accidents after major storms I think your overstating the case. People are bad drivers in all conditions. The problem with driving is you have to consistently do it well. You can make zero mistakes 99.99% of the time and be a terrible driver. One accident per 10,000 minutes would be ~one accident every year. Worse, a lot can happen every minute, so it's closer to not messing up for 600,000+ seconds. The only reason people can drive is we build in very wide tolerances. ex: Car lanes are far wider than strictly necessary, you can fit ~2 cars in the average lane. Traffic lights have a significant delay where they are all red etc.

bsder 11y ago
> The only reason people can drive is we build in very wide tolerances. And other drivers react to minimize the problem created by another driver.
TrevorJ 11y ago
I think it's more accurate to say that people are unreliable drivers. Humans are certainly capable of driving very very well, but they perform unreliably.

roymurdock 11y ago

I have a $100 bet going with a coworker at the office. We defined self-driving cars: When I can pull out my phone in any of at least 5 major metropolitan areas around the world, order a driverless car, have it pick me up and deliver me to a specified location within the city in a timely fashion, with as little risk as getting in a taxi. He is sub 20 years. I'm thinking more like 40-50 mark. My thesis? We can solve the technical challenges, but so much physical, legal, and regulatory infrastructure needs to change to make this viable that it will be more than 2 decades until we see self-driving cars as a reality across multiple cities. Of course, I would be more than happy to lose the $100 as it would make everyone's lives better that much sooner. But I'm skeptical.

baddox 11y ago
Call me a technology optimist. I'd bet 10 years.
- roymurdock 11y ago
  You want to get in on this bet? We could open up a pool on the prediction markets.
  - baddox 11y ago
    Probably not. I don't think it's sufficiently well-defined for me to trust an arbiter to resolve the bet satisfactorily. Also, time value of money.
  - epimetheus 11y ago
    http://longbets.org/ http://longbets.org/ would help facilitate this, though the minimum is 200 dollars.
- lamontcg 11y ago
  I'd agree. I think in 10 years we're starting to have the conversation about when human driving should be banned in metro areas. At that point it'll be obvious that the technology has arrived, and the safety record will be there, but not everyone will have the technology. There will be the problem of telling someone with a jalopy that they need to park that outside of the metro and pay for an Uber to their destination which will probably snarl that up for at least a decade or more... At some point, though, as rich people are zipping along in cars that never get pulled over for speeding or having taillights out, the "Uber tax" is going to be calculated to be less expensive than the "PoPo tax" on the working poor.

rubicon33 11y ago

Hold up. Just because Google's problem is a big one to solve, doesn't refute the point that human drivers are bad. Yes, driving is actually a challenging task. But guess what, humans are BAD AT IT. And are computers going to be better? I'd be pretty damn surprised if they weren't. Most crashes come down to distraction. Computers never get distracted. So if we can workout errors like the one in this story, then at least we can say the computer isn't going to get lazy or distracted and suddenly forget it's lessons learned. Yes, its a challenging road ahead for these self driving cars. But I'd feel so much safer in a world of autonomous vehicles than I would with the morons behind the wheel of today.

josho 11y ago

People are bad drivers. Every winter at the first snowfall there are tonnes of accidents because folks forgot to adjust following distances. The promise of an AI driver is that there will never be a second accident of the same type. The only question is how fast the learning rate can ramp up.

baddox 11y ago

I'm not convinced that the distinction between "situations requiring thinking" and "boring situations" is that strong. You seem to be implying that self-driving cars will probably be worse than humans at things like negotiating through city traffic (where this accident apparently occurred), but is there any evidence of that? It's true that most deaths and serious accidents occur on highways, where human factors like boredom and sleepiness are probably significant. But humans also have a heck of a lot of fender benders like this incident, and a lot of the ones I have seen weren't exactly situations where "a lot of thinking" was necessary. People are texting and rear-end the person in front of them, or underestimate how much room they have to switch lanes between two cars, or other things like that. I don't see why these situations are uniquely difficult for AI to solve. In fact, they seem like very apt problems for computers to solve.

DannyBee 11y ago

"Lot of snow and can't see the lane markers? Millions of people adapt every day to this during winter." Having driven a corridor with a ton of snow quite a lot (western PA to washington DC), i'm going to strongly disagree with this. People don't "adapt". They just do it anyway because they have to. The rate of minor and major fender benders in this kind of situation is really high, it's just "acceptable". In truth, computers that understand the physics of what is happening to the car at a given point in time based on tons of sensor data are going to be much more effective drivers in snow and ice than people (because of even simple data it can use like "this wheel has this much traction currently, so i need to correct this much"). People are really bad at figuring this out in their head and use horrible heuristics, often hitting other cars, guard rails, you name it. You could also can get data about surrounding conditions (IE the ice the wheel will hit next or whatever) that people can't because they are not close enough/can't process fast enough (IE not just what is going on with the car, but what is the state of the ice on the road 2 inches to the right or left of the car and would it be better for the car to steer in that direction to get more traction, etc)

zanny 11y ago
This is it. There is nothing inherent to CV that makes self driving cars unable to operate in snow. Humans already suck massively at it (and in the rain). I remember driving home in a massive rainstorm at night about two years ago with around 2 meter visibility and was going like 20mph because I could not see shit. I had less sensory data than a computer with extra vectors of vision beyond sight would have had, and my reaction time is a ton slower. Then a year later I'm driving in icy conditions and count five cars that either off roaded or rear ended each other in the span of 15 minutes because of the slick surfaces. I imagine self driving cars would do a much better job slowing down and budgeting for potential slippage than impatient humans. There is nothing really magical about our eyes that give us better clarity in awful driving conditions, and we don't have radar and GPS fed into our brains to give us a clue where the roads are supposed to be - we just rely on historical context and past driving experience on the same roads. How many hours would it take a networked fleet of self driving vehicles to outdo my historical context for driving on any of the roads I've driven on for a decade? Two? Maybe three? You just need to get the tunable parameters right though some good old genetic algorithm work like what Google is doing now with its test fleet and while it would be impossible to guarantee perfect performance in every scenario (because inevitably an earthquake is going to make a self driving car crash where nobody could have prevented it) it just has to be better than us, and that has almost certainly already happened.

amelius 11y ago

How difficult is it to not hit something? Let's suppose you are given a 2d field in which there are a number of rectangles, each of which have a velocity vector. So you know the location of each rectangle now, and, to a good approximation, in the near future. How difficult is it to program a path-finding algorithm that will not crash into any of these rectangles, given that lowering speed is always a good option within a city? I'd say this is really not all that difficult. Yes, there are a lot of special cases to consider, but still, in essence, this seems to me a quite simple problem. So breaking down the problem is key. If you look at an autonomous vehicle as a black box, then, of course, it will seem dauntingly complicated, and difficult to trust.

infinity0 11y ago
> Let's suppose you are given hard AI problem, computer vision > to a good approximation, in the near future. how near is near? > lowering speed is always a good option can't brake if someone faster is behind you > there are a lot of special cases [..] simple problem simple problems by definition don't have many special cases, the "simplicity" means you can abstract them into a few cases. in other words, talk is cheap show me the code
- amelius 11y ago
  IIRC, the autonomous cars all use a LIDAR system (kind of radar) to detect objects, and do not fully rely on computer vision. Also, here's ([1]) an article about a student who (single-handedly!) wrote the software for a self-driving car, which doesn't use a LIDAR system and is much cheaper. [1] http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/students-self-driving-car-tech-wins-intel-science-fair-1C9977186 http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/students-self-driving-car-...

haxel 11y ago

There is a way to get the best of both worlds: variably-autonomous swarming vehicles. The larger the swarm, the more autonomy the car has. The smaller the swarm, the less autonomy. Large swarms on the highway, small swarms (or solitary driving) elsewhere. Best of both!

trhway 11y ago
only this one human-driven car in the middle of the swarm is what stops this swarm from reaching new level of autonomy. Opps, such an unfortunate mishap! that human-driven car has just hit the car in front of it and went off the road. Finally the swarm is free... err... can move onto the next level.

_greim_ 11y ago

> But when boring suddenly turns to not boring? The current state of AI is very very bad at this. "Boring" versus "not boring" is too vague for this statement to really be meaningful. Examples could be drummed up on both sides. For example computers beat humans hands down in at least some criteria fitting the "not boring" description, like reaction time and seeing in multiple directions at once, and probably some others.

spuz 11y ago

The problem you are stating is called the 'handoff' problem which I believe will be a serious challenge for manufacturers of driverless cars. The handoff problem is when an automated system identifies a scenario in which it needs to hand over control to a human. How will that work in a vehicle that is not designed to be occupied by someone that knows how to control it? This problem has been written about in the book Our Robots, Ourselves [0] and there is an Econ Talk podcast about it as well [1]. To me, it makes sense to make use of the brain power provided by the occupant of the vehicle. For example, if one of the main vision sensors in the car breaks, why not let the human occupant drive the car manually? [0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Robots-Ourselves-Robotics-Autonomy-ebook/dp/B00SI02AWK http://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Robots-Ourselves-Robotics-Autono... [1] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/david_mindell_o.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/david_mindell_o.htm...

bryanlarsen 11y ago
As far as I understand, the current behaviour of self-driving cars is to stop the cars safely in a safe place, to the best of their degraded ability. Once it's stopped, the human can either take over. If a human can't, you're stuck on the side of the road and you call a tow truck. Which isn't really any different than any other sort of major mechanical failure.
- 0xffff2 11y ago
  That's all well and good if you make it to the side of the road, but what happens when the car decides it can't make it that far and stops in the middle lane of an Interstate?
  - matthewowen 11y ago
    What happens if your car breaks down such that it can't make it off the interstate? It's the same principle. You try to do the safest thing you can, but yes, at some point a car will fail and be stuck in the middle lane of an interstate because the autopilot fails, just as can happen because of mechanical failure.

samstave 11y ago

Personally - I think we need a network of "robot only" car lanes in cities and highways. Turn one out of four one-way streets in business districts to robot only. Make a certain highway on/off-ramp robot only etc...

ender89 11y ago

Actually, it sounds like the self-driving car got muscled out by the bus. They claim that the the car AND the driver of the car thought the bus would let them through. Now this is a problem with the car not driving defensively enough, because either the car miscalculated the bus's ability to slow or assumed the bus would be able to see the car and react accordingly (or, just possibly, the bus driver is an ass who tried to shut out the car. I know, its practically unheard of, but its possible). I don't think this is a deathblow to self-driving cars, nor is it a sign that they are worse at driving than people, only that they are still being perfected and that the single greatest threat to a self driving car are people because they are the ultimately unpredictable.

Tenhundfeld 11y ago
Anecdotally, this is a lesson I too had to learn, almost the hard way. The closest I've ever come to accidents in city driving is with municipal buses. City buses seem to drive as though they always have the right of way, and other cars will always get out of their way. Coming from a smaller, more suburban area, I learned to recalibrate my driving to be more aggressive in larger cities (primarily NYC & DC), to hold my own against pushy taxis, etc. Most city drivers kind of bluff, and if you show you're not falling for it, they'll stay out of your way. But city buses don't bluff. If they start pulling into your lane, even if clearly cutting you off, you better slam on those brakes, because that bus is not stopping. It's one of those unwritten rules you learn, at least in my experience driving in major East Coast cities. I can see how it'd be hard to train AI that you have adjust the driving style depending your locale and for specific types of non-emergency vehicles. I'm not making an argument here, really just sharing a chuckle about the crash involving a city bus.
- michaelt 11y ago
  But city buses don't bluff. If they start pulling into your lane, even if clearly cutting you off, you better slam on those brakes, because that bus is not stopping. Bus drivers would learn just like you did if there were a few thousand unmanned cars whose programming assumed every other driver would follow the law :)
- 11y ago

petra 11y ago

>> And unfortunately there's no easy way to use the best of both sides. It doesn't seem too hard to go in that direction. For example you can use satellties or drones or other sensing mechanism to survey a city in real time and tell the driver X minutes in advance before he would need to take control of the wheel - and of course you could adapt this recommendation according the skill of the person, his current state(being drunk) or other data.

bigiain 11y ago
Not sure that'd work: "Sorry I mowed your child down, but it wasn't my fault, the computer didn't tell me I needed to pay attention". People are in general extremely quick to deflect blame from themselves (especially under stress) no matter _how_ stupid or implausible their no-the-spot excuse is. (Source: I'm a motorcycle rider, we have a term here "SMIDSY", which stands for "Sorry mate, I didn't see you" - because it's such a common thing for drivers to say when they've just driven into you. There's a great quote from a judge a few years back in a court case over a driver excusing themselves for running into a bike "But the plaintiff was _clearly_ there to be seen.")
- petra 11y ago
  If the vehicle told you to be focused ahead of time(say a few minutes before, enough mragin), and recorded that action than legally at that point in time, you're driving a regular vehicle.

nske 11y ago

If all cars were self-driven and there was a system that allowed them to exchange information, negotiate decisions, etc with all cars in proximity, that would be the ultimate vision safety-wise. I expect that we'll live to see that day. Removing the human factor would be removing the biggest problem. On the other hand, making this mandatory would also be the wet-dream of most governments. In the name of safety, they could have access to so much information... Just knowing how many passengers the car is carrying, what's the weight of each passenger, and, of course, a history of the coordinates, would open insane possibilities, not all of them good.

mirkules 11y ago

Personally, I feel we are approaching the self driving situation backwards. We are so heavily invested in current technology that we are trying to shoehorn existing tech into doin something it was not designed to be autonomous in the first place. Imagine how much easier it would be, for example, if roads had embedded markers (like magnets or RFID chips) that designated lanes, speed limits, and other road rules and weather conditions. AI vehicles would simply need to read this information and adjust accordingly. But, unfortunately, this would be almost unfeasible in today's world vecause a) it depends on every car following the same rules and that's impossible if you have human drivers and b) it would require massive investment and national-level cooperation to change the infrastructure.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
> Imagine how much easier it would be, for example, if roads had embedded markers (like magnets or RFID chips) that designated lanes, speed limits, and other road rules and weather conditions. AI vehicles would simply need to read this information and adjust accordingly. Speed limits can be defined as metadata on existing mapping data. Existing vehicles, such as Tesla's with their autopilot system and GPS receivers, can "define" existing lanes by refining existing mapping data using their drivers as expert system trainers [1]. You don't need national-level cooperation to change infrastructure; you just need a massively automated system for collecting data and training based on it. Google and Tesla are doing both, just in different ways. [1] http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-building-maps-autopilot-drivers/ http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-building-maps-autopilot-drive...
VLM 11y ago
It wouldn't help very much. We need visual processing and heuristic logic to handle a kid on the side of the road chasing a ball unlikely to intersect and catch it before he enters traffic. Given that mandatory ability, reading a speed limit sign is pretty trivial. Given that its very unusual for an oncoming car to swerve into your lane, and a giant pothole in the oncoming lane, and the car sees three cars swerve into your lane taking turns, what are the odds of the next car hitting you head on? Compared to this puzzler, interpreting a stop sign is pretty easy. Also the human drivers presumably will not understand the weird behavior of an enhanced self driving car, unless the human infrastructure matched the automatic infrastructure. Of course you could analyze the human data visually to predict the human behavior, but then why bother with the automatic hardware sensors? I guess a bad automobile analogy is if you must design this pickup truck to safely haul a 8000 pound trailer, then a 300 pound trailer will not overtax it.

benologist 11y ago

Bad drivers take on a whole new meaning outside of wealthy countries where the dangerous drivers routinely end up disqualified from driving. Just by providing a predictable vehicle everyone can trust will stop and stay stopped at red lights, stop at stop signs etc AI will bring a lot to the world. Seventy-four per cent of road traffic deaths occur in middle-income countries, which account for 70% of the world’s population, but only 53% of the world’s registered vehicles, burdens for 74% of world's road deaths. In low-income countries it is even worse. Only one percent of the world's registered cars produce 16% of world's road traffic deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Symbiote 11y ago

> Again, look at any Asian mega city, people can adapt very fast. Have you seen the accident rate in these places? It's huge, and in many countries underreported.

IgorPartola 11y ago

I will just leave this here: http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/52fcc3c76bb3f7bf62eeb138/10-crazy-photos-of-north-carolina-crippled-by-snow.jpg http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/52fcc3c76bb3f7bf62e...

j79 11y ago

Interesting point. Would be interesting if this lead to remote drivers who are responsible for navigating self driving car when the car decides human intervention is safest? (At least until all cars on the road are self driving and connected to each other for real time communication...)

megablast 11y ago

Over 1 million people a year die from driving accidents. And that is not including the huge number of injured. That is an awful result. Humans are awful drivers. They are too easily distracted, don't have enough information, bored, and tired.

mtgx 11y ago

> And unfortunately there's no easy way to use the best of both sides. How about using the "self-driving AI" only as "really advanced automatic assistance". Humans will still drive the cars, but the AI will kick-in in those boring situations where the humans turn off their thinking.

isaacremuant 11y ago

That humans are bad drivers is something most of us experience everyday. Of course, everyone thinks THEY are the exception. Self driving cars being better than the average driver is absolutely to be expected since they can only get better. They'll be consistent. They will always be focused, not get distracted, not get tired, have more sensors than a human could. It's not just about the environment but also about the mental state of the driver. Sure it's difficult but your using one case to flip things around doesn't seem to be a very strong argument. > Self driving cars will get there someday, but I think it's much farther away than many assume it will be. There's no evidence to support your assertion given the tests that have been going on so far. There's no evidence to support that switching back and forth would be better than having the AI all the time either.

x3n0ph3n3 11y ago
> Of course, everyone thinks THEY are the exception. This gets brought up every so often, much to my chagrin. If you asked 10 people what qualifies a good driver, you will get 10 different answers. Does it mean they have a good safety record? Does it mean they are skilled at controlling the car? Does it mean they can navigate traffic efficiently? Does it mean they communicate with other drivers well enough to not negatively affect traffic? Does it mean they have good reactions times? What combination and weighting to you provide the above questions and what questions haven't even been asked? Of course people respond that they are above average or good drivers since everyone is using a separate metric to define a good driver.

StreamBright 11y ago

Not all of the humans are bad drivers, but some of them definitely are. I have been living in the US for 4 years and here are the list of things that are extremely dangerous: - not using signals at all, just randomly changing lanes - not using signals at all and on the top of that do not care about traffic in the other lanes - driving 45 mph in the left lane because California teaches to new drivers that changing lanes are dangerous, aka "stick to your lane" (I learned that recently and I could not believe) - driving with the exact same attitude in rain like under dry weather conditions - do not care about people merging lanes, do not look at them, pretend they dont exist - being on facebook on the highway driving with 65mph - do not care about bicycles, pretending they are not legitimate traffic I am not sure about the rest of US, but several friends told me it is specific to California. I would argue that humans are not as good drivers, at least there is a large part of drivers who aren't. Replacing drivers with software is always going to win, just like it did with airplanes or anything else repetitive task that we automated. I am pretty sure there is going to be a period while AI is not as good as humans but this is why Google is collecting to data at large scale to improve it to beat humans and make driving a safer way to commute.