On a recent trip, with my car in cruise control, I noticed something interesting: if the car in front of me slowed down, my car would slow down along with it. Apparently it’s equipped with proximity sensors in the front and back, which serve to protect against lazy drivers who hit cruise control and then start reading email on their iPhones while zooming down the highway. (Not me!) Which is great, but I couldn’t help but imagine the obvious next step: once you have cruise control and the ability to adjust to the speed of traffic, not to mention cars that park themselves, you are most of the way to self-driving cars.
You will be unsurprised to learn that I’m not the first to think of this. Tim Lee has written an interesting introduction to the state of the art, as well as speculations on what the effect of automatic driving would have on urban cityscapes. (Via Yglesias.) A big one: parking is incredibly resource-intensive, but if your car can drive away and wait for you at some central location, vast stretches of land can be returned to human uses rather than automotive uses.
Will we have self-driving cars within the next few decades? I don’t think it’s such a leap, given what technology is already available — and that technology can be confined to the cars themselves, there is no need to put rails down or any such thing. There is even a sensible phase-in strategy, where we convert present-day carpool lanes into automated-driving lanes. But Atrios is skeptical:
I think self-driving cars are going to be here some time after flying cars, my jetpack, and Glenn Reynolds’ sexbots, but this little thought experiment is useful for highlighting that while we talk about highways and roads and whatnot, the biggest problem with cars generally is parking. They take up space. Lots of it. That space reduces density most places, and reduces the benefits of density in places where it exists.
Concerning flying cars and jetpacks, I’m likewise pessimistic (at least sometimes). But those sexbots are on the way. And they’ll be arriving in self-driving cars.
I heard on the radio that over 70s are more dangerous behind the wheel than drunk drivers.
But the over 70s vote in droves, the politician they had in to talk about it laughed a lot and said he’d have bus loads of wrinklies petitioning outside his office for the next month 😉
I’d like a computer to control my car. I fear other drivers due to their complete stupidity.
>> Okay, a subway train (or even a taxi) is not exactly “your car”,
Good god, look at the results. Urbanites use trains a little, but 99% of people don’t. Please, dear god, stop using this argument.
When I drive home I go to the shops, check the surf, pop into my mates house. Take some photos of the sunset…. how the hell does the train let me do that?!?
99% of people don’t have a life that fits around a fixed train time table. Get over it. Trains don’t work.
“When highly sophisticated sexbots become a reality…”
I don’t think the big bucks are in the sophisticated end of the market. Ditto with the mechanical wear and tear.
But will an automatically-controlled car be able to respond appropriately when a deer or dog wanders on to the highway, or if being used in cities to go to parking, if a child does?
Trains still have drivers, and I think it is for this reason. And trains face this type of problem much less often than cars (and are much less able to respond, but….).
On cars and jetpacks… Minority report, anyone? 😉
Self-driving cars are not ‘possible,’ or ‘feasible’ – they’re ready, and have been for a while. Issues of liability has kept the technology from deployment.
Larry Niven long ago wrote about the consequences of flying cars. Imagine a 15 (flying) car pile up – over your head. Who needs killer asteroids? In Niven’s “known space” it was illegal, in fact it was a capital offense to drive a flying car over an inhabited area under manual control. The rational for the severity of the punishment was to fill the organ banks, but considering some of the things I seen people do while driving an earth bound car and the likelihood of catastrophic accidents, I’m not sure the penalty would be excessive.
-dave
Chase, “Trains still have drivers”
Not everywhere, the Copenhagen Metro has trains that are driver-less and run entirely by a computer system called ATC (Automatic Train Control).
Nope. Never.
Drivers drive cars because they’re crazy individualists. And of course we all know that most drivers consider themselves better than average.
They’re never gonna give up control.
Sure it could easily be implemented, but the market won’t be there for it.
At least not in the US as said by LabLemming. I can’t even imagine it here in Denmark.
Sad. But true.
Isn’t it kind of silly to assume this would be an over night thing? Why wouldn’t it come in the form of a feature of cars and then eventually be as common cruise control, radios, and air conditioning after that point it’s just another hop, skip, and a jump to being legally required.
People wll get used to having it, use it liberally and we’d figure out oh, we are safer in general this way. Can you imagine the efficiency increase?
I’m a car enthusiest and I too love sitting behind the wheel but don’t tell me a majority of people would not be better off with automated cars.
nice Niven quote there above. Larry gets ignored a lot these days, partly for his highly unfashionable politics (with which I vehemently disagree). But when it comes down to the mark of a great futurist scifi writer – how many of the things he wrote about are now current real issues – I think he might have the highest score of any writer. The Gil the Arm stuff on organlegging is prescient beyond belief, and it’s far from the only thing…
Biggest problem with automated driving is emergent mass behavior, of course. When you have large numbers of autonomous agents following simple rules en masse, big things happen, and not always what you’d expect. It’s true enough of human traffic patterns (seen the paper on shockwave modelling of traffic jams? great stuff) that when you turn the agents into robots, I would expect some rather….interesting behavior to emerge.
lol actually I just had an image of The Game of Life being recreated in traffic patterns as seen from overhead, with repeating structures cascading across the grid, etc.
“Parking is incredibly resource-intensive, but if your car can drive away and wait for you at some central location …”
At last trying to put thinking and technologyinto some ‘practical’ use. But Why have the car wait for you at some central location.
If I could go down the pub, restaurant, club or airport, be dropped off by the car which either selects the nearest parking space (or returns home to my garage) and then comes and picks me up – Great! No need for the wife to go teetotal on a night out.
Mind you I don’t think Taxi Drivers or Limo Drivers would be too happy. Yet another redundant career?
Geez, #22, fascist much? Self-driving cars would solve the problem pretty easily – they drop you off and go somehwere where there’s plenty of room – say, a huge parking garage on the outskirts of town. It comes back and picks you up when you’re done. The total footprint would be vastly small than many numerous lots and garages distributed everywhere. You’d need electric cars charged by nuclear/renewable power or something similar to prevent additional pollution. But all things considered it’s a vast improvement on the status quo.
I think people will continue to enjoy driving themselves. We can’t automate ourselves out of existence- can we?
Of course I can see the need for a self-driving car if you are with your sex-bot.
Assuming you define a “self-driving car” as a car that drives itself under almost all conditions (in the city, in the suburbs, in the narrow lanes from another century, not just on the freeway), then it’s going to be doing it using a substantial amount of image processing (even if you use something like laser sensing, when it’s dense enough it’s essentially an image you’re dealing with).
I work in image processing and my professional opinion is: IF we could outlaw humans driving (and really get it enforced), then twenty/twenty-five years we could get it developed and deployed (deployment actually takes much longer than you’d think, so twenty years is “right around the corner”). IF we can’t outlaw human driving then I’d put it at least at the forty year mark. The reason for this is the “New York cabbie problem”: everyone who drives in New York knows that New York cabbies do truly insane things, so upon seeing a yellow cab they hang back a little to deal with problems. But the cabbie’s know this, so they know there are maneuvers they can pull using this knowledge, and push things as much as they can without getting attention from the police. The cabbie’s actively use the way that people view them to increase their driving options.
In the context of self-driving cars, if there are no human drivers then you can assume that other cars will either behave sensibly or they’re malfunctioning and will be behaving “randomly”. This is a hard, but do-able problem. What they aren’t going to do is try and take advantage of the fact that a program, designed to avoid killings, injuries and other damages, is driving the car. But if there are also human drivings, some of them will decide “since that self-driving car should be able to respond quickly in order to avoid a crash, I’ll cut in front with minimal clearance”. Likewise the envelope of various other “self-centred” driving techniques will get pushed right to the edge. Since just a few deaths that appear to be caused by self-driving cars will cause a backlash, any companies that want to deploy them will need to have the controlling programs completely capable of dealing with an intelligent and actively “hostile” other human drivers whilst still giving a reasonable ride. (If the car emergency stops every five minutes to avoid a human gaming the system it’s not something people will pay for.) This is a much harder problem (indeed the 40 years incorporates a guess of increasing “artificial intelligence” productivity as the years go by, it’s a more than twice as difficult problem.)
I’d actually expect things like surgical robots and robots for helping the elderly to be deployed sooner than self-driving cars precisely because you can safely assume all the humans involved will be co-operating rather than gaming the system.
Unfortunately, as The Almighty Bob pointed out, the issue that will stop self-driving cars from becomming commonplace is liability. This is especially important in a country that is now practically built on a foundation of litigation, such as the United States.
Think about it: if your automatic car crashes into a bus full of catholic schoolgirls and nuns, killing them all in a horrible fireball, who is at fault? There is no way the car companies will want to wear that kind of publicity or liability.
Speaking of publicity… TimG points out that about 42 thousand Americans die each year in car crashes. If we assume that the first iteration of self-driving cars aren’t perfect and te death toll is reduced to about 20 thousand, which headline will sell more papers?
“Self-Driving Cars Cut Death Toll in Half”
or
“Phycho Robot Cars Kill 20 Thousand”
Hi Matt,
Having the cars go to a parking garage on the edge of town seems silly. As it is now, if I want to go to Borders I can park right outside. So when I am browsing books and the mood suits me to leave, I just walk out and get my car. So why would I want a self driving car parked at the edge of town? I would have to ping it when ready and then sit there and wait 20 minutes for the thing to show up. Sounds like a pain in the butt. In any case I still don’t see how its going to reduce space used for cars. If the same number of people are at the mall, their self-driving cars are going to take up the same amount of space as their manual cars do now.
David
Sean wrote “Concerning flying cars and jetpacks, I’m likewise pessimistic (at least sometimes). But those sexbots are on the way ..”
Yes, I have my eye on one of these little beauts, although it’s hard to judge the exact scale.
Presumably the strange looking pedal-like assembly underneath is some kind of advanced retractable landing gear.