What qualifications should the 'driver' of a fully autonomous car need?
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Work the way down to no license (Score:5, Insightful)
It would make the most sense to require fewer qualifications as the technology becomes more proven; it could start requiring a driver's license with an endorsement and, as the cars become more capable and the kinks are worked out, go down to no license. But gradual deregulation tends to run counter to a bureaucracy's instincts and when the political process steps in it tends to do so suddenly, so I don't know if the idea would work in practice.
Putting people in an autonomous car (Score:5, Insightful)
and then not absolving them off the responsibility is just cruel. Nobody is going to have the presence of mind to react after they've been lulled by hours upon hours of not having to do any driving. Either the car is autonomous, then the company who makes the car's algorithms or an insurance company must be responsible, or the car isn't autonomous and then it shouldn't pretend to be.
Autonomous Taxis (Score:5, Insightful)
No licence should be required, because an autonomous car is effectively a chauffeured vehicle, and since when do you need a licence to be driven around. It's my strong suspicion that autonomous vehicles will first hit the scene in the form of autonomous taxis. First these vehicles going to be fairly expensive and out of most people's budgets, but even if you could afford your own autonomous vehicle would you really want one? Why deal with car ownership when you can call up an autonomous taxi to pick you up anywhere and take you where you need to go, or even schedule pickups so a car is waiting for you when you get out of work. All the liability would be with the taxi company, so you're not responsible for any accidents, you wouldn't have to maintain your vehicle, there's no risk of it being stolen or damaged wile it sits idle outside you house. You'd never have to deal with parking again.
Re:Work the way down to no license (Score:4, Insightful)
Best to make 'em go cold turkey. But autonomous has to mean autonomous. If the operator does not control the vehicle, aside from its destination, then he should not be held responsible any more then the guy selecting the floor in the elevator.
Driver and user licenses (Score:4, Insightful)
The computer may have a failure in the middle of nowhere. If the system is well designed the car should stop safely. But Then?
The user may want -- or need -- to go somewhere the computer can't drive, e.g. off road.
Therefore the user should have a driver license. If it is not mandatory, the user must at least be inform that he may be in trouble in some situations. A driver license is not only about road regulation, it is also about the ability to handle a car.
An "autonomous car license" should require some basic knowledge about what the computer can do and can't do, and how to use it: the destination is not always an address.
The human is just a passenger (Score:5, Insightful)
If the car is truly "fully autonomous" as the question suggests, then the human is just a passenger. Since when do we need a license or insurance to be a passenger? Some age restriction would be nice, so that little five-year-old Jimmy doesn't steal the family car for an automated trip to Disney World, but anything beyond that is just clinging to the past.
Re:The human is just a passenger (Score:4, Insightful)
It does indicate the qualifications that should be required though. I voted for "none", because you don't need a license to use your private chauffeur driven car, which is essentially what this is.
Re:Putting people in an autonomous car (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fully autonomous cars won't be ubiquitos (Score:4, Insightful)
In order for the hardware and software for a fully autonomous vehicle to really be deemed safe to be 100% in control of the vehicle on public roads...
If only humans were safe, 100% in control of vehicles, when on public roads. As a bicyclist, I wish fewer humans drove cars.
Just because the car is supposedly 'autonomous' does not mean it's so sophisticated that it can handle any situation that comes up, especially when most of the other vehicles on the road are not autonomous and therefore must be considered unpredictable.
The Google autonomous cars are intended and have been tested on city streets, which are emphatically not full of predictable autonomous cars. So far, they've been in 1 accident, and the other party was at fault. Humans get into that type of accident all the time.
Autonomous cars are great because they can have much faster reflexes and much deeper memories of how to avoid accidents than humans. Find a way to avoid more accidents, send an update, and all the cars running the same software would avoid those accidents in the future. Contrast that with humans, who decline with age and die, and are replaced with new idiot teenagers all the time. Google is not doing autonomous cars because they want a dystopian future without humans, like those lame protesters say, but because they're trying to save lives. [ted.com]
At this point, the greatest fear I have about autonomous cars is that lame regulators will make it so difficult to approve them, that they never become available to the public.
Re:Putting people in an autonomous car (Score:1, Insightful)
They require that the driver be ready to take over at any time in the case where something goes wrong
No they don't. This has already been proven.
Autonomous cars mean people will be sleeping, reading, working or socializing on trips, not paying attention to the road because they don't need too. The more autonomous cars on the road, the safer everyone will be. A robot can see, hear, predict, react and communicate with other cars far better than any human ever could.
Re:Putting people in an autonomous car (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They need to learn (Score:2, Insightful)
"To let the computer do the work unlike the idiot pilots who insist on actually flying the planes because it's boring to watch."
Pilots should get as much real flying time as they can. When it comes to emergency situations no computer is going to safely land you in the Hudson river.
Re:Putting people in an autonomous car (Score:4, Insightful)
That's like saying I should be at fault if I'm a passenger on a bus and it crashes. Sure, if I interfered with the driver or slashed a tire before getting on, I'd be responsible. But, if I get on without sabotaging the bus and sit quietly in my seat without distracting the driver, how can I be at fault if there's an accident?
As far as the auto-driving car goes, I didn't write the software or design the hardware. If it passed federal and state guidelines, it's not my fault if it fails. If I've maintained the vehicle properly and installed all of the required software updates, that should be the extent of my responsibility and liability. Also, this is what insurance is for. My insurance pays the aggrieved parties, then goes after the manufacturer if a cost/benefit analysis says they should.
Re:Fully autonomous cars won't be ubiquitos (Score:4, Insightful)
There will ALWAYS be situations where any sort of auto-pilot will NOT be able to handle it, and that is why aircraft still have manual controls with fully qualified and experienced pilots sitting there overseeing the autopilot's operation and taking control where necessary or desired.
There's a major difference: In an aircraft, you're always minutes away from falling out of the sky in fiery doom. A car has the option of pulling over and stopping. Also, I've been watching Mayday, [wikipedia.org] and all of the autopilot accidents have been a result of poor user interface design. If an autopilot has difficulty, then a human pilot will have difficulty. On the other hand, the Miracle on the Hudson [wikipedia.org] was facilitated by good use of the autopilot, to make corrections that a human would not be able to handle, in total contrast to that hijacking off Africa. [wikipedia.org]
For precisely the same reasons all motor vehicle operators should continue to be trained, tested for competency, licensed, and should strive to be experienced as drivers. ... I suspect you, personally, find driving a car to be a chore that you hate, and would rather just let the deus ex machina take the wheel from you instead, and damn the consequences.
Certainly, the operator of the car should be experienced and properly licensed. Again, as a bicyclist, I think more people should be using human power to move themselves, and not going around in multi-ton metal death boxes like it's a human right. I drive a manual transmission, so I already appreciate how people are deferring to the car's engineering, especially in boring situations.
Far from being a deus ex machina, an autonomous car is an engineered product. In principle, you can examine its code and analyze how it works. Once it works, it will work the same way every time, unless there are software updates or faults in the sensors. In contrast, your God-given brain is messy and unpredictable. The longer you go without an accident, the more complacent you become. The more safety features you have, the more careless you become. [wikipedia.org] And as long as you go without accidents, the DMV does not bother testing your driving ability, but just renews your license sight-unseen. The current situation is demonstrably not safe.
The big question is whether having the car drive itself would make the humans' skills atrophy. My guess is that it would improve safety, having the humans drive only in tricky situations where they know they have to be careful. And the rest of the time, the computer would be driving with all of the safety techniques that it knows, constantly alert.