Autonomous Cars: Not Yet Ready for Prime Time
- By Unforgiven
- Vehicles
- 61 Replies
I look at it as an inherent risk in trying to program human thought into a machine. Humans have to think of everything they think of (and stuff they don't think of which is more scary) in every scenario and adequately program that into some machine.I'm sure that crosswalks are easy to detect, and so only flagging pedestrians when they are on those will be a simple programming problem.
But everyone involved in authorising that, and in authorising a vehicle with that programming to travel on the road, and who didn't inform the safety driver of this limitation (because I'm sure they didn't), should be sacked and face charges. That's unforgiveable (though if you'd asked me 2 years ago to guess which company would have cut a corner like that Uber would have been top of my list).
And I'll circle back to saying the biggest impediment to self driving cars becoming mainstream will be lawyers. Was it incompetence or negligence? Who's incompetence or negligence? Was it really a foreseeable event? Was the critical failure the vehicle manufacturer (SAAB), the operator (UBER), the safety backstop (the human whatever), or any one of the many sensor manufacturers, developers, and whatnot. There are more than enough ambulance chasers out there to make self driving cars so cost prohibitive up and down the supply chain that it just won't work.

