vox_mundi wrote: Your Self-Driving Car Will Be Programmed To Kill You - Deal With It
A new study published in Science shows there’s a big disconnect between the kinds of ethical programming we want these vehicles to have, and the kinds of cars we actually want to ride in. Surveys done last year demonstrate that people tend to take a utilitarian approach to safety ethics. That is, they generally agree that a car with one rider should swerve off the road and crash to avoid a crowd of 10 pedestrians. But when the survey’s respondents were asked if they’d actually ride in a vehicle programmed in this way, they said no thanks.
Situations involving imminent unavoidable harm: the autonomous vehicle must decide between (A) killing several pedestrians or one passerby, (B) killing one pedestrian or its own passenger, and (C) killing several pedestrians or its own passenger. (Image and caption credit: J. Bonnefon et al., 2016)
Results of the survey showed that people are on board with utilitarian-minded robotic vehicles, and would be content to see others buy them. This is an easy sell; the needs of one or two individuals, we tend to agree, is greatly outweighed by the needs of the many. The more lives saved, the more inclined people are towards this utilitarian attitude. As shown in the survey, as many as 76 percent of respondents were cool with a vehicle being programmed to sacrifice one passenger if it meant saving the lives of 10 pedestrians.
But these same people showed considerably less enthusiasm when it came to their desire to purchase or ride in one of these autonomous vehicles. When asked to rate the morality of a car programmed to crash and kill its own passenger to save 10 pedestrians, the favorable rating dropped by an entire third when respondents had to consider the possibility that they’d be the ones riding in that car.“What we intellectually believe is true and what we in fact do may be two very different things,” ... “Humans are often selfish even as they profess altruism.”
“It shouldn’t be surprising that ordinary people haven’t thought deeply enough about ethics to be consistent,” said Lin, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Most people think that ethics is just about your ‘gut instinct’, but there’s so much more to that.
Humans are notoriously bad at risk assessments: we drink and drive, we text and drive, we go way over the speed limit, and so on,” he said. “If we really didn’t care about being killed, we wouldn’t be in a car in the first place or allow guns in society.” To which he added: “So, by asking for opinions from ordinary people, the study is collecting uninformed answers, and that’s not very helpful in resolving dilemmas, which may be useful in advertising and marketing, but not so much for law and ethics.”
pstarr wrote: a plane crash is usually deadly But then so are autonomous vehicles.
Ohio's toll road, a heavily traveled connector between the East Coast and Chicago, is moving closer to allowing the testing of self-driving vehicles.
Testing is likely to begin within 12 months, and possibly before the end of the year, the Ohio Turnpike's executive director told The Associated Press.
Officials overseeing the roadway have spent more than a year looking at the possibilities, said Randy Cole, the turnpike's director.
Ohio is among several states competing to play a role in the testing and research of autonomous vehicles, which is advancing at light speed.
Ride-hailing service Uber said Thursday that it will start hauling passengers in self-driving cars with human backup drivers on the streets of Pittsburgh within the next several weeks.Everything One Car Learns The Whole Fleet Learns.
Because Ohio's toll road has its own governing authority, it can more easily allow the testing, Cole said.
"We will make sure any vehicle testing is as safe, or safer, than any other vehicle on the road," he said. "It shouldn't scare people."
Cole said he sees more opportunities right now coming with the trucking industry.
One possibility already being tested in Europe is called platooning—a tractor-trailer with a driver that's linked to a self-driving truck following closely behind.
Lowering freight costs will help the state's manufacturing industries and could create new jobs, Cole said. "This is part of Ohio's future," he said.
Republican Gov. John Kasich has been pushing state agencies to take a leading role in the rapidly growing development of self-driving autos.
The state's highway department is working on creating another testing area along a divided highway northwest of Columbus.
The state's largest city, Columbus, won a $40 million federal grant this summer to put new transportaion technologies, including self-driving cars and connected vehicles, into use.
Columbus was selected as one of seven city finalists for the Smart Cities Challenge, a competition hosted by Google-turned-Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs and the Department of Transportation.
The winner of the challenge announced in June will receive $40 million from the Department of Transportation that can be spent in whatever way possible to "become the country’s first city to fully integrate innovative technologies – self-driving cars, connected vehicles, and smart sensors – into their transportation network."
The winner also gets 100 Wi-Fi kiosks with traffic information from Sidewalk Labs,wireless communication data from NXP for cars to communicate, and $10 million from Vulcan to incorporate an electric vehicle infrastructure. Mobileye will also install driver assistance technology in every bus of the winning city.
Columbus is home to Ohio's Traffic Management Center, which monitors traffic conditions all throughout the state using sensors and cameras. The city is also spending $76 million on a smart traffic system that when completed will link all 1,250 signalized Columbus intersections and 12 regional communities.
That's actually a great infrastructure to support the implementation of driverless cars.
For driverless cars to operate as safely as possible, it's necessary to make modest changes to city roads. Having cameras and sensors on roads that can collect data on traffic patterns and congestion can help driverless cars navigate faster and safer. And the ability to communicate with traffic lights at busy intersections also has its benefits.
The City of Columbus wants to roll out driverless transportation by first testing autonomous vehicles in the neighborhood of Easton. The driverless cars would shuttle workers from the Easton Transit Center to local employers in the area.
http://www.techinsider.io/columbus-ohio ... ars-2016-4
With all the attention paid to Tesla Motors' Autopilot system, you'd think the company was the only one making cars that can *almost drive themselves. But many automakers have rolled out cars that do what Teslas do.
The difference: Tesla debuted Autopilot, a suite of semi-autonomous driving features, with a swagger, while others tread more carefully.
Tesla's Autopilot allows the car to maintain a set speed, brake automatically and stay centered in its lane. Most luxury vehicles — and even some mainstream ones like the Honda Civic — can do the same. When Tesla upped the ante by offering automatic lane-changing, Mercedes-Benz quickly matched that.
Automakers are feeling pressure to make sure tech companies like Google and Apple don't leapfrog them with driverless cars of their own.
They also see dollar signs: Ford CEO Mark Fields says car companies currently make $2.3 trillion in revenue each year. The global transportation business, including buses and car sharing, is worth $5.4 trillion per year. Carmakers that develop autonomous taxis or ride-sharing services could get a big slice of that pie.
Fully driverless cars that communicate with each other could potentially save thousands of lives per year, advocates say. More than 30,000 people die in crashes each year in the U.S. alone.
StarvingLion wrote:Who are those moron CEO's kidding? There will be so many dead people on the roads and it will reek so bad that nobody will be in the cars. The robot armored autonomous trucks will drive over the rotting corpses and mow down any stragglers still trying to cause trouble with full cannons a blazing.
In July the Google driverless car program's Chris Urmson did a Q&A session. (Before Google, he was on the faculty of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon; his research focused on perception for robotic vehicles.).
The question was that there were lots of articles about accidents involving the cars and were those signs that the cars are unsafe? His reply: "In six years, over the course of 1.8 million miles of autonomous and manual driving, we've been involved in 15 minor fender-benders. The self-driving car was never the cause. And except for the most recent incident, where some minor whiplash was reported, there haven't been any injuries. Instead, given that we were rear-ended in 11 of those 15 incidents, the cause seems to be distracted drivers who aren't watching the road."
Hey, look! Pictures of self-driving Ubers are starting to emerge from Pittsburgh. Uber announced the launch earlier this month. While the cars do indeed drive themselves, there’s still going to be a human at the wheel.
The world's first self-driving taxis began picking up passengers in Singapore starting Thursday.
The cars—modified Renault Zoe and Mitsubishi i-MiEV electrics—have a driver in front who is prepared to take back the wheel and a researcher in back who watches the car's computers. Each car is fitted with six sets of Lidar—a detection system that uses lasers to operate like radar—including one that constantly spins on the roof. There are also two cameras on the dashboard to scan for obstacles and detect changes in traffic lights.
Drive. ai is a team to watch as the world's drivers face a future of self-driving cars. On Tuesday Drive.ai introduced its path to support, through its technology, the commercialization of self-driving cars. "Drive.ai is touting a retrofit kit for business fleets that can imbue existing vehicles with full autonomy."
Drive.ai has no interest in building an actual, self-driving car, said Danielle Muoio of Business Insider. "Rather, as co-founder and president Carol Reiley told Business Insider, the start-up plans to sell 'the brains of the car.'"
Drive.ai's product offering will consist of a retrofitted self-driving kit for existing business fleets. There will be sensors, a roof-mounted exterior communication system, and in-car interface, powered by deep learning software algorithms.
The company's initial market approach will focus on proving the technology with route-based vehicle fleets, in industries such as freight delivery, ridesharing, and public/private transit, according to the company release.
How will this work out? Will Knight explained in MIT Technology Review. "The company's first product will be hardware required to retrofit a vehicle so that it can drive itself. It will be offered to companies that operate fleets of vehicles along specific routes, such as delivery or taxi services. Besides sensors and systems for controlling the car, this will include a roof-mounted communications system and a novel in-car interface."
A key feature about the group's technology is the HRI (human-robot interaction) component. This, said Ackerman, is in the form of a big display, capable of having the car communicate with people. And this, he also said, is a feature that autonomous cars really need.
"Not only will autonomous cars actually use their turn signals, but with the ability to communicate more complex concepts, they could even politely ask to merge, provide useful information like "slowing for accident ahead," or even apologize if they cut you off, which they probably won't ever do."
We are into the first generation of this new change in transport. Ackerman said, "Once roads are full of autonomous vehicles, and vehicle-to-vehicle communication is done wirelessly, it's not going to be as big of an issue." Now, however, we need a focus on HRI in the first generation of commercial autonomous vehicles, as "there's going to be a significant transitional period between mostly human-driven cars and mostly autonomous cars."
Trust is a big deal when it comes to autonomous cars, but the discussion to this point has been almost entirely one-sided: Can humans trust driverless vehicles? But developments at two US-based companies last week — on-demand ride service Uber's plan to put driverless Volvo sport-utility vehicles on the streets of the US city of Pittsburgh, and robotics startup NuTonomy's deployment of driverless taxicabs in the tech-centric One-North district of Singapore — prompt another question: Can driverless cars trust human passengers?
As any taxi driver will readily attest, there's more to the job than simply driving the car. Drivers may be called upon to apply fuzzy logic to "translate" slurred or syntactically incorrect destination requests, or even play "destination Pictionary" with riders for whom the language gap proves insurmountable. Even with technological advances like natural language processing and real-time translation, how can a car's passenger interface assist the passenger who, for instance, doesn't realise there are two "65th and Broadway" intersections in New York City, six miles apart? And just how will the taxi of tomorrow react to the breathless movie hero who leaps in, points, and yells, "Follow that car!"?
Human drivers also serve other, distinctly human functions — reacting appropriately when a passenger leaves a duffel bag full of cash on the back seat, or simply closing the rear door when a drunken passenger fails to oblige. And what will a driverless car do when a passenger vomits — or worse — in the back seat? The needs are apparent, but the solutions won't be simple. For now, NuTonomy is shying away from specifics. Said the company in a statement: "We are working to implement additional systems that will ensure the comfort, safety, and convenience of all passengers throughout their journey."
The company plans to introduce Singapore-wide driverless taxi service by 2018.
The presence of a taxi driver also dissuades a variety of illicit passenger behavior, including vandalism, drug use, and, of course, self-expression of a sexual nature. During NuTonomy's Singapore taxi test, says the company, an engineer will ride along "to observe system performance and assume control if needed to ensure passenger comfort and safety." Eventually, though, it will be just car and passenger. Are the cars ready for responsibility?None of these problems require particularly high-tech solutions
Further down the road, the challenges of serving a diverse population — and supervising its behaviour — won't be exclusive to driverless taxicabs. Autonomous-mobility researchers, including the team behind the Google Self-Driving Car, have envisioned uses for the technology that extend well beyond short hops with clear-voiced, smartphone-wielding professionals and into trickier territory, such as transporting an elderly rider to a medical appointment, running errands with a visually impared adult, or ferrying a small child to school.
Driverless minibuses will begin taking passengers in the eastern French city of Lyon at the weekend in a year-long experiment that officials are calling a "world first".
The two electric vehicles, fitted with high-tech equipment including laser sensors, stereo vision and GPS, can ferry around 15 passengers at a top speed of 20 kilometres an hour (12 mph). The initial route in the heart of the city will last 10 minutes and include five stops.
Manufactured by the French firm Navya and costing 200,000 euros ($225,000) apiece, a prototype was tested in 2013. The minibuses have already been tested in other French cities as well as in Sion, Switzerland, but without carrying passengers. Driverless electric minibuses made by other companies have also been tested in the western French city of La Rochelle as part of a European experiment.
Dubai has unveiled its first driverless bus service, launching a month-long trial period for the electric vehicle with a view to expanding it across the futuristic Gulf city state.
The 10-seat vehicle made its first trip on Thursday along a 700-metre (2,300-foot) stretch of road in downtown Dubai, near to the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest tower. Developed jointly by French group Easy Mile and Dubai-based Omnix, the minibus is powered by an electric motor and can hit speeds of 40 kilometres per hour (25 miles per hour)
It can be programmed to navigate between Dubai's main tourist attractions, including the Burj Khalifa, the Dubai Mall, Dubai Opera and the Souk al-Bahar shopping centre, the emirate's Road Transport Authority (RTA) said in a statement. Thursday's test run was "the first and very important stage in our efforts to introduce this type of vehicle into Dubai's transport network," RTA official Ahmed Bahrozyan told AFP.
Mattar al-Tayer, the RTA's director general, said it aimed to have a quarter of all Dubai transport automated by 2030.
A driverless electric bus is set to be trialled in Perth in a test run for the use of autonomous vehicles on West Australian roads. The staged trial is being conducted and funded by WA's RAC later this year using a French-made electric shuttle bus.
With no driver, it will use three-dimensional sensing technology to carry 15 passengers at speeds up to 45 kilometres per hour. The RAC said multi-sensor technology allowed the bus to detect and read signs and avoid obstacles.
RAC WA chief executive Terry Agnew said the staged trial on private and public roads would help the Government understand the legislative and practical challenges posed by vehicles without drivers.
"Not only are we thinking about regulation and how it might work operationally, but importantly we can start understanding the human factor of how Western Australians will embrace and use this innovative technology," he said.
German carmaker Daimler said on Friday it would pilot a project to allow sensor-studded, networked cars to share information about available parking spots to save drivers time. "The daily hunt for a parking space often takes up as much time again as the actual journey," the Mercedes-Benz maker said in a statement, causing "stress and annoyance".
Daimler will work with Bosch—the world's largest auto-parts maker—on the scheme dubbed "community-based parking" in its home city of Stuttgart, capital of southwestern Baden-Wuerttemberg state.
During the project, set to begin "imminently", participating cars will use built-in ultrasound sensors to scan the roadside while travelling at speeds of up to 55 kilometres per hour (34 miles/hour). Information about free parking spaces will then be sent via a "secure connection" to Bosch's cloud computing service to be processed.
One technical challenge will be identifying which gaps in the roadside are genuine parking spaces and which are exits from parking garages. But with enough cars travelling down the same street, spaces that are repeatedly registered as empty can be identified as likely exits, Daimler explained.
Driverless car technology is expected to reduce labor costs, fuel costs and accidents, but it will also be a complete disaster for the millions of Americans who work as long-haul truckers, bus drivers or cab drivers. Truck driving alone is the most common job across vast swathes of the United States, and they could all be unemployed within years.
... eventually, the economic endgame is to leave the drivers behind. Companies like Uber aren't investing in driverless technology so they can continue to pay drivers: Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said years ago..."The reason Uber could be expensive is because you're not just paying for the car — you're paying for the other dude in the car. When there's no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle."
Almost 3 percent of all working American are drivers of some sort — more than 2 percent are truck drivers, 0.4 percent are bus drivers and 0.3 percent are cabbies and other types of drivers, according to Census Bureau occupational data. According to the 2014 Census data, there are more than 4.4 million Americans aged 16 and over working as drivers, and the vast majority of those are men who are categorized as "driver/sales workers and truck drivers.
ennui2 wrote:That's wrong. According to PStarr, robotic cars will be mowing down kids chasing balls by the millions. A child apocalypse.
evilgenius wrote:I dig your sense of humor. Beyond that, are you having a feud with PStarr?
evilgenius wrote:The hypocrisy of the difference between what parents teach about driving and what most show by example
That is not true pstarr. Even if Moore's law comes to an end that doesn't mean computers will not continue to improve. Cramming more transistors into a smaller space is only one way computers have been improving. There have been a myriad of other techniques used to improves computers. And this trend is continuing even with a looming brick wall for Moore's Law. And less we forget chip makers have not hit that wall just yet. Transistors still continue to shrink and their numbers continue to grow.pstarr wrote:But yeah, Moore's Law is toast, and so visual pattern identification, along with real speech-recognition/synthesis, robotics, intelligent computers, and self-driving cars. All will remain pop-science pablum forever.
Alternative ways to get more computing power include working harder to improve the design of chips and making chips specialized to accelerate particular crucial algorithms.
Strong demand for silicon tuned for algebra that’s crucial to a powerful machine-learning technique called deep learning seems inevitable, for example. Graphics chip company Nvidia and several startups are already moving in that direction (see “A $2 Billion Chip to Accelerate Artificial Intelligence”).
Microsoft and Intel are also working on the idea of running some code on reconfigurable chips called FPGAs for greater efficiency (see “Microsoft Says Reprogrammable Chips Will Make AI Smarter”). Intel spent nearly $17 billion to acquire leading FPGA manufacturer Altera last year and is adapting its technology to data centers.
the coming plateau in transistor density will stir more interest in redrawing the basic architecture of computers among supercomputer and data-center designers. Getting rid of certain design features dating from the 1940s could unlock huge efficiency gains).
Moore’s law really is dead this timeRather than focus on the technology used in the chips, the new roadmap will take an approach it describes as "More than Moore." The growth of smartphones and Internet of Things, for example, means that a diverse array of sensors and low power processors are now of great importance to chip companies. The highly integrated chips used in these devices mean that it's desirable to build processors that aren't just logic and cache, but which also include RAM, power regulation, analog components for GPS, cellular, and Wi-Fi radios, or even microelectromechanical components such as gyroscopes and accelerometers.
These different kinds of component traditionally use different manufacturing processes to handle their different needs, and the new roadmap will outline plans for bringing them together. Integrating the different manufacturing processes and handling the different materials will need new processes and supporting technology. For manufacturers building chips for these new markets, addressing this kind of problem is arguably more relevant than slavishly doubling the number of logic transistors.
There will also be a focus on new technology beyond the silicon CMOS process currently used. Intel has already announced that it will be dropping silicon at 7nm. Indium antimonide (InSb) and indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) have both shown promise, and both offer much higher switching speeds at much lower power than silicon. Carbon, both in its nanotube and graphene forms, continues to be investigated and may prove better still.
While a lesser priority, scaling is not off the roadmap entirely. Beyond tri-gate transistors, perhaps around 2020, are "gate all around" transistors and nanowires. The mid-2020s could bring monolithic 3D chips, where a single piece of silicon has multiple layers of components that are built up on a single die.
As for the future, massive scaling isn't off the cards completely. The use of alternative materials, different quantum effects, or even more exotic techniques such as superconducting may provide a way to bring back the easy scaling that was enjoyed for decades, or even the more complex scaling of the last fifteen years. A big enough boost could even reinvigorate the demand for processors that are just plain faster, rather than smaller or lower power.
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