An article in today’s Boston Globe: “Boston Driverless Car Company Will Expand Testing Citywide” tells us that driverless cars that have been learning how to operate safely in the Seaport District of Boston will soon be stepping out into Boston’s other neighborhoods and Newton and other Boston ring communities will not be far behind. The article notes that entry into each new Town/City will be regulated and will begin in a defined area within that community. Upon entry into these communities, there will be humans inside the vehicles, able to override the “robot” decisions, while the process of artificial intelligence testing and learning goes on. Where do you think these cars will begin to operate in Newton? IMBY or IYBY? Our Mayor and City Councilors should have fun with that decision! What do you think? (Do you think driverless cars ever exhibit road rage 😉 ?)
Forget the Zombies: The Robots Will Soon be Among Us!
by Sallee Lipshutz | Jun 21, 2018 | Newton | 5 comments
Opens up new opportunities for teens and seniors in terms of lowering transportation costs. No reason for teens and seniors to own a car if the trips are cheap enough
We should encourage it
While we should definitely encourage the activity, the machine learning methods underlying the current generation of driverless cars are nowhere near the level of reliability needed for full autonomy. I’ll go out on a limb and say that barring a major breakthrough in understanding how and why neural nets work (and importantly, fail) assistive driving is all we are going to have for quite some time. #CNNs:DontBelieveTheHype
Maybe I am a troglodyte, but the technology is not there yet for open road trials. Although probably less dangerous than a distracted driver or drunk driver, autonomous vehicles are just another manifestation of our car centered society that we can do without.
The crashes that have happened so far with AV shows they are not yet ready to be on complicated streets with multiple hazards. Vehicles have been shown to not be reliable at seeing bicyclists and pedestrians. Even worse, they may be ignoring them. In the Arizona UBER crash resulting in the death of a woman crossing the road, the car systems detected her but ignored it as a false positive assuming it wasn’t a pedestrian as there wasn’t a crosswalk. People driving in Newton know there are many places people cross where there is no crosswalk and in village centers are often coming out from behind cars. Are the AV programmed for that?
That said many people driving on the streets of Newton now are not ready to handle the complexities of driving here. Drivers speed, tailgate, pass people illegally and unsafely, run red lights, fail to stop for pedestrians even in the crosswalk, don’t signal and are distracted texting/snapchating/instagraming/emailing/eating/putting on makeup/turning their heads to talk to their children in the backseat/…
The case might be made that AV used correctly might be an improvement.
If the police notice a moving motor vehicle violation, how do they issue a traffic ticket to a driverless car’s non- driver?