Singapore also has a political framework that could force self-driving car adoption if the powers that be want it. Things that could be mandated such as self-driving only car lanes and motorways could be possible given the small size of Singapore and the powerful nature of the government. It would be unthinkable at present in America to force all cars on certain roads to be self-driving only. Singapore has the sort of culture that values "safety" over freedom.
In America, for better or worse, it would take a long time to mandate these things if they were even possible (considering that the same laws would need to be passed at least 52 times for states and territories). America has checks and balances--everybody gets their say.
>It would be unthinkable in America to force all cars on certain roads to be self-driving only.
There are private cities (Celebration, FL), private housing communities (1000s of them), private large corporate campuses, private shipping yards, private military complexes, private airports, industrial hangars - lots of places where you could safely force all cars to be self-driving without any governmental interference.
But I think for it to have meaningful impact we need interstate public roads to have self-driving. I haven't looked at the statistics, but most deadly accidents I read of late happen on interstate roads.
Edit: It's unthinkable at present but I believe if a city-state like Singapore undertook the experiment and it was successful it could eventually spread around the world like HD adoption. (That's why I said it would take a long time to happen in America.)
Not only is that most meaningful, it olso has the most bang for the buck (saves people the most time), AND is the easiest technically.
I wrote a long post about it before, but basically I expect self driving trucks on dedicated interstate lanes to be the start. Then self driving cars on the same lanes.
Over time all interstates will be self driving. City streets will never be unless we get AI with general intelligence.
> City streets will never be unless we get AI with general intelligence.
Driving is likely a much easier problem than artificial general intelligence. Even when it involves evading rampaging toddlers. Sure, if you want perfect safety, you'll need the car to anticipate a great deal —far more than humans currently do, like looking at the walkways as well as the drive lanes.
If we merely want something that's safer than a human driver that's probably nothing more than a (huge) engineering feat.
> Driving is likely a much easier problem than artificial general intelligence.
That isn't actually true. Scenario: Narrow one way road, you get to the bottom of it and there is an ambulance blocking the road. Behind you is a bunch of cars, ahead of you is a few cars.
You need to coordinate with other cars to move out of the way, you need to make use of driveways to turn around, you need to know to override the law and got the wrong way on a one way.
And that's just one scenario. You need general AI to handle all the different things that happen on city streets.
Highways is easier - it's controlled access. And if they block the road it's typically by officials who would have some way to remotely control the self driving cars and tell them what to do (not that that is not a car of worms in itself).
> If we merely want something that's safer than a human driver that's probably nothing more than a (huge) engineering feat.
Not even close. You would need to do better than 99.99999% perfect to do better than a human. That number is correct BTW - that's how rarely humans make a mistake that leads to a fatality. (Injury rate is not quite that good: 99.999% but that's still quite hard for a computer.)
We don't have that level of reliability in a phone, never mind a car. There are some appliances that are that good, but they tend to be very simple.
Such scenarios are rare enough that they could be handled either remotely, or not at all. The ambulance won't get through and its patient will die. Tough luck. But think of the many accidents those automated cars avoided in the first place. It sucks, but it's still worth it.
Also, cars don't have to be fully automated. They can still be remotely controlled, or otherwise warn their company that they should call a tow truck. My favourite example is automated trucks: you'll most likely have a central dispatch per region, with a few operators that manage 50 trucks each. Once a truck has a problem the computer can't handle, it just calls the relevant dispatch, where humans take over.
Also, automated cars don't have to do better than humans in every dimensions. Safety is paramount, but resilience in the face of unusual situations is not. It is okay for the computer to get you to your destination a bit more slowly, or even not at all from time to time. Even public transportation has way less than 99% reliability for my commute to work, and I still take it.
It's ALL edge cases. Everything. The non edge case are the easy part. It's the edge cases that is hard.
Saying it's fine "it's just edge cases" completely ignores the difficulty.
> But think of the many accidents those automated cars avoided in the first place. It sucks, but it's still worth it.
Did you read the rest of my post? Do you understand just how good the computer would have to be to have any impact at all? I have a feeling you don't.
> They can still be remotely controlled
No they can't. Wireless internet service is not even remotely close to good enough to make that possible.
> Also, automated cars ... every dimensions. Safety is paramount
This is why I say highways only. That covers that majority of the use cases, and the most dangerous part, and the easiest part. It's a triple win. The use case for city roads is basically non existent with the exception of self parking.
> has way less than 99% reliability
That 1% doesn't mean death. It's means slowness. That's not what I mean. The self driving car has to be basically perfect or death is the result.
People very much underestimate just how good people are at driving.
Let's arbitrarily decide that 99.9% of driving time is made up of the "common" cases, and the rest (0.1%) is the "edge" cases. I'm pretty sure there are many more edge cases than common ones.
Now let's further assume that whenever an "edge" case occurs (that would be a couple times per hours), the cars just slows down until it stops or stop being in that edge case. It's not very convenient, but I'm quite sure it is rather safe.
> Do you understand just how good the computer would have to be to have any impact at all?
From what I have gathered, computers are already good enough to work on sunny roads with few surprises. Including towns. Or maybe the google cars don't work as well as I though they did? I wonder how many times the human had to push the emergency shutdown button in their tests.
> No they can't. Wireless internet service is not even remotely close to good enough to make that possible.
Just use a regular cell phone, and communicate through the speakers. 56kb/s is more than enough bandwidth (space stuff like the Mars rover use way less bandwidth than that, and suffer from way more latency).
> The self driving car has to be basically perfect or death is the result.
We don't need computers to be perfectly safe. We need them to be safer than humans. If automated cars kill on average half as many people as humans do, that's already a huge win. Not enough to stop there of course, but more than enough to switch.
Besides, I believe that abiding the traffic code and slamming the brakes whenever something goes wrong is not hard, and already safer than human driving (which take chances, speeds, rides too close to other cars…).
Bugs on the other hand may prove most problematic (see Toyota's unintended accelerations). We may need Nasa like processes to ship that code on the road.
Singapore may be small, but within that space (a bit over 700 square km) it has everything larger countries have. Towns, expressways, nature reserves, military bases, airports, etc.
Thus, it is an excellent place for testing such things as self driving cars.
That's only one lane that is enforced to a varying degree (hardly in CA), and subject to cheating. I think in order for cars to become safer we need to force the human out of the driver's seat. Even if we had a hybrid system, self-driving is still subject to other human drivers. Try taking away the keys of Americans. I ride a motorcycle and I would miss riding if it came to forcing people to adopt self-driving, but that's how we reduce highway deaths.
Edit: now that I think about it, cheating could be enforced by camera. Assuming the road had a computer network (like a much more reliable Bluetooth), I am sure cars could identify an unauthorized manually-driven vehicle and alert authorities.
I suspect there'd be a strong selection bias where the only people who'd continue to drive manually would be the better (or at least more attentive) drivers.
To enforce that, you could make the licensing regime more like an FAA private pilot rating and less like a token ritual for access to your God-given right to drive no matter how incompetent.
+1 I think you have it right, the political/social frameworks of Singapore could 'make this happen.'
I worked in Singapore in April and I loved the place. I felt very safe walking around at night for exercise, and the whole place was well run. I have read some criticisms of the government but people there seem happy, seemed to be employed, etc. A nice place and I would love to go back there!
From a product development and deployment perspective, it also makes a lot sense to start in Singapore. Unless a product is completely risk-free, it makes sense to validate outside of the largest and most valuable market.
In America, for better or worse, it would take a long time to mandate these things if they were even possible (considering that the same laws would need to be passed at least 52 times for states and territories). America has checks and balances--everybody gets their say.