As to whether lawyers and accidents will put an end to self-driving vehicles as taxis and other areas of operation, I highly doubt it.
I don't think that civil suits would end the tech. I think it will be a very costly way to get to the tech. Juries love to penalize big companies most of all; they won't be sympathetic to a "machine" killing folks.
Do a Wikipedia search on the number of fatalities in the United States each year by motor vehicle accidents and also in other countries. The numbers are truly staggering. And each of those incidences affect families and loved ones and Friends of those in the accident. And that's not even counting the accidents where people survive but are lamed for life.
True. But most of those fatalities do not happen in slow-to-moderate speed taxis (Uber; Lyft). Extremely rare is the fatal accident when a paid human driver is transporting folks around town. I've seen more than my fair share of auto-related deaths, and I also understand the root causes. If a self-guided vehicle kills or seriously injures a person in its path, that's a lot different from the general nature of all auto-deaths. You're conflating issues where they don't reside in this topic.
Probably the biggest incentive for automation of driving is that there is the real ability of it someday to make a huge reduction in the number of fatalities and injuries that occur each year from Motor Vehicles.
Again, in some circumstances that will be true. But it will also cause accidents as well. It will be a very long time before we might be able to understand the net death toll, one cause to another.
This is not something that is some imaginable Pie in the Sky. These systems will eventually get to that point.
Probably so. I hope it's long after I'm dead of some other cause. I want no part of automated driving.
Someday Vehicles will come from the factory with no designated driver seat, no steering wheel, no brake pedal or gas pedal, no parking brake activation or deactivation. And many decades beyond that when the crash rate has dropped to such an ultra low level that the only fatalities are from very rare events such as Bridge collapses and boulders rolling down the side of a mountain onto a highway, things make it to the point where even airbags and crumple zones become a thing of the past. Autonomous driving has huge possibilities that many people don't seem to grasp. But lack of understanding with these possibilities are is not going to stop it from happening.
It's not that we don't understand them. What I doubt is that it's going to be an easy, simple implementation. I believe it's going to be a very bumpy ride, full of problems and ripe for civil lawsuits.
Automated driving systems are a far distance from being "reliable" IMO. While they do OK with known conditions, they don't have the human ability to adapt instantly (more so better described as instinctively) when things go wrong. There are many, many examples of how auto-driving does not recognize or adapt well to non-normal situations:
- manual traffic direction by law enforcement
- driving directly into objects it does not perceive as an obstacle
- not recognizing when the vehicle path in GPS doesn't exist in reality
- instantaneous traffic hazards
- poor weather conditions where road markings, road signs, even the road itself is indistinguishable
- etc
Are these unique to auto-driving systems? No. But humans generally "react" to these with instinct with a high degree of success. AI can't solve these problems in the blink of a eye; not yet anyway. Even the OPs storyline here ... Waymo forcing its way into traffic. Is that a unique problem to a machine? No; stupid people do it too. But that also is how stupid people get sued; they cause harm/death.
Like I said up top, juries love to penalize entities with big pockets in punitive damages. Let a few of those awards happen, and that will cool the rush to market these kinds of systems. I agree it won't stop the development. But those civil awards will slow the progress, and make those OEs of the auto-driving systems slow their roll, so to speak. And to some degree, I like this idea. It's sort of the checks/balances approach. Without any restraint, the tech would be allowed to run free and unbridled; that won't end well for sure. A few really expensive damage awards will motivate the companies to go back and refine their tech.
Every substantially new tech breaks through barriers, often painfully and expensively. This won't be any different.
