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gwern comments on Notes on Autonomous Cars - Less Wrong
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Comments (139)
Hello, I'm looking for the comment section and got lost, is this it?
The legal status quo is secondary to public perception, which - other than some technophile aficionados - is quite reserved. There's too much male identity attached to driving, not only are cars used to show off status, but so is the driving style you use them with. As is often the case, people confuse a "autonomous cars are not for me" with "autonomous cars - what nonsense, should not be allowed!", in part because they feel threatened their identity-generating toy could be devalued / taken away.
Secondly, the reaction to a robot (car) causing accidents - killing people (gasp) is vastly disproportionate in relation to human-caused killings that are accepted as part of the supposed fabric of nature/society. It is one of the main reasons why robotic surgery has such a hard time taking over - a surgeon "doing his best" yet the patient not surviving? A human tragedy, it may have been the patient's time to go. A robot - with a much higher success rate - "killing" a patient? Outrage! Liability demands! A central figure that can be blamed (the manufacturer). It is comical how the makers of the da Vinci surgical system have to insist that every move is controlled by a physician, when certain aspects would work much better when automated.
And that is why Carthago should be destroyed. I'm sorry, what was this comment about? Ah well ...
I think you substantially overestimate how important this is. As urbanization continues and suburbs empty out, cars simply become impossible for many people to support. Further, the car mystique is being attacked at the root: young people. As minimum wages stagnate, teen unemployment continues to increase, insurance maintains its inexorable creep upwards, and additional obstacles put in the way of getting drivers' licenses, teens literally cannot afford cars unless their parents buy them. It's hard for anything to become part of your identity when you cannot obtain it.
Certainly. This is one of the factors making me pessimistic in the short-run. Autonomous cars are simply too novel, and will be treated under a massive double-standard. But as the young people grow up and the statistics start to percolate through the old peoples' heads, combined with the expected improvements in autonomous cars, the problem will abate. This may not have happened in your physician example, but then again, if taxi drivers had veto power over autonomous cars, it might not happen there either...
Related reading: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/the-cheapest-generation/309060/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-are-young-people-ditching-cars-for-smartphones/260801/
(unrelated) - I'm confused. Is there a reason why random letters are bolded?
Kawoomba's post spells out "weathehollowmen", ("we the hollow men" it seems) and gwern's spells out "lipsthatwouldkissformprayerstobrokenchips" (I suppose that means "lips that would kiss form prayers to broken chips"). I have no idea why though... Probably a quote from something.
Doesn't everybody know how to use Google yet? :-)
Which leads to a new trilemma on the existence of ignorance:
QED, God is not omnipotent. Or something.
It might be fair to point at that ygert did not in fact ask a question (perhaps ygert does not care for looking up references despite caring to 'uncode' hidden messages) and brilee might have thought that the bolding was a technical issue and didn't think to look for a message which would be google-able..
By the way, shortly after posting my comment, I did in fact google it. I didn't go back and comment again or edit my comment though, assuming that others who want to find out could google it themselves (and I was being lazy). Perhaps that was a mistake.
Further evidence: population adjusted miles driven per year, normalized to 1971 levels
Peaked in 2005, currently back down to 1998 levels with little sign of the trend slackening.
Those Atlantic articles seem like bogus trend pieces. The main evidence they cite is that the percentage of car sales to youth has declined--not surprising given the aging of the population in recent decades. As for the "suburbs empty[ing] out," that isn't actually happening. Suburban populations are still rising, just relatively slowly compared to the growth of cities.
And driverless cars are a boon especially to suburban areas, since they make commuting less annoying (and potentially, much faster).
Certainly. I think there's multiple overlapping trends feeding the final results, but the cited stats could be purely cyclical or cherrypicked.
And the total population is still growing, which means a shift.
This can only happen after autonomous cars are accepted and widespread for ordinary driving, hence it doesn't matter to my argument about acceptance.
Also, rising fuel prices. (This is more of an issue in Europe, especially Italy, than in the US, though.)
Overwhelming exception. Where I am, ISTM that most people in their early 20s drive a car, but few of them bought it themselves.
I was explicitly talking about teenagers.
I don't see how that changes my point. In Italy you need to be 18 before applying for a driving licence, so the fact that younger people don't drive doesn't mean much. Many teenagers ride scooters that their parents buy them, and a small, second-hand car isn't much more expensive, so I guess they'd drive their parents' car if they were legally allowed to.
Italy is incomparable in many ways to the USA; discussion of trends in the USA do not easily generalize to Italy, so I don't really care about Italian scooters. My points were about the USA, and I believe they remain valid about the USA; and given the predominance of the USA in technological matters, the USA's regulation and trends will matter most to the development of autonomous cars.
AFAIK the US is wealthier than Italy, so, if anything, I'd expect American adults to be more willing to buy cars to their children than Italian adults are. Am I missing something? (Probably, given that I've never been to the US; but what, exactly?)
Maybe cars cost more here. Maybe insurance costs more. Maybe the culture frowns on scooters as replacements. Maybe a million things.
Wouldn't that make it less likely for teenagers to buy their own cars, rather than more?
(Maybe I wasn't clear. What I meant by “overwhelming exception” in the great^n-grandparent is that I'd guess that most of the teenagers who drive cars already are the ones who were bought cars by their parents. Were you implying that in the US until now there have been a large fraction of teenagers who buy their own cars?)
Yes. As far as I can tell, decades ago it was a lot more common for teenagers to buy cars, assisted by part-time jobs.