(task) Will cars driven by humans eventually be outlawed? | TechnologyTell

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> http://www.technologytell.com/apple/148131/will-cars-driven-humans-eventually-outlawed/ <http://www.technologytell.com/apple/148131/will-cars-driven-humans-eventually-outlawed/>
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> Will cars driven by humans eventually be outlawed?
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> The Verge chose a surefire double-take inducing headline <http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/3/17/8232187/elon-musk-human-drivers-are-dangerous> for anyone who regards driving as a pleasurable pastime and skill (and much more than a utilitarian chore) with “Elon Musk: cars you can drive will eventually be outlawed.”
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> Say what?!
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> I admire Mr. Musk for his seemingly boundless imagination and eclectic entrepreneurship, which puts one in mind of polymath industrialist inventors, idea-men, and promoters of the first half of the 20th Century. People such as Howard Hughes and Henry Ford, moreso than the buttoned-down technocrats more typically found in corporate CEO suites today, partly because fields of expertise are so specialized nowadays.
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> At 43, the South African–born, Canadian-American Musk is founder, CEO, and CTO of the private enterprise outer space commerce company SpaceX, CEO and chief product architect of electric vehicle upstart Tesla Motors, and chairman of SolarCity. Musk was also the cofounder of PayPal, Tesla, and the web software company Zip2. He is also frequently compared with Steve Jobs, who he reportedly admires as a role model (Musk refers to the Tesla Model S as his “Macintosh”). It has even been suggested that Musk could be the next Apple CEO following a speculated Apple/Tesla merger.
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> However, there was Mr. Musk being quoted by The Verge’s Josh Lowenstein telling NVidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang at that company’s annual developers conference that human controlled automobiles will eventually be outlawed in favor of robot-controlled transportation appliances. This is a nightmare scenario for car enthusiasts. He drew a somewhat shaky analogy with electric elevators, which used to have human operators until about the mid 20th Century. However, an elevator is primitively simple and of limited technology, hardly comparable to a vehicle that sees use in constantly changing venues and circumstances in all weathers. Even worse, Mr. Musk is cited suggesting that once elevator-like robocars are perfected, the logical next step would be to outlaw human drivers. “It’s too dangerous,” he explained rhetorically. “You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine.”
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> Aa the saying goes, “Them’s fightin’ words!” It’s a peculiar sentiment from a guy responsible for building an electric car that excels at just being a good car without the electric qualifier, even in the estimation of automobile enthusiasts.
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> The comment also must have elicited considerable vigorous blowback, causing Mr. Musk to feel compelled to issue a Twitter clarification a day after the interview went live, affirming that Tesla is “… strongly in favor of people being allowed to drive their cars,” and that he personally does not want drivable cars to be outlawed.
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> However, with driverless cars at the consumer level <http://www.technologytell.com/apple/146530/apple-car-or-not-driverless-cars-are-an-ethical-dead-end/> (possibly even one made by Apple) being a virtual certainty at some future point—at least in heavily mapped and marked areas out of the snow belt—I suppose the contention that as Mr. Musk is cited suggesting, human control is just “too dangerous,” will rear its head again, painting a bullseye on those of us who like to drive.
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> I do appreciate Mr. Musk projecting a more realistic timeline than most robocar advocates, estimating that once such vehicles become a consumer reality, any sort of wholesale changeover to driverless will come slowly, and that self-driving cars would take 20 years to replace regular cars. I hope it takes a lot longer than that.
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> In the meantime, Quartz’s Steve LeVine reports <http://qz.com/366256/elon-musk-says-the-tesla-model-s-will-soon-be-self-steering/> that—in a conference call with reporters—Mr. Musk took a more cautious tack about the upcoming “auto-pilot mode” that is to be incorporated in the Tesla Model S to allow partly autonomous vehicle control “from parking lot to parking lot” on long-distance highway drives between cities. However, that auto-pilot mode would be disabled during the urban legs of such a trip because of its shortcomings in coping with city and suburban hazards; for example, children running into the road. Auto-pilot will, however, still allow summoning your car and sending it off to park itself—so long as it’s done on private property at slow speed. Obviously, true vehicular autonomy is a long way off yet, which is fine with me because I dread sharing the highways with a bunch of mindless automatons, even if I still remain in control of my own car.
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> Here’s one of many reasons why; robocars will presumably be programmed to never break the law, which means they will be unable to break posted speed limits under any circumstances. Advocates contend this will make for a safer highway environment. I emphatically disagree.
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> Consider the following scenario. You are stuck on a two-lane behind someone doggedly determined to drive five or ten miles per hour below the limit—perhaps a large truck or RV. Finally, your robocar pulls out to pass the moving roadblock, but can proceed in the lane facing oncoming traffic at no greater rate of speed than the legal limit, since that is the letter of the law in many jurisdictions, including the one I live in, even though it’s idiotic and a formula for creating dangerous situations in real world terms.
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> I want to spend as little time as possible in the oncoming traffic’s lane, and use the V8 thrust in my current rides to accelerate past cars I overtake and tuck back into my own lane with dispatch, even though that typically means exceeding the speed limit—sometimes by a substantial margin—which I consider the safest passing practice, notwithstanding the unqualified “Speed Kills” notion. In circumstances like the one described, speeding combined with skilled vehicle control is the safest modality.
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> Then there is the matter of applied ethics in rock-and-a-hard-place circumstance where all potential outcomes are bad, but some are more moral than others, such as the hypothetical of a large oncoming truck swerving into your lane, leaving you with four no-win alternatives:
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> collide head on with the truck likely killing you and all occupants in your vehicle, and possibly in the truck as well;
> swerve onto the sidewalk to your left killing an elderly pedestrian;
> swing to the right and kill two children, or;
> steer into a tree or other solid object killing only yourself and your passengers.
> We might deduce that it’s generally more ethical to harm fewer people than more, or have one person die instead of three or five, but do you trust a drone driver’s computer program to make a best-of-a-bad-lot decision in a split second in such instances where almost infinite combinations of variable circumstances may obtain? Seriously?
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> And how about product liability, with the onus placed on large corporations to intentionally program car-control computers’ responses to make life-or-death ethical decisions in right now highway situations, and the prospect of mega-million dollar lawsuits arising therefrom, which can be expected to put a damper on autonomous car deployment? Human rights lawyers would have a field-day with user-adjustable ethics algorithms potentially weighting different values to be applied in crash incidents, with manufacturers providing preference settings that could potentially predispose a hierarchy of gender, age, ethnicity and so forth in making determinations about who lives or dies in unavoidable crashes.
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> While there is an apparently near consensus a priori assumption afoot among many in the tech community that self-driving cars becoming a consumer reality is both inevitable and will be a good thing, a white paper by researchers the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute <http://www.umtri.umich.edu/> investigates several important issues associated with autonomous autos. And while it’s not the central focus of the paper, entitled: “Potential Impact of Self-Driving Vehicles on Household Vehicle Demand and Usage (Schoettle and Sivak), Report No. UMTRI-2015-3, February 2015 <http://www.umich.edu/~umtriswt/PDF/UMTRI-2015-3_Abstract_English.pdf>,” the report coauthored by Dr. Michael Sivak—a research professor in UMTRI’s Human Factors Group—with Brandon Schoettle observes there are still vast technological gaps that must be bridged before self-driving vehicles are turned loose on streets and highways.
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> Schoettle and Sivak, citing U.S. light-duty vehicle statistics, observe that it currently takes 25 years before the proportion of cars 25 years old or older declines to 13.5% of vehicles in use, meaning that self-driving cars will be sharing the roads for decades to come with cars driven by humans, and quite possibly not “connected.” “There will likely be at least a several-decade-long period during which conventional and self-driving cars would need to interact,” said Schoettle and Sivak. “Furthermore, to the extent that some people may want to drive only conventional vehicles, this overlapping period might last indefinitely.”
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> It will as long as I have any say in the matter.