I am not sure of this but my feeling is that no-one cares about the 90% of people saved. If company X negligently allows one of their machines to kill your daughter, you will go for blood against company X. You can’t put it in jail but you can sue it.
I’ll throw in here the experience of IBM Watson playing Jeopardy. Watson mopped the floor with the best humans, but some of its mistakes were childishly bad. So, we cut deaths by 90%, but some deaths will be the computer dodging a drifting plastic bag by plowing over a mother pushing a baby carriage.
They will also cease to be the inevitable result of human fallibility and become the result of corporate negligence.
In theory, though, the self-driving car will be learning, not just from its own experience but that of other self-driving cars. So perhaps after the first time one is confused by a drifting plastic bag, the rest will learn to tune them out. And I assume the sensors will be able to pick up that the thing in its path is very light and nebulous.
Who is going to ring the doorbell?
Who is going determine which groceries are mine? who is going to count the empty bottles?
I do not see a role for AV’s in delivering stuff.
There is simply too much to do for the delivery person. All small unimportant stuff… which I will gladly pay for.
Presumably, the system can text you or notify you in the app that your delivery vehicle has arrived, much as how I was notified last decade that my airport shuttle had arrived.
AV’s have been delivering groceries for at least three years. All of those are in long-running pilots, either in suburbs or (pre-covid) on college campuses. The technology/process have been less of an issue than scaling it to be profitable, which I’m having a hard time seeing.
As for this, one option is for your groceries to be separated, much as how this AV delivery vehicle has various compartments. Perhaps only the one containing your groceries will be unlocked when it arrives at your house? And I have no clue what empty bottles you’re thinking of.
You don’t pay a deposit on bottles?
If we could roll out SDC’s in an overnight rapture we’d probably be alright but since that’s not what’s going to happen I’m concerned that Sam will be right. I’d be open to some sort of legislative fix, like maybe capping lawsuit payouts to $10m but leave open a possible Fed investigation if criminal malfeasance is in evidence.
I think what people would notice enough to care about is not getting delayed by accidents anymore.
And let’s say for each of those 3000 people killed by the AVs each year, there’s a $5M settlement - way more than the $1M from your insurance company. That’s $15B.
Now let’s say there’s 250M cars in the U.S., average purchase price $30K, and the fleet turns over every 10 years on average. That’s 25M new cars sold every year, for $750B. The costs of all those lawsuits raise that from $750B to $765B, which would raise the price of each car from $30K to $30,600.
ETA: All these numbers are guesstimates; feel free to adjust for actual. But doing so won’t change this by orders of magnitude or anything.
I don’t but this is an easily solved problem. You take your groceries out of the trunk that has your stuff. You put your bottles in the trunk that used to have your stuff. The store counts the bottles when the AV returns to its home base and they credit your account. I love how the world has delivered remarkable technology to you and you have so little imagination for what could come next that you are obsessing over how a store will count bottles.
This seems to be one of those things that AVs just aren’t suited for, even if they work in a general sense. If I have to take the stuff out of the AV’s trunk, that means I have to be at home on the AV’s schedule rather than on mine. Unless it’s a looong way to the grocery store, curbside pickup at the store would be easier and more flexible schedule-wise.
OTOH, one could pay someone minimum wage to ride in the AV just so they can take stuff out and put it on your doorstep or wherever the groceries go. Their wages would be cheaper than those of a delivery driver. (Cheaper by enough to pay for the AV? Probably not.)
Or you tell the store when you’ll be home, and they schedule the AV for then? Of course, your schedule may change, but that seems a smaller problem (and if you notify them before the AV is loaded, you can easily be rescheduled. Post loading, they might have to charge you a restocking/redelivery fee).
Not since the 70’s.
Well, here deposits on bottles are a thing. And the delivery guy takes them away else I would have to take them back to a shop, then what would be the point? For deliveries other than groceries is the AV going to ring my neighbors doorbell when I’m not at home? Are they going to make an appointment for everything that doesn’t fit our mailbox? I get regular deliveries of pharmaceuticals, are they going to leave those on my porch? (my door is almost directly on the sidewalk). In short: deliveries are the last place where I would expect AV’s. Besides, I can’t imagine allowing AV’s in residential areas, ever.
Business to business transport would be a much more obvious candidate, from some distribution center close to a highway to some other industrial park. With only highway and industrial areas to traverse AV’s become more attainable. You could program every route individually (does that make it semi-autonomous?) no children playing at their destination. A much simpler proposition.
Even the cable company texts me a notification that the technician has just arrived at my house.
This is a little like the time (at another board) that an opponent to a consumption based sales tax derailed the discussion by ranting that we wouldn’t know whether to value floor models as “new” or “used” products for the purpose of taxation. There are a million good reasons to oppose the “Fair Tax” but categorizing display models ain’t one of them.
FTR: I’m not opposed to AV’s. I love the idea of sleeping on my way to the next client. Never looking for parking space, not owning a car.
I just don’t see the use-case for deliveries to consumers.
Personally I consider the risk of deliveries being dropped on my porch while I’m not there to be enough of an issue that I don’t ever have stuff shipped to my house - I have it shipped to my parents, who are more likely to be home. This is not a non-issue, no matter how much you might want it to be one.
Not to say that it will be enough of an issue to retard the use of robocars that drive up to your house, send you a text, wait ten minutes, then drive off to their next destination with your groceries still in the trunk. The likely effect will be that there will be some people who use the service, and some who don’t.
ETA: I also wouldn’t put it past Amazon to try to figure out some way to get the car to mechanically offload your packages, perhaps dropping them on the sidewalk like a reverse garbage truck, perhaps catapulting them in the general direction of your front door/plate glass window. Of course if it’s Amazon doing it, they won’t give you a choice about using it.
Anyway, it’s all fairy tales for now, because like the thread title says, self-driving cars are decades away.
Yeah, and I am still waiting to see a good argument why a truly self-driving car won’t have to have what’s equivalent to at least a good general-purpose AI to deal with the real world of driving. Without a detailed map of every place it’s expected to go (and probably even with), an AI is going to have to be able to discern and figure out how to deal with novel situations on the fly.
I think that Tesla’s self-driving failures that kill people are especially newsworthy because their system was designed well enough that in a lot of situations the customer was led to believe that they could allow the car to drive itself. Sadly, this behavior led to situations that could have been avoided if the system wasn’t engaged and the driver was paying attention. The threshold between “Everything’s OK” and “Death is imminent!” is only a few seconds at freeway speeds. If the system decides “I can’t figure it out. I need to bail and turn control over to the meat machine”, it’s never going to happen quick enough to alert someone who’s watching a movie at the wheel, much less playing banjo in the back seat.
I mean, the general problem with driving is that the monkey at the wheel is historically inattentive and distracted. We’re not bad at driving, but sometimes we try to do things besides driving while driving. I don’t see how you’re going to really improve on that until you can come up with something that’s at least nearly as smart, and more vigilant.
So yeah, maybe a vigilant, smart AI that’s the equivalent of a 5 year old (understands the rules and could follow them) will get us to a point where we can get in the back of a car and play banjo while it takes us somewhere. I don’t see that being likely before 2040.