[When] will you trust a self-driving car?

[Brian Howell]

The Guardian has an article up on one of the risks of placing ourselves at the mercy of technology.

It references the crash of Air France flight #447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris: the flight crew were so accustomed to the "assistance" of the late model Airbus A330 aircraft's fly-by-wire control systems that when those systems abruptly degraded in response to an abnormal situation (outside the box), leaving the crew in manual control of the aircraft, they were unable to right the aircraft; their skills had degraded from lack of use. 228 passengers and crew died instantly as the aircraft ultimately slammed into the Atlantic at about 200KPH. This is an example of the paradox of automation.

I've been driving for many years. I've driven in all kinds of traffic, including I-5 at 80+ (the prevailing traffic speed) and Silicon Valley bumper-to-bumper, through abroad range of weather conditions, including in heavy fog, rain, and snow, and on a variety of road surfaces, including black ice and unpaved hat were little more than dusty ruts. It will be some years, I think, before self-driving cars will be able to handle such a spectrum of situations. So, what will they do when confronted by a corner(ing) case? They'll call on the erstwhile driver to respond. 

From the article:

The three Air France pilots had two or three minutes to work out what to do when their autopilot asked them to take over an A330 – what chance would you or I have when the computer in our car says, “Automatic mode disengaged” and we look up from our smartphone screen to see a bus careening towards us?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/crash-how-computers-are-setting-us-up-disaster

P.S. Google doesn't map all roads—notably those on private property.

[alanjoh...@gmail.com]

I love the analogy in this story:

The auto-drive car say "auto control disengaged" - the driver looks up from his email and sees a bus careening towards him ....

Yikes

Alan Pearson - Sent from my iPhone 510-334-8648

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[Craig Good]

> On Oct 11, 2016, at 16:00 PM, Brian Howell <bdho...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> From the article:
>
> The three Air France pilots had two or three minutes to work out what to do when their autopilot asked them to take over an A330 – what chance would you or I have when the computer in our car says, “Automatic mode disengaged” and we look up from our smartphone screen to see a bus careening towards us?

OK, as a pilot I did a lot of wincing as this article “explained” aviation. Pretty poor, especially in a piece that quotes Langewiesche. (If you want to know how airplanes are actually flown read his “Stick and Rudder”.)

That aside, aviation has been talking about this problem for a while. The Air France pilots violated Rule #1: Fly the plane. That was inexcusable.

Truly autonomous driving is a long way off. It will doubtless be here well before autonomous airliners.

The most useful suggestion in the article is having computers monitor humans. Yet that still seems like something that can create big problems, if rare. But it’s what many cars do now with automatic braking, and that seems to work quite well.

I also don’t think that careening busses are what will make cars drop out of automatic. That’s not a good image at all for understanding the problem. Accident avoidance is relatively easy. I think the problems will come from getting “lost” or the inability to make a key choice on where to go. The edge cases will be construction zones and washed out bridges, not stray Greyhounds.


--
--Craig WWSJD?
clg...@me.com http://www.craig-good.com

"Friends are for laughing with, and crying with; having them for
just one or the other is using them."
--Catalina Good

[jack saunders]

> I would have guessed that a Crew Training Period was programmed into every flight at unpredictable places, the basis for continuing feedback and future "forced manual" sessions. The fact that it's not suggests the auto pilot capability has been digested whole into some Total Systems schema in which human performance becomes a risky exogenous factor, to be severely minimized.

BIG WINNERS in auto drive cars will be motor cycle guys. They suffer more than anyone else from lack of driver awareness.