Safe in a Driverless Car

A long time ago, I said a driverless car is not likely to happen, given the complexity of the rules and objects that a system had to track to drive.  My son had a problem when he was learning to drive and he was smarter than almost any computer around at the time.  The car manufacturers have proven me wrong - sort of.

60 Minutes brought this out in a segment last night.  I had seen Chris Urmson's How a Driverless Car Sees the Road on TED, and found it just as complex as I said it would be.  Google cars have been rearended in most of the accidents they have been in because they are cautious.  This is the same reason my wife and I both have been rear ended by a couple of cars over our time in Washington D.C.        I have asked myself how a driver drives straight into a stopped car, but it is a  impossible question to answer since "not paying attention to driving" is not something the operator is supposed to do while driving.  Only one of the those drivers was on the phone, and none of the others were texting.  They were driving on dry roads, in a straight line, and not following close enough to matter, yet they still ran into the back of one of those cars and ours.  It seems like everything we believe about driving is backwards, which is why software developers must get special rewards in heaven for compensating for all the things humans  do wrong.  

Our focus in automotive rules has been in the wrong place.  We need to get humans out of the driving business so they don't kill each other. Google adapts their cars to compensate  for driivers who sneak into intersections, or don't wait their turns at a 4-way stop.  In the 60 Minutes segment,, a Mercedes has a car come  into iits lane,, and the car asks the driver to  take over.  That seemed llike the wrong thing  to do, Mercedes.  They should tell the driver to close his eyes and take over total control.

We have  understanding for the woman I saw talking on the phone and trying to send text messages on her iPad on her/ lap.  I understand why she will have an accident and hope the police will figure out why it happened.  But, it is much harder to figure out why a grown person of 35 years can drive straight into a stopped car where the light is clearly red in front of all the cars that were stopped there.  He is not on the phone, or watching television.   We used to say that no software compensates for stupid.  We can't have standards for driverless cars that ask too much of a human.