Driverless cars ! Is it all Bah Humbug?

[pH]

Here is a long article (an extract from a book) dealing with the "paradox of automation", which it describes as "The better the automatic systems, the more out-of-practice human operators will be, and the more extreme the situations they will have to face".

 

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

 

It deals mainly with the crash of Air France flight 447 over the Atlantic. However, it also considers ‘self-driving’ cars. It includes some very surprising figures e.g. the amount of flying time that pilots actually spend controlling a large modern aircraft and raises very interesting questions about what happens when an automated system basically says “I don’t know what’s happening – you deal with it”.

 

(The last part of the article, dealing with changes in road design, while interesting is not - I think -  relevant to the subject of driverless cars.)

[pH]

(Given that a working premise used to be that 1 line of code in 10 could be in error, that is scary.)

 

 

That may be the case in something like Windows but not in mission critical software.

 

 

 

Safety-critical stuff involves things like formal proofs so actual failures are more likely to be problems in specification rather than straight coding errors.

 

I should explain that I understood 'in error' to mean something like 'will not do, either by itself or in conjunction with other code, in all possible situations, what it was intended to do'. It covers specification, design and coding errors. 

 

I've always maintained that anything beyond very simple code cannot be error-free (using the above definition). As time goes on, the errors that haven't been seen yet require ever-more unusual situations/combinations of data etc. to be triggered. I've seen an error that we could actually show had a 1-in-64K chance of happening - the process had run for over a decade without that particular failure.

 

And regarding failures in mission critical software, some examples:

 

http://www.nature.com/news/computing-glitch-may-have-doomed-mars-lander-1.20861

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_failure

http://www.math.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/ariane.html?

[Glorious NSE]

Here is a long article (an extract from a book) dealing with the "paradox of automation", which it describes as "The better the automatic systems, the more out-of-practice human operators will be, and the more extreme the situations they will have to face".

 

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

 

It deals mainly with the crash of Air France flight 447 over the Atlantic. However, it also considers ‘self-driving’ cars. It includes some very surprising figures e.g. the amount of flying time that pilots actually spend controlling a large modern aircraft and raises very interesting questions about what happens when an automated system basically says “I don’t know what’s happening – you deal with it”.

I agree with the observations - BUT - cold hard numbers again - how many simple 'pilot error' crash scenario's have been avoided since these systems started in widespread use versus how many situations like the above have been caused?

 

Has the commercial aviation accident rate got better, or worse. 

I suspect I know what that answer will be - and that in a field where pilots have gigantic amounts of training and a professional approach to the task.

 

Bringing it back to cars, you've the chance of bringing that level of accuracy to a scenario where I'm fairly convinced the majority of 'pilots' do not properly know, let alone follow the rules. Where a significant minority do not pay full attention to the task at the moment when they know it's a safety critical...and so on...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Davey]

Driverless cars is just another incidence of using technology for the sake of it. The way were going, man will end up doing nothing for himself, which will be a very bad day indeed. Technology has it's uses, but it's about time we made a stand and said enough is enough! Man needs to work, for the good of his soul, his health and his general well being. The only winners, in this headlong rush to make man obsolete, are the shareholders who gain from every redundancy! I'm sick of walking into banks, where there are staff standing around doing very little, while we use the machines, that the poor fools can't see will ultimately lead to their demise. And before anyone says I'm a Luddite, I'm not. Technology can help mankind, but not at the expense of mankind! Rant over.

[rockershovel]

Re #153, I don't believe that most people understand the concept of "safety critical" at all.

 

A friend of my wife's has just suffered a family tragedy of sorts, a car accident involving her son (whose injuries are serious but not critical, so at least there's that). This isn't the first such accident the lad has been involved in, although the worst by some margin.

 

Fen roads aren't nice places, they are narrow, undulating, poorly maintained and vary in camber. They have arbitrary 90deg bends in places with virtually no topography, and are frequently bordered by deep dykes. However plenty of people use them and come to no lasting harm. But, you can't drive around the Fens without seeing, sooner rather than later, a car (usually a small hatchback) which appears to have left a straight road for no visible reason..

[Southernman46]

you can't drive around the Fens without seeing, sooner rather than later, a car (usually a small hatchback) which appears to have left a straight road for no visible reason..

Often a common problem with the nut that holds the steering wheel, at least it was in my case !

[rockershovel]

Just seen a driverless tractor ploughing on Country File, along with a fully robotic weeder..

[pH]

Competition for the driverless car -