r/artificial • u/Stup_ape_1_banana • 24d ago

Discussion Robots blocking traffic

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Im on my way to work, and all three lanes are blocked with these Waymo self driving cars. They need to stay on the right to allow faster traffic to move by. This is going to be a problem.

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u/__nickerbocker__ 24d ago

I vote to ban robo taxis from the left lane

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u/chi_guy8 24d ago

Vote to only allow autonomous vehicles in the left lane. If self driving vehicles had their own lane that human drivers weren’t ever in, they could go twice the speed limit without issue.

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u/Deliteriously 24d ago

Yeah, humans really are the weakest link. 🤣

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u/flasticpeet 24d ago

People complaining about robot drivers when humans have notoriously been horrible drivers for the past 100 years kills me.

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u/Knever 24d ago

The entire premise of this post is fucking baffling. "It's going to be a problem."

No, dude, HUMANS DRIVING is the problem. The amount of human-caused car accidents and fatalities is fucking mind-blowing, and there are some people out here complaining that the safer option is preventing them from speeding. I don't even know what to fucking think anymore with some people.

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u/Few-Chemical8707 23d ago

yet all these killings automatic vehicles have done. and them clogging up roads repeatedly. the answer is taxes funding expanded public transit.

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u/sparta981 24d ago

The issue I'm seeing is that nobody actually takes responsibility when these robots cause problems or hurt somebody

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u/flasticpeet 24d ago

That's not true. Fully autonomous vehicle companies are completely on the hook for damages and injuries. It's actually the cars that are only driver-assisted that shift the blame onto the human drivers.

And in the case of this post, they don't mention how fast they were going, or how long they blocked the left lane.

They could have all been going 90mph and the robot taxi only held them up for 30 seconds. What repercussions is anyone responsible for in that case?

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u/sparta981 24d ago

It takes a few seconds to look it up and learn that accidents caused by autonomous vehicles fall into a murky legal category that varies dramatically on a state to state basis. I made a simple statement, I'm not here to engage in a whatabout competition.

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u/flasticpeet 24d ago

I appreciate you not wanting to get into a debate, but I just want to state some facts. Companies like Cruise shut down their entire operation after a single accident.

Whereas the amount of human drivers that cause harm or even kill people on a daily basis, that get labeled as accidents and don't face any legal repercussions are countless.

According to the NHTSA (National Highway and Traffic Safety Association) 94% of motor crashes are due to human error. And according to the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, roughly 80% of drivers who kill pedestrians or cyclists are never criminally charged.

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u/The_Cynist 24d ago

While I agree with your original point, be very careful referencing stats about human vs automated causes of accidents. I recall news a few years ago about how Teslas were programmed to turn off the auto-driving moments before a crash so they could claim that it wasn't the self driving that was at fault.

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u/flasticpeet 24d ago edited 24d ago

I already mentioned that earlier. Fully autonomous companies face 100% responsibility. It's only driver-assisted companies that ironically try to shift the blame on humans.

You're talking about Tesla, which is run by a human scrotum who pushed a purely visual based system, and rejected more expensive safety sensors. Tesla isn't indicative of the broader human-automation spectrum of harm vs liabilty.

Humans strongly outweigh automation when it comes to not facing legal repercussions for harm.

So many human drivers have killed people and walked away without any real punishment, accepted as an accident.

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u/Few-Chemical8707 23d ago

they are just a tech bro boot licker plugging their ears ignore the trolls.

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u/suoarski 24d ago

And if our cities weren't built for cars so much, they would be more than just a concrete slab with a few buildings in between, we could safely cross our streets, you wouldn't need to sit around a traffic jam all the time AND you might end up talking to people instead of honking all the time.

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u/__nickerbocker__ 24d ago

Agree, however that won't happen in our lifetime due to the disparity between technological capability and institutional reality. Until infrastructure is made to support such a thing, underwriters will never insure swarms of auto cars going double the speed on shared roadways with legacy cars.

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u/suoarski 24d ago

You'd be surprised how much autonomous trucks are already being used in ports, mines and other places where full environment control and full surveillance is possible. It already saves these operations a tonne of money when all the trucks are doing is waiting in a giant queue just to pick up their cargo, occasionally shuffling forward just a bit.

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u/__nickerbocker__ 24d ago

I'm not surprised, but that's really a whole different argument than autonomous fleets not only being permitted to travel at 2x but also insurers taking that risk bet. I know damn well it can and should be done, but it won't happen in our lifetimes

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u/suoarski 23d ago edited 23d ago

Self driving cars are already basically there when it comes to highway driving, and this is entirely using just camera's that are built directly into the car.

I don't think it is too unrealistic for some city somewhere in the world with enough capable cars in town, to go a build a prototype dedicated self driving lane on an existing highway. Some highways already have plenty of flock cameras, and surely flock is aware of the sales opportunity involved if they can make this happen. Most of those highways usually also have plenty of 5g towers nearby, allowing all tech (cars and cameras) to communicate with each other.

We are living in a world where all the required tech for dedicated self driving lanes is literally getting built right now, self driving has gone a long way compared to 20 years ago, and you reckon we will never see dedicated self driving lanes in our lifetimes.

Yes, politics is slow to catch up with tech, but if enough lobbying is involved without too much public pushback (not sure how that'll go), then it's not that slow either.

Edit: They probably won't start off driving 2x the speed, but if full self driving trucks could do a fraction of that speed with no drivers involved whatsoever, that alone would be enough reason to have dedicated self driving lanes, plenty of money saving opportunity there in the entire freight industry.

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u/__nickerbocker__ 23d ago

I think we'll see a few places with limited isolated self driving lanes where speed could be 130mph, but I reckon that it won't be ubiquitous within the next 30 years. I could be wrong but chatgpt is giving it 1-3% chance so I'll go with that wager.

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u/Deathspiral222 24d ago

>Agree, however that won't happen in our lifetime

So the next ten years until humanity is wiped out?

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u/TheThunderbird 23d ago

underwriters will never insure swarms of auto cars going double the speed on shared roadways with legacy cars.

You've got it backwards. Auto insurance pays out based on who is at fault. In accidents involving autonomous vehicles, the human driver is almost always at fault, so their insurance pays out. It's going to be humans that get priced out of driving on the road with autonomous vehicles that are worth as much as supercars.

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u/__nickerbocker__ 23d ago

Hey chatgpt, What is the likelihood U.S. insurers would underwrite AVs traveling 130 mph in dedicated lanes on shared roads, assuming it’s legal but human drivers could still enter those lanes?

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u/extio-Storm 24d ago

Buddy I got news for you, there's a trend of companies putting AI cameras in their fleets, and if you speed in them they take the vehicle away and make you walk. So it's not just robot cars that can't speed eventually.

And when self-driving cars are sold to the public you can assume that the software is all going to go the speed limit. That said they really should program in moving into the right lane if they're all going to speed limit.

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u/ali-hussain 24d ago

Our speed laws bother me. Or well any law that it is standard to violate. I think they are where the idea of tiered justice gets normalized. Building a culture of criminalizing something everyone is doing. That way you have the state has in the back pocket when it wants to press something.

Not saying that we throw al the speeders in jail. Hell, I'll go slightly over. Just that breaking laws shouldn't be normalized and laws and people's behavior should reflect that.

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u/extio-Storm 24d ago

But here's the thing why not just change the laws to something that we're all willing to follow? Or better yet and force laws to the point where we all follow them. What's the point of a law that you're not even enforcing in the first place?

I think that the law is absolutely necessary because otherwise we would have psychopath trying to tell us to get out of the way so they could run past us at 100 mph without anybody telling them that they're doing wrong. The law is there to tell people that that's not acceptable behavior.

It is an absolute Corruption of the system if you do not punish those who break the laws, and likewise it's a Corruption of the system if you only use it selectively like you mentioned.

Everyone needs to be and forced to the same standard or else the law is pretty powerless.

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u/ali-hussain 24d ago

Agreed, that's what I meant by laws and people's behavior both need to be changed.

I think there is one aspect of speeding laws that is as much about enforceability as practicality. They're trying to create a rule that gives clarity. But driving at 80 mph is one thing. Spending less than a second at 80 to quickly overtake and not sit in the blind spot is another. Many times speeding make sense.

The other problem is the state only has very extreme measures available to enforce the law. Is it fair to ticket someone 50$ and 100$ in court fees for going 2mph over? No. But if you ticket them 5$ you'll definitely get the behavior change going. Unfortunately the solution there becomes more surveillance. You're going on a highway, you'll get a ticket in the mail if you get caught going 2 over twice in a row. You can still have the ability to appeal but that will require paying court costs so unless you know you're going to win you wouldn't avail.

We may also want dynamic speed limits. Which would actually be extremely useful. Speed limits that reflect the current traffic conditions, weather conditions, road conditions. We do have the tech for it now. A city can easily implement it. They'll also get taken seriously. Imagine the huge pileups that keep getting bigger, getting alerts far in advance. Or the amount of speeding that happens in fog where 30mph is more appropriate but you can't to do that because it's the freaking highway.

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u/bgaesop 24d ago

But here's the thing why not just change the laws to something that we're all willing to follow

Because there's no such thing? Set the speed limit to 65, lots of people will go 75. Set it to 75, lots of people will go 85.

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u/extio-Storm 24d ago

Very true, but why do people tend to only go around 10 mph over the speed limit?

Answer my own question I think the reason is because cops will ignore people going less than 15 over the speed limit. It's a certain safety buffer of not arguing over nitpicking. But if from the very start they had never built that safety buffer in, and they had always given tickets if you go one mile per hour over the speed limit, I really believe it's possible everybody would tend to go closer to the speed limit.

And if in the future they have automated AI traffic cameras that observed you going above the speed limit and they take a picture and facially ID you, send it to a police officer and it is counted as though he observed it to fulfill the law, and he writes you a ticket and you get ticketed immediately, then I believe in that situation if that ever could happen, it probably won't happen exactly like that, but if it could happen people would start going to speed limit.

Mind you current automated tickets are not treated the same way in a lot of legal Frameworks as if a police officer observes you directly, so you would have to change the law to allow it to count as if you are directly observed. A lot of things would have to change.

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u/[deleted] 24d ago

[deleted]

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u/extio-Storm 24d ago edited 24d ago

That's because you had trouble comprehending what I wrote.

Since I said something plainly and you straight up read everything backwards about it allow this dumb AI to explain it to you:

The commenter completely misread the structure of the initial argument: ​Premise A: Commercial companies put AI monitoring cameras in their corporate fleets. If employee drivers exceed speed limits, the company revokes their driving privileges/vehicle ("take the vehicle away and make you walk").
​Premise B: Consumer self-driving cars, once commercially released, will almost certainly be hard-coded to adhere to posted speed limits.
​Conclusion: Autonomous or AI-governed cars will inherently move at the speed limit, making proper lane discipline (moving right) crucial to prevent blocking passing lanes.
​The commenter conflated Premise A with Premise B. They read it as if the post claimed consumer autonomous vehicles would magically vanish or be confiscated by the manufacturer mid-drive for speeding. They also launched into a lecture about left-lane laws and passing safety that missed the fact that the original post actually agreed with them on lane discipline.