> > We can rethink our cities and move parking to the periphery
> Just moving parking to the periphery won't make American cities better or more walkable.
It certainly can make cities better. Removing street parking allows streets to be narrower, giving us room for larger sidewalks, bikepaths, outdoor seating in restaurants.
> > Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity that will save 30,000+ lives a year in the US alone
> If you're assuming that self-driving cars will be perfect and segregated, conditions will always be perfect (e.g. no pedestrians or bikes slipping), etc. etc. etc. Why would you?
Humans definitely aren't perfect, that's why there are so many collisions, deaths and injuries. Many of those occur in "ideal" conditions due to distracted driving. In exceptional conditions (where people, bikes, animals run into the road), humans have a pretty poor response too. You'd have to run the numbers (like insurance companies) to determine when they are generally better than humans.
There's also no reason you couldn't delegate parts of the road system as autonomous only, we already have areas that are pickup/dropoff or taxi only. Just expand them.
> > Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity
> The vast majority of driving can be replaced by already existing, proven and drastically more efficient tech - public transit.
Why not both? Put in your destination in an app and if there are enough people on the way, an autonomous bus can pick you up. If not, an autonomous car does.
Thankfully, the Monty Hall example here is explained well. Oftentimes it is explained in a way to make you think just the opposite. If you assume the House knows where the prize is, they'd have picked it (and won) when they reveal the door. So you'd be a sucker to switch. They went out of their way in this example to say that the host always opens a door without the prize rather than trying to win themselves, which gets you to the "surprising" answer that you should always switch. Maybe if you were familiar with the format of the show (I am not), you'd understand. But the question usually just states that the host knows where the prize is and you are expected to come to the unintuitive conclusion that they don't actually want to win.
The gamblers fallacy is also amusing in that it is almost the exact opposite of what people often think it should be. If you have an extremely unlikely string of "red" on the roulette wheel, rather than think that "black" is due, you should start to consider that the wheel isn't fair. So a gambler who thinks he is due for a win is far more likely to be just getting scammed.
Another way of looking at regression to the mean is basically the law of big numbers... infinity+1 is still infinity so no matter what the starting offset is (streak of improbable events), given enough rolls, it'll be irrelevant and you'll end up with the statistical probability.
Humans have this problem because they get distracted and have slow reaction times.
Emergency breaking can typically stop a car within about 100 yards even from freeway speeds. But a distracted human might travel more than that before they even realize they should be trying to stop.
Humans are also pretty bad at adjusting to conditions, so if weather makes the road slick (wet or icy) or they have limited visibility, they don't often slow down enough to compensate.
Autonomous cars have none of these problems, so aren't likely to ever run in to a "can't stop in time" situation.
I can't actually think of any situation where, in the event of a likely collision, the best solution isn't to just try to stop. Even if, for some reason, you can't stop quickly enough to avoid the collision, any reduction in speed will result in a reduction in the severity of collision.
From the response, that's what it sounded like the remote support person was expected to have done. From watching the video, it appeared that the remote assistance was hitting some sort of "reset/retry" option when they should have been hitting the "unlock/turn off" option.
That'd perfectly explain why the car would suddenly start trying stuff again once the roadside crew got close (and why it kept cancelling the roadside call).
> Just moving parking to the periphery won't make American cities better or more walkable.
It certainly can make cities better. Removing street parking allows streets to be narrower, giving us room for larger sidewalks, bikepaths, outdoor seating in restaurants.
> > Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity that will save 30,000+ lives a year in the US alone
> If you're assuming that self-driving cars will be perfect and segregated, conditions will always be perfect (e.g. no pedestrians or bikes slipping), etc. etc. etc. Why would you?
Humans definitely aren't perfect, that's why there are so many collisions, deaths and injuries. Many of those occur in "ideal" conditions due to distracted driving. In exceptional conditions (where people, bikes, animals run into the road), humans have a pretty poor response too. You'd have to run the numbers (like insurance companies) to determine when they are generally better than humans.
There's also no reason you couldn't delegate parts of the road system as autonomous only, we already have areas that are pickup/dropoff or taxi only. Just expand them.
> > Eliminating the tedious and dangerous task of driving is an enormous benefit to humanity
> The vast majority of driving can be replaced by already existing, proven and drastically more efficient tech - public transit.
Why not both? Put in your destination in an app and if there are enough people on the way, an autonomous bus can pick you up. If not, an autonomous car does.