Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car
While I&#x27;m almost always bullish on new tech, self-driving cars are one where I frankly have a pretty hard time buying into the hype. I think when they really start to hit the streets, some issues are going to show up.<p>Here&#x27;s what I mean. Imagine this situation:<p>You&#x27;re pulling into your driveway in your self-driving car, and one of your kids left a lawn gnome there, blocking it. The car won&#x27;t go forward because there&#x27;s an obstacle.<p>Simultaneously, a driver looking at their phone and not paying attention comes careening down the road. They&#x27;re clearly going to rear-end you, hard. You COULD just pull forward and out of the way.....but the car won&#x27;t, because of the lawn gnome. It can&#x27;t know the lawn gnome doesn&#x27;t matter in comparison to the damage your car is about to suffer.<p>Imagine this flip scenario:<p>You&#x27;re pulling into your driveway in your self-driving car, and one of your kids, a toddler, is in your way. The car won&#x27;t go forward because there&#x27;s an obstacle. Otherwise, same situation as above. Now, you ABSOLUTELY do NOT want to pull forward, because you&#x27;d rather get rear-ended than run over your child.<p>Even if you want to nitpick this exact scenario, surely you can think of a hundred similar contexts yourself, where driving involves <i>understanding the value of different pieces of the car&#x27;s immediate environment.</i> A car cannot know the value of a child versus a lawn gnome, nor can it reliably detect the difference.<p>Even if such a situation only arises once in a thousand days of driving, with hundreds of millions of people on the road everyday, that&#x27;s thousands of times per day. That&#x27;s really bad.<p>Is it statistically <i>better</i> than the amount of harm done by human drivers? Possibly. But we all still get in cars believing we&#x27;ll be better than other drivers. Who&#x27;s going to get in a car when any given car has an equivalent chance of making a bad decision all on its own? It&#x27;s just like getting in a car with a drunk driver.<p>Who&#x27;s going to sign up for that? Not me, that&#x27;s for sure.