Breaking The Rules — Self-Driving Cars Edition

So, this from a recent article on self-driving cars.
One woman said that she almost hit one of the company’s minivans because it suddenly stopped while trying to make a right turn, while another man said that he gets so frustrated waiting for the cars to cross the intersection that he has illegally driven around them.
The anecdotes highlight how challenging it can be for self-driving cars, which are programmed to drive conservatively, to master situations that human drivers can handle with relative ease — like merging or finding a gap in traffic to make a turn.
Let’s think about that for a moment. The car was — almost certainly — Doing The Right Thing.
- The woman who almost hit the minivan because it suddenly stopped? Well, if she was following the two-second rule, and paying close attention, or was even more conservative, she would not have been surprised at the sudden stop.
- And the dude who illegally drove around the self-driving car? Errr, “illegal”? As in, “not legal”?
We humans are perfectly happy believing that we are rational and follow the rules, but are just as happy breaking the rules when we feel like it! (Mind you, it’s only OK when we break the rules, not when those other folks do so). Unfortunately, these aren’t really options for self-driving cars — just imagine the liability chaos, no?
Take a different situation — say you need to turn around on a road, ‘cos, oh, a road-obstruction or something. If the road was not wide enough, you’d probably do a 3-point turn, right?
Well, if you ask a self-driving car to do an “optimal” 3-point turn, it turns out that It might go “f**k it” and just drive backwards. After all, why does it matter which direction that car is pointing? Which is all well and good, except that any humans in the car end up getting seriously freaked out, because, well, us humans don’t like going backwards at high speed (unless we’re olympic figure skaters I guess…)
In the end, there is a kind of “Uncanny Valley” in effect here, where we need the cars to behave less rationally, and more rule-breaky. And that’s something we’re going to need to work on…
