Road bullying

[Jaded]

If driverless cars are going to be a world thing, there could be a problem with dashcams, as they are illegal in some countries.

[FifeingEejit]

Surely a self-driving car doesn't need lights at all, apart from little ones on the corners so you can see it's there?

It does if it's using cameras to see.  (This is Tesla's approach, as cameras are much cheaper - if less robust - than LIDAR.)

Conceivably it could all be done in the near-infrared, thobut, so you could have IR headlamps that are invisible to humans.  But they'd still cause a glare problem for other IR-camera-using cars.

Musks approach so far has been to ignore everything people say is needed and rely entirely on edge detection on video images.
Funnily enough whose cars is it that keep doing seriously stupid shit in self driving mode.

And then there's the videos of them driving roads with corners...

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[Cudzoziemiec]

Given that fully self-driving vehicles, if and when they hit the streets, are going to be mixing with human-driven vehicles for at least a decade (not to mention actual humans),

This has always struck me as the hardest part of a move to self-drive.  In the dual-use period there will be some manual drivers who will try and exploit the avoidance software of the self-drives to their advantage - i.e. push in, cut up and generally get up to all sorts of mischief.  I suppose mandatory dash-cams & GPS will mitigate to an extend, but even so.

Will self driving cars perform the same niceties to other cars that human drivers do? E.g. slowing / not accelerating into a gap to let someone out into a busy stream of traffic.

Once a self driving car has dashcammed the number plate of the obnoxious, will they share it and make life hard? A hive-mind grudge, if you like.

Good questions. One of the goals of autonomous vehicles is that they should both communicate and cooperate (or so we're told), so surely yes to the first part, and in fact more so than humans, because of communication that doesn't rely on only hands and eyes and cooperation that doesn't involve egos. However, you just know that someone is going to devise ways to get autonomous vehicles to mimic human egos of various sorts.

As for the hive-mind grudge, in theory the situation should never arise, because of no ego. But then again...

[perpetual dan]

…
Good questions. One of the goals of autonomous vehicles is that they should both communicate and cooperate (or so we're told), so surely yes to the first part, and in fact more so than humans, because of communication that doesn't rely on only hands and eyes and cooperation that doesn't involve egos. However, you just know that someone is going to devise ways to get autonomous vehicles to mimic human egos of various sorts.

As for the hive-mind grudge, in theory the situation should never arise, because of no ego. But then again...

On the first point, the autonomy will be a mix of rules and machine learning. The learning will have to be trained on something. Probably humans.

As for the grudge, imagine an AI spidey sense. It spots a car (or cyclist, wild animal etc) behaving erratically, or not following the Highway Code. It needs to adjust it’s behaviour.
Is it wildly unreasonable to check with the hive mind for similar incidents, to inform a model of threats and likely behaviour?
Is it unreasonable to program it to avoid a situation where a problem car is an ongoing interaction, if there’s a choice?
Maybe they’ll come to regard Audis with the same disdain as we do - on a balance of probabilities?

So, no ego, just a programmed response to increase safety and efficiency.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Sounds reasonable. Avoid situations and vehicles you identify as high risk. But a grudge isn't reasonable!

[Adam]

Contrary to what everyone else seems to be experiencing, I'd say in the last couple of months driver behaviour locally has improved, with generally more space being given on overtakes, and cars holding back and giving way. 

I've even had an enormous skip lorry stop and give way to me where the cycle path crosses the entrance to their compound, which hasn't happened before.

And all this is against a backdrop of increased volumes of traffic compared with pre-Covid.  Generally, road traffic numbers are up around 10%.