According to News, Google is close to making driverless cars available to consumers. Does it worry you? It worries me. Their claim is people cause more accidents by not paying attention. It cites accident data caused by human negligence and how driverless cars are safer. The argument is incomplete unless it also looks into accidents avoided with good drivers thinking fast. Are negligent drivers cause more/worse accidents than good drivers save?
I’m not worried, no, but I am little sad with the direction that everything is heading (i.e. taking control away from people and leaving it to AI/computers/robots). This whole driverless movement seems geared towards city people who hate driving and/or don’t own cars – they just want to get from pt A to pt B. The rest of us who enjoy driving cars are left asking “well, what about us?”
On a more constructive note though, I am curious how these cars are able to reliably determine position on the road with respect to lanes. We have a new Subaru with the fancy eyesight system that has lane departure warnings… 50% of the time it has trouble detecting the lines (i.e. the lines are missing/faded/etc.) There are some locations where turn offs are atypical in design too and the system gets confused… I imagine the image processing capabilities in these driverless cars is more robust, but I am curious how it all works.
GPS may be refined enough for cars to know where in the road they are. Lets say the road is 4 lane, 40 feet wide. If the car is in the rightmost 10 feet, it’s in the right lane traveling east/west or south/north. I am more worried about unexpected incidents, what if a car comes raging towards you? Can it react as fast as alert human? Or when it hits an icy patch, can it see and judge fast enough how to react? As fast as alert experienced human driver?
I’m one of those people who hate driving and just want to get from A to B. Probably won’t get a driverless car until the bugs are worked out and the price reduced to something manageable.
Assuming it is reliable and safe, I think it is a great option with many benefits:
People impaired due to:
medication, alcohol or drugs
older people who don’t have the reflexes and capabilities they used to but who still want transportation
tired people
people distracted by phones and other gadgets
just to name a few…
Every time we see someone driving erratically, the spouse and I guess they are on their cell and, yup, when we pass them they are. We saw a guy driving last week with his laptop propped up on the steering wheel!
City dwellers… the technology assumes that vast majority of drivers are rational. Or driverless. A driverless car is no match to a raging bull or an angry redneck in his rusted out truck on a dirt country road. 
There’s six defined levels of autonomous cars, 0-5 with 0 being no automation. We’re currently around level 2, with level 3 and 4 probably getting more common over the next 5-10 years. Level 2 is equivalent to smart cruise control, or Tesla Autopilot. L3 is more autonomous, with some ability to navigate, but still requires a driver for intervention. L4 is partial autonomy in a mapped area, and L5 is what some people have in mind when they hear “driverless car”.
To @fractalmstr post, L4 and L5 require high definition 3D mapping of the area in advance. Those maps are then available to the vehicle so it can determine exactly where it is via software. GPS is not nearly accurate enough. L4/L5 cars will also need a variety of high definition sensors, long/medium/short range to both detect traffic and recognize the surroundings in order to match up with the high def map.
When a company like google says “driverless car” today, it would be for a well-mapped region only (L4), not something you can buy anywhere that’ll take you anywhere.
For interested in AI, psychology and human behavior (raises hand) there’s a funny phenomenon that leaves autonomous cars open to abuse/exploitation on the road. The autonomous cars must drive safely and legally, which human drivers will recognize and take advantage of, e.g. cutting them off, forcing them to change lanes, etc. Imagine leaving a 2s gap in LA or NYC traffic? Fuhgettaboutit!
Not only no, but hell no.
I’ll assume driverless cars will be programmed to take the safest option (eg maximize distance between cars, operating at speeds to allow braking, etc). I think the overall effect will slow down traffic and not be well received especially on stop and go rush hour freeways resulting in more incidents of road rage. An angry driver can’t be mad at driver of driverless car, but what abuse will passengers be subjected to.
This is the wave of the future, although there will probably be manual overrides for various reasons. Here are my concerns:
If there are driverless cars, when will there be driverless taxis? This will put a whole bunch of people out of work.
When will there be driverless trucks? This will put even more people out of work. Won’t Walmart just love getting rid of a big segment of their workers.
How many of these driverless vehicles will be electric? Probably most of them. Electric vehicles don’t break down the way combustion engines too. Being a mechanic will have its limits in the future.
As far as safety, a lot of that is tied to predictability. If you have predictable drivers around you, you are safer and things will be easier to navigate. But what happens when a bicycle swerves around someone blocking their lane? What do these cars do and how well do they react to unpredictable situations like that? What about snow? When the lanes are made more narrow by snow plowed onto the sides and the lane markings are barely visible it would be very tricky. In those situations, you often have people walking in the street too if the sidewalks are buried.
That may be changing actually. They are now combining differential GPS with IMUs to bring the accuracy of commercial L1 C/A down to within centimeters. The Air Force is also modernizing the GPS constellation and introducing new bands aimed at increasing accuracy.
https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-have-made-gps-accurate-to-within-a-centimetre
https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/civilsignals/
This problem is easily handled with sensors positioned around the car.
Would the suicidal squirrel be programmed into it? 
Driverless cars have been on the road where I live for maybe five years, in the testing phase. I’ve seen them many times. They’re way better driven than cars with humans, and they don’t text. Since cars with drivers have hit me and other cyclists I know, I can’t wait for all cars to be driverless.
A more accurate GPS would be awesome for navigation apps. I get frustrated by the lack of accuracy a lot when I’m travelling. For autonomous cars I’m sure you’d still need the high-res 3D maps though, so the cars can navigate reality on the ground (building shapes, sidewalk shape/size and cutouts, lanes narrowing/merging, traffic islands, pedestrian crossings, etc) with its indicated GPS location.
They are going to start road testing driverless cars here in San Diego in January. I’m anxious to see how it goes.
This will be a huge social disruption. Many, many people are employed driving vehicles of various kinds. There will be riots, and Luddite destruction of vehicles. It worries me a lot.
There’s no reason to think that good AI can’t account for unpredictability as well as humans can.
As far as losing jobs, yeah, it will suck but it’s going to happen. You can’t stop the advancement of technology. You need to create new fields which means better education. You don’t keep making buggy whips when buggies are no longer needed. There will be a point in which we might pay people not working. Some, like Bill Gates have proposed taxing robots like workers.
I agree, many people like to sweep this problem under the rug and assume all of these workers will simply retrain for another industry. In the short-medium term, I don’t see how that’s going to work when other industries are shifting towards AI/robots for laborers as well… In the long term, maybe the goal is for robots to take over everything and we all just sit back sipping Pina Coladas all day. 
I think this is inevitable, because you need everybody to be able to consume the goods made by all the robots. I think we’re going to have some tough times before we get to that point, though.
The consensus is driverless trucks will come soon. Long haul truck drivers will be out of a job, because driverless trucks will be better and cheaper.