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New studies show people will sleep, eat and read in self driving cars

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BY KEVIN SAWYER – Politicians and business moguls are looking to clean up financially with the coming self driving car revolution. They all, of course, especially the politicians, babble on about how safe they are going to be.

Really?

This past May, the Tesla company was running a live simulation with one of its driver-less vehicles. The car ended up crashing under a huge truck and the car’s driver was killed. When the truck driver was asked about the sudden accident he replied that right before the crash he remembered hearing a Harry Potter movie blasting from inside the car that crashed into him.

Of course, this made all of the front pages of every newspaper and news site in the world. Last year, more than 35,000 people were killed in auto accidents in this country. That’s almost 100 people a day. The day of the Tesla crash, however, none of the other dead 100 seemed to make to the front pages.

The problem seems to lie in one of responsibility. Driving a car is a legal responsibility and even the most advanced self driving vehicle will need human oversight and participation. When one of these vehicles is purchased, the legal contract states that the human, and not the machine, is responsible for its operation.

With regard to this split operation, the director of Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab, Hod Lipson, said that, “There’s something we used to call split responsibility. If you give the same responsibility to two people, they will each feel safe to drop the ball. Nobody has to be 100% and that’s a dangerous thing.”

Recently, psychology and engineering researchers at the University of Utah decided to try and determine just how safe these “safe” self driving vehicles are. After all, the entrepreneurs and the politicians are saying that they are safe. But, just in case, the researchers wanted to determine safety for themselves.

The subjects of the research were in self driving simulators so that their reaction times could be judged when human intervention was needed. The reaction times doubled when the drivers were distracted doing something else. The more distracted and self involved, the worse the reaction times got. The researchers even noted that many of the drivers were asleep most of the time.

Their future research will test certain systems that have been designed to keep drivers alert while in the vehicles. Apparently, most people can’t stay alert simply because it’s the right thing to do? In a more recent survey taken by State Farm Insurance, respondents were asked how they would behave while in a self driving vehicle.

People responded that they would sleep, eat, read, text, talk on the phone, and access the web.

PHOTO CREDIT: The Los Angeles Times