The strangest part of watching this story unfold has been discovering that some people have faith that speed limits are anything except a rough guess as to what's mostly safe on a given road. Oh, and subtract 10% from that guess to compensate for the fact that human drivers under 60 years old almost all speed by 4-9 MPH.

Of course, as others have pointed out, human tendency to ignore speed limits and react badly to vehicles driving slower than ambient traffic speed creates another potential hazard to trade increased accident fatality rates off against when deciding if and when self driving vehicles can speed. It's trolley problems all the way down.

However I can't imagine a car company accepting the legal liability of allowing their autonomous cars to go over posted speed limits to "match traffic".

In a trolley problem you have the option to refuse a decision. By participating in "speed matching" you become one of the trolleys and you have accepted the unsafe conditions.

So the safest reasonable thing for self-driving cars to do could depend on how many of them there are around.

(Of course there are other considerations of that sort. E.g., if all cars on the roads were self-driving then they could coordinate with one another in interesting ways and maybe go substantially faster than human-driven cars for a given level of safety. Maybe not, though, because of risks to pedestrians.)

Google’s driverless car is programmed to stay within the speed limit, mostly. Research shows that sticking to the speed limit when other cars are going much faster actually can be dangerous, Dolgov says, so its autonomous car can go up to 10 mph (16 kph) above the speed limit when traffic conditions warrant.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-google-driverless/look-no-...

I wonder how they decide over what warrants speeding.

You'd have that range whether people went at the speed limit, above the speed limit, or below the speed limit. As long as speed limits are made with actual speeds taken into account (they are) that argument is irrelevant to whether you should speed. It just means that if you really want to be safe to hit someone you shouldn't go above 25mph, no matter what the speed limit is.

> The strangest thing about watching this story is that people who are apparently ignorant of this still feel sufficiently certain of the relative unimportance of speed differences in this range to sneer at other people for commenting on it.

The speed limit here was at least 40, wasn't it? Your own numbers say that the differences are unimportant above 40.

To me they seem analogous to age-of-consent laws, which of course are not perfectly chosen for every individual -- and of course there's no magical change that occurs on a person's birthday -- but the law reflects society's best judgment of the balance between (protecting the vulnerable and allowing people to make their own choices :: safety and efficiency).

I grew up near (in the bay area) Almaden Expy where the signs post 45 (which means that in the bay area the limit is really 55). Just search for "Almaden Expy killed" in google and let me know if that's a safe street.

€15 for an in-town violation, €10 for out-of-town, no points for less than a 20 km/h variation? That's more of a secret tax than an actual deterrent.

Electric cars can't regulate the speed more smoothly than gas cars while on cruise control. It's about the control algorithms, not the source of power, and the gas systems could be on tighter control ranges if it weren't so inefficient and uncomfortable for the passengers. Adaptive cruise control runs on a PID loop control scheme and overshoot is inherently part of the game.

While on cruise control a car will go slightly faster than the speed setpoint for a few seconds, then slower, then faster, until it settles on exactly the correct speed. Then you go down a hill and it takes a little while to slow down, or you go up a hill and it takes a little while to speed up. Electric cars can use regenerative braking when the car is going down a hill but they're still constrained by the nature of control loops and aggressive braking will just lead to wonky acceleration-braking cycles while hunting for the setpoint.

That's also how humans drive. We just don't do it as well. If you're worried about tickets set your cruise for 3 km/h under the posted speed.

The setpoint is the setpoint. Key element of controls engineering. Secretly subtracting from the setpoint behind the scenes to compensate for your local driving laws would be the car lying to you and just leads to more trouble than it's worth.

Every day people tell me that they want a setpoint to be the temperature that the room never exceeds or the temperature it never falls under or five degrees above the highest temperature the boiler hits. It's like setting your clock ahead by five minutes to avoid being late. You can do it if you want to but it's ridiculous functionality to build into the timepiece.

Further, outside of detection errors like the one in this article, the reaction time of a self-driving car is orders of magnitudes faster than a human. You don't need 5m more braking distance per 5km/h because within milliseconds of the computer noticing the issue the car will hit the brakes. Human reaction time is more like 0.7s to 3s. You still need more time to brake as you go faster but the computer doesn't need as much time as our human laws already give us.

In a case like this where the victim enters the path of the car closer than the car's brakes are capable of stopping, even given instant detection, a human would have just hit the victim at a much faster speed because of the reaction time. That's going to happen sometimes. It's just how it works.

Basically everything you're saying is based on an outdated notion of how cars work and in particular your very German desire to follow the rules exactly. The rules are going to change, dude, and in the meantime you're free to set your cruise at 47 km/h to avoid accidentally triggering a photo-radar trap if you like.

Listening to that while he's alive would be a waste of your irreplaceable shared time on Earth, right? It's just his job. While your Dad is alive you should go talk to him on subjects he cares about.

After he dies, though, if there happens to be an archive of your father joking around with, remonstrating, and otherwise being himself with the people who made up half of the social context for his waking life, year after year, that might be valuable to you.

It only has value in the right emotional context, of course, perhaps when you reach the age he was when the recordings were made. You can measure your daily self against the daily self your father created and inhabited.

An existential crisis might create a desire for that comparison, or perhaps you'll find yourself missing him and realize that family records don't show who he was in the world at large.

If your father is careless with that information you don't have that opportunity. If you are careless with your equivalent of that information your heirs won't have that opportunity.

When I die, I hope I am forgotten - because honestly, grief is shit, and the dead neither appreciate it, nor wanted it before they died. People can't be measured, and their lasting forms aren't them in any case - they are just text, video, photographs.

On the other hand, now, that's bleak.

I would view that human relationships are like strings that connect human beings. Grief of loss is the process of cutting those strings - one-by-one - and it hurts like hell. Because, if the relationship was an important one - I think it's supposed to. And after the grief has done it's job the living move on.

After the grief has done it's job, memories become bitter sweet. There are always complications, of course, and for example unresolved issues make it difficult to let go.

We begin to die the day we are born. It's only a matter of time, really. All of us are mortally ill of a condition called life. Every precious relationship must end in time.

There is a zen-story about this. A wise man was asked what was happiness? He answered, a man is born, a son is born, a grandson is born. Man dies, son dies, grandson dies. It sounds horrible the first time you hear it, but then you realize it nailed it completely - any other order would be worse, and having no children would be even sadder.

My mother has always said "Funerals are for the living, not the dead." I don't find the GPs attitude bleak at all. The people who grieve most heavily seem to be those with unfinished business with the deceased. If you leave behind no unfinished business, I think people can let it go fairly easily. They got what they needed while you were alive. That's a good deal.

I'd rather a decent amount of those survive me in some fashion. A few might, as they'll probably be included in console or flash game rom dump collections, but I wish more would. I also wish i completed more projects in my lifetime.

I've experienced the other side of this one - a lot of my family were amateur artists. Their work, on the whole, isn't that interesting. Their practice, on the other hand, is something they passed on, and I value it quite a lot. As a kid, I was always encouraged to make things, and to make new things rather than replicas, and to take making things seriously.

I still make a lot of stuff, and I really feel that people who don't are missing out - but I don't think I've made anything that I'd like my descendants to have - other than the practice of making things itself. I guess family, at its best, is about passing on traditions that allows you to live well in a frankly hard and troubling world. I mean, you can pass on more stuff than that - paintings, photos - but it usually ends up sitting in some attic. At least, that's what's happened to the creative output of about four generations of my family.

It's not that characteristic a tune.