Breaking the Law Is Safer When Everyone Else Is Breaking It

Google. While breaking privacy laws seems to be their global sport of choice, they sure do stick to the letter of the law when their autonomous cars are perusing American roads.

Oddly, that’s a problem according to the New York Times, because the rest of us operate our automobiles in a legal gray area, bending the rules to our benefit when we know we won’t get caught.

Google’s autonomous car project is — in its simplest form — four wheels, an array of sensors and software that tells the wheels what to do based on signals from the sensor array. Because that software is programmed in a way that follows traffic law in an absolute form, human drivers don’t know how to react it — and it doesn’t know how to react to humans.

This is because, for the most part, we break traffic laws is small ways all the time.

For example, four-way stops:

One Google car, in a test in 2009, couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage — paralyzing Google’s robot.

If the Google car had been programmed to break the law by not waiting for all other vehicles to stop, it would have made it through the intersection.

But, it isn’t just the autonomous car of the future; drivers are having difficulties with the semi-autonomous features of today found in a number of vehicles, like lane departure warning systems:

Humans and machines, it seems, are an imperfect mix. Take lane departure technology, which uses a beep or steering-wheel vibration to warn a driver if the car drifts into another lane. A 2012 insurance industry study that surprised researchers found that cars with these systems experienced a slightly higher crash rate than cars without them.

Bill Windsor, a safety expert with Nationwide Insurance, said that drivers who grew irritated by the beep might turn the system off. That highlights a clash between the way humans actually behave and how the cars wrongly interpret that behavior; the car beeps when a driver moves into another lane but, in reality, the human driver is intending to change lanes without having signaled so the driver, irked by the beep, turns the technology off.

As difficult as it will be for autonomous vehicles to seamlessly blend in with the current infrastructure — regardless of the condition of that infrastructure — the biggest hurdle will likely be something much more difficult to change: human nature.