I work a lot with automated delivery robots at my job and I gotta say.
seeing those things screech to a halt because there is a piece of paper on the ground, or a colorful reflection off an elevator, or because someone stood a tad bit too close to one of it's sensors, or it Decided there was a phantom robot in front of it, or because the doorway they have gone through every single day for the last 6+ years has "suddenly" moved.
does not inspire me towards confidence in self-driving technology.
We have 5 of these robots and at any given time 1 of them is broken because of a battery fault. or a docking error. or the rain outside interfered with the connection. Sometimes one of them breaks because of a genuine equipment malfunction and a part needs repaired or replaced.
Today I spent over 10 minutes trying to explain, over the phone, to a technician in another state that one robot went on a scheduled run (that they do 3 times a day every weekday) and then came back to it's dock. Proceeded to throw up battery charging errors, as it had been doing intermittently throughout the day, and as I was doing the normal fix of taking it off the dock, redocking it, then holding down the Go button. All the lights shut off and it died. I had to restart it manually twice using 2 different restart mechanisms, which did nothing, and ultimately I had to file a support ticket for it so someone knew to physically come examine the robot.
One time a robot got onto the elevator at critically low battery, after having battery charging errors all day, died. Locked it's breaks. was unable to communicate with the elevator because it shut down completely, the technicians can't remotely access the elevator because it's a physical, closed system and the robot wasn't sending signals. so I had to get my supervisor who had to call maintenance who had to call the 1 guy with the elevator key to pry open the doors and retrieve the robot, which had halted all the other robots trying to get into the 1 elevator they can all use WHILE it was carrying an entire cart of rapidly cooling food. 3 people had to drag the robot, with it's brakes locked, back over to it's dock before it could be reset and the food cart released. All of that took over an hour.
There are all kinds of problems with these relatively simple, deeply expensive, navigational robots. And they don't carry people. They don't hold human lives on their backs. If I can't trust a less than hundred pound robot to make the same delivery route a couple times a day, then what on earth is supposed to convince me to trust a several hundred pound car outfitted with a much more complex navigational system to do...whatever hundreds of thousands of tasks they want them to do as personal vehicles?
And people want this without ANY human supervision. even With minimal supervision or specialized people designed to remotely monitor and fix the problem. there's numerous physical issues that can occur which cannot be fixed remotely.
Are we just supposed to wait an hour, several hours, for someone to show up and stop a malfunctioning car driving in circles with people trapped inside. what happens if the car dies somewhere dangerous like a busy intersection, or a train crossing. what if the roads are blocked or there is sudden inclement weather.
Autonomous driving may be technically possible, as in feasible on some scale, but is it necessary? is it safe? Will it ever be safer or more economically viable than just teaching a human being to drive. or investing in better public transit. I really doubt it.
