US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash

Motorway driving sure, there it's closer to fancy cruise control. But around town, no thank you. I regularly drive through some really crappily designed bits of road, like unlabelled approaches to multi-lane roundabouts where the lane you need to be in for a particular exit sorta just depends on what the people in front and to the side of you happen to have chosen. If it's difficult as a human to work out what the intent is, I don't trust a largely computer vision-based system to work it out.

The roads here are also in a terrible state, and the lines on them even moreso. There's one particular patch of road where the lane keep assist in my car regularly tries to steer me into the central reservation, because repair work has left what looks a bit like lane markings diagonally across the lane.

Most likely, every self-driving car company will send drivers down every road in the country, recording everything they see. Then they'll have human labellers figure out any junctions where the road markings are ambiguous.

They've had sat nav maps covering every road for decades, and the likes of Google Street View, so to have a detailed map of every junction is totally possible.

Honestly it seems like it ought to be federal law by now that municipalities need to notify a designated centralized service of all road/lane/sign/etc. changes in a standardized format, that all digital mapping providers can ingest from.

Is this not a thing? If not, is anyone lobbying for it? Is there opposition?

There will be a large number of non-participating vehicles on the road for at least another 50 years. (The average age of a car in the US is a little over 12 years and rising. I doubt we'll see a comms-based standard emerge and be required equipment on new cars for at least another 20 years.)

Road layout can change daily, sometimes multiple times per day. Sometimes in a second, like when a tree falls on a lane and now you have to reroute on the oncoming lane for some distance, etc.

You could certainly never rely on them alone.

I think so too, but I also think, if we would really want to, all it would take is a GPS device with internet connection, like a smart phone, to make a normal car into a realtime connected one.

But I also think we need to work out some social and institutional issues first.

Currently I would not like my position to be avaiable in real time to some obscure agency.

Why not just anyone and make that data openly avaiable?

I've been kind of amazed how much younger people take some newer technologies for granted, the ability of humans to adapt to changes is marvelous.

If a consensus mechanism similar to those used in blockchain were implemented, vehicles could cross-reference the data they receive with data from multiple other vehicles. If inconsistencies are detected (for example, a car reporting a different speed than what others are observing), that data could be flagged as potentially fraudulent.

Just as blockchain technologies can provide a means of verifying the authenticity of transactions, a network of cars could establish a decentralized validation process for the data they exchange. If one car broadcasts false data, the consensus mechanism among the surrounding vehicles would allow for the identification of this "anomaly", similar to how fraudulent transactions can be identified and rejected in a blockchain system.

What you mentioned with regarding to insurance could be used as a deterrent, too, along with laws making it illegal to spoof relevant data.

In any case, privacy is going to take a toll here, I believe.

Simple, asymmetrically-authenticated signals and felonies for the edge cases solve this problem without any futuristic computer wizardry.