Autonomous Driving | iDSC038

Autonomous Driving - One Group Says Tap the Brakes As California, the US and industrialized nations around the world speed toward robot cars the Consumer Watchdog group says we need to proceed with caution with autonomous driving.  Hear what specific issues they have with the five different levels of autonomous driving in this episode of iDriveSoCal. ***Transcript*** Recording date – February 20, 2018 John Simpson: Another thing that has to be dealt with is the so-called ethical dilemma, which is okay, if there's going to be a crash, who does the car kill? So consider a situation where a six-year-old kid comes out into the street, does the car, faced with the choice of swerving into the stone wall and smashing the vehicle and potentially hurting the people in the vehicle, does it do that to save the kid or does it hit the kid? Those kinds of decisions are going to have to be programmed into the software that's going to run the robot car. And we think that the kinds of decisions that are going to be programmed in that ethical level have to be publicly discussed and understood. Tom Smith: Welcome to iDriveSoCal, the podcast all about mobility from the automotive capital of these fine United States of America - Southern California. I'm Tom Smith. And with me today is John M. Simpson from the Consumer Watchdog organization. John is the Privacy and Technology Project Director, and we're going to talk about the topic of autonomous driving and specifically the speed at which our society is moving towards driverless vehicles out on the roads being tested today and soon to come. John, thank you so much for being with me. John: Pleasure to be here. Tom: So Consumer Watchdog Group, let's first get out of the way what you guys are in just a very high level perspective. John: Well, we're a nonprofit public interest group that looks after what we perceive to be the consumer's interest. We've been very active in insurance rate regulation, health care, and, of course, now we're looking at the safety issues with consumer...excuse me, with autonomous vehicles. We also have had a big project looking at privacy concerns with online and Internet companies. Tom: And both the safety issue of the vehicle and then the privacy of all this data that these autonomous vehicles are going to be consuming and kind of processing and working off of are issues you guys are looking at? John: Absolutely and we got into the whole robot car issue, autonomous vehicle sure initially precisely because of those privacy concerns about the data. And we then started to realize that there are fundamental safety concerns and our focus is on that as well. Tom: Okay. And I want to dive into both of those topics with reckless abandon--pun intended--because we're talking about safety. But before we do that, the Consumer Watchdog Group let's just...for listeners that are like, "All right, what's the agenda behind this organization?" You guys are a nonprofit. John: That's correct. Tom: Right? And funding for this type of work comes from where? Does it come from...? John: We have a big fundraiser every year. We often get various kinds of grants from foundations when we have a specific project. So our initial Privacy Project was funded by something called the Rose Foundation. Our legal team, when they are involved in legal cases, get legal fees. So those are those three major... Oh, the other thing, too, we get something called Cypress Gotcha. But the consistent kind of big funder sounds like The Rose. John: Oh, no, no, that's just one particular project that we were doing in privacy. And I mean it can depend from year to year in different projects. We don't take any corporate money. Tom: Okay. And you guys have been around for a really long t...