[HN Gopher] Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
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Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere
Author : simonebrunozzi
Score : 194 points
Date : 2022-10-15 08:12 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| cs702 wrote:
| In the short run, technological progress is _much slower_ than
| anyone hopes, but in the long run it is _much faster_ than anyone
| expects.
|
| My favorite example is that in 1987, the scientific consensus was
| that it would take "at least 100 years" and likely much longer to
| sequence the entire human gnome.[a] But the vast majority of it
| was sequenced by 2000, only 13 years later. Moreover, just two
| decades later, anyone could get their genome checked for known
| markers for pocket change by companies like 23andMe, founded in
| 2006.
|
| Having some expertise and interest in AI, I regularly watch
| presentations by all companies working on self-driving and also
| look at the videos posted by beta testers online. While it's fun
| to watch the failures, I'm more interested in judging whether the
| technology is continuing to improve.
|
| My perceptions contradict this article: (1) The technology is
| progressing _faster_ than is generally recognized, with vehicles
| getting progressively better at dealing with edge cases and
| handling failures gracefully. (2) Judging by the videos I 've
| watched online, Tesla is significantly ahead of everyone else.
|
| Prediction: Before the end of the decade, this article will
| seem... short-sighted.
|
| --
|
| [a] https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/sequencing-
| human-g...
|
| --
|
| EDIT: I edited my statement about 23andMe based on sausagefeet's
| comment below.
| warbler73 wrote:
| To be clear 23andMe does not do sequencing. They check for
| certain markers.
|
| However full sequencing IS available and runs around $1000.
|
| If I recall right the first human genome sequenced cost about
| $1 trillion. But we now have much better algorithms, mostly due
| to algorithms from works such as Knuth's AOCP.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| Really interested how this one trillion figure came out, is
| it the sum of all medical research for decades? Are you
| talking US dollars
| warbler73 wrote:
| Was going from memory. Official number was $2.7 billion in
| 1991 dollars. So now it's $1000, or someone said $299, 9
| million times less.
| Gys wrote:
| A person overestimates what he/she can do in a day and
| underestimates what he/she can do in a year. I read that
| somewhere and I often think of that. Seems also applicable to a
| bigger scale.
| black_13 wrote:
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _My perceptions contradict this article: (1) The technology is
| progressing faster than is generally recognized, with vehicles
| getting progressively better at dealing with edge cases and
| handling failures gracefully. (2) Judging by the videos I 've
| watched online, Tesla is significantly ahead of everyone else._
|
| We must be watching different videos. And experiencing Teslas
| differently. I see Teslas constantly slamming on their breaks
| on freeways, swerving across lanes, and avoiding collisions by
| the narrowest margins only because their owners took control
| before certain death. And that's just driving around in L.A.
| traffic, the YouTube videos are even worse. Tesla's vaunted
| camera-based system still can't recognize white semis or other
| broad, flat obstacles that a human or radar-based system would
| recognize instantly.
|
| Tesla _was_ ahead of their competitors, several years ago. Now
| they 're way behind, and dropping further behind with every
| "update" that addresses the problems that got media coverage
| with "solutions" that indicate brittle, manual programmer
| overrides rather than any sort of scalable AI-driven
| capability.
|
| And it's irrelevant that Tesla has 160,000 drivers on the road
| "training" the system, since they selected the drivers who
| drive in the safest road conditions using a "safe driver"
| metric that has no relationship to safe driving. This means
| that Tesla's "AI" (to the extent it can be called that) is
| being overwhelmed with tons of useless data that overtrains it
| to drive easy roads and with almost no training for difficult
| conditions or edge cases. For point of comparison, most
| vehicles today with advanced cruise control can drive the same
| roads that FSD can safely drive...but they don't need advanced
| AI to do it.
|
| It doesn't matter how far ahead you were at the beginning of
| the race, it matters how far ahead you are at the finish line.
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Oh my dog.
|
| Part of this is the fault of Tesla's marketing, but you are
| wildly off mark. The cars you are seeing are Autopilot, not
| FSD. Most of them are even the even older, radar-based
| autopilot.
|
| Tesla Vision has no issues detecting white semis crossing
| your path. Vehicles with radar, on the other hand, struggle
| with discerning those from overhead bridges, so if one
| appears close to a bridge, you're SOL due to whitelisting.
|
| Tesla Vision in FSD is a much, much more developed version
| which has been excellent about detecting its environment,
| especially now with the new occupancy network. Its decision
| making needs work but you will notice, when watching all
| those videos, that detection of vehicles - even occluded ones
| - is not a problem at all.
|
| Your comment about useless data is also wrong. They are
| experts in their field and they know exactly what type of
| data they need. Both Tesla and Karpathy himself have shown on
| multiple presentations that they focus on training
| unique/difficult situations because more data from perfect
| conditions is not useful to them anymore. They have shown
| exactly how they do it, and even showed the great
| infrastructure they've built for autolabeling.
|
| Your claim about cruise control from competitors being equal
| to FSD is laughable. They don't even match Autopilot: https:/
| /www.youtube.com/watch?v=xK3NcHSH49Q&list=PLVa4b_Vn4g...
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious why you think Tesla is ahead compared to
| Waymo and Cruise. Autopilot struggles in my car on some fairly
| boring roads, while Waymo and Cruise are both operating real
| taxi services in vehicles without drivers. I can understand the
| argument that Tesla has lots of data from real world driving.
| But Google also has fleets of cars mapping out every road in
| the world.
| Initial_BP wrote:
| Not sure about the current state of the actual ML, but
| compared to other self driving companies Tesla has a treasure
| trove of data because they have so many vehicles on the road
| at all hours of every day. The edge cases are the parts that
| are hard to identify and solve so having all that drive time
| data to identify edge cases would seem to give them a big
| advantage.
| teyc wrote:
| Most self-driving is about avoiding collissions, and
| signalling intent, especially when streets are narrow and
| there's merging or shared use. The physics of cars, people,
| bikes and kids around roads are well understood
| (acceleration, velocity). This can be simulated, and a game
| engine can generate data for virtual sensors to be trained.
| There's no reason to require time on the road.
| jboy55 wrote:
| If the data doesn't have the details required to build
| accurate models, then the data is just costing Tesla money.
| Since Tesla's are just cameras only, with telemetry, they
| can replay scenarios with existing roads, but what happens
| when someone cones off half of the road?
| Initial_BP wrote:
| I imagine they have a way to replay incidents from their
| cars in a simulation and even if it's not super accurate,
| they could likely look at camera data and rebuild a
| similar situation (Sim or real life to identify and test
| the edge case)
|
| I work at another autonomous car company (as a security
| engineer not ML related work) and I know we have a Lot of
| simulated situations that we run the ML against and add
| more from situations collected from actual driving.
| Salgat wrote:
| Aren't Waymo and Cruise constrained to specially tailored
| cities? Autonomous driving that can be activated literally
| anywhere in the country is far more impressive, even if it
| has cases where it doesn't perform as well.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| The more far flung reaches are are served well by
| traditional vehicles and the people are trained to use
| driving machines since most of the workers are
| agricultural. The city centers and suburbs are a big enough
| win.
| cs702 wrote:
| Please keep in mind that I'm talking about FSD Beta, not the
| current production software, which is dozens of versions
| behind.
|
| Are you on Beta 10.69.2.3?
|
| If I had to articulate my reasons:
|
| * Judging by the videos available online, my perception is
| that _many_ situations that were impossible for Tesla FSD
| Beta a year ago have become uneventful in recent weeks. Take
| a look at Chuck Cook 's videos for example (I like the fact
| that he always highlights the failures).
|
| * Judging again by the videos available online, my perception
| is that Tesla FSD Beta has encountered and had to deal with
| more crazy edge cases than any other system. A possible
| explanation for this is that for a long time Tesla FSD Beta
| hasn't been geofenced or restricted only to certain types of
| roads, like highways. You can test it anywhere in North
| America.
|
| * Tesla FSD Beta currently has 160,000 individuals testing it
| without road restrictions. As far as I know, no other system
| has been exposed to similar open-ended large-scale testing.
|
| * Occupancy networks look like a real breakthrough to me --
| DNNs that predict whether each voxel in a 3D model is
| occupied by an object, using only video data as an input. I
| understood the high-level explanation of these DNNs on AI Day
| 2. I haven't seen anything like it from anyone else.
|
| * Tesla's DOJO also looks like a breakthrough to me. I
| understood the high-level explanation of it on AI Day 2.
| IIRC, DOJO cabinets are 6x faster at training existing neural
| networks than Nvidia rigs, at 6x lower cost, so call it ~36x
| more efficient.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I really feel that you have been duped here. There is no
| reason to believe that Tesla Dojo even exists. At Hot Chips
| last year they showed some 3D renders of their supposed
| board. At Hot Chips this year they showed the same renders.
| At "AI Day" last month they showed a retarded humanoid
| robot. We have no basis to conclude that Dojo does, can, or
| will exist.
| mrb wrote:
| Dojo does exist. There are real-world pictures of it: htt
| ps://media.datacenterdynamics.com/media/images/training_t
| ... source:
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/tesla-details-
| doj...
|
| However, to my knowledge, Tesla is still in the "bring
| up" step. I think that was a mistake to pack 25 dies on a
| single system-on-wafer. Very hard to cool.
| dontreact wrote:
| I'd sum up your points 1,2,3 as "more data". This would be
| a reason to think they can one day be ahead if they can
| take advantage of this, but not evidence that they are
| currently ahead.
|
| Occupancy networks: waymo has published research on this
| before Tesla announced this at AI day (not clear to me who
| got there first though
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.03875v1.pdf)
|
| Tesla's Dojo -> Waymo has TPUs to train on
|
| To me all of this is outweighed by the fact that Waymo has
| a driverless deployment and Tesla does not. I am pretty
| biased because as a Tesla owner I am pretty pissed off at
| this point at how the false positives on the system in
| detecting close following are stopping my safety score from
| getting high enough to even be able to access the product I
| purchased.
|
| But it is pretty hard to say one way or another.
| cs702 wrote:
| _> I 'd sum up your points 1,2,3 as "more data". This
| would be a reason to think they can one day be ahead if
| they can take advantage of this, but not evidence that
| they are currently ahead._
|
| I'd sum up those three points as "more data _and_ more
| real-world, open-ended, large-scale testing by regular
| people. " Big difference.
|
| _> Occupancy networks: waymo has published research on
| this before Tesla announced this at AI day (not clear to
| me who got there first though
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.03875v1.pdf)_
|
| AFAIK, Tesla FSD Beta is the only system that has been
| using these DNNs for open-ended testing.
|
| _> Tesla 's Dojo -> Waymo has TPUs to train on_
|
| I've trained AI models on TPUs. They're nowhere near
| close to 36x more efficient than Nvidia GPUs.
|
| _> I am pretty biased because as a Tesla owner I am
| pretty pissed off at this point at how the false
| positives on the system in detecting close following are
| stopping my safety score from getting high enough to even
| be able to access the product I purchased._
|
| Oh, I get your frustration... but I also understand why
| Tesla is being so strict with safety scores at this
| point. It wouldn't be fair to blame them for that.
| cypress66 wrote:
| As someone who also likes to watch Chuck Cook, I don't
| think Tesla is close to waymo.
|
| Tesla fsd in its current state will either crash or do some
| serious fuck up if you let it unattended for a few hours or
| maybe less (based on the disengagements in those videos).
| Forget about driverless Tesla with the current fsd. Waymo
| has been operating driverless since 2019.
|
| I do agree that it is progressing very nicely. Imo tesla
| fsd needs 2 more years and a hardware update and it will be
| there.
| cs702 wrote:
| I've yet to see how Waymo and other self-driving systems
| perform in open-ended testing, outside tightly
| restricted, geofenced environments.
|
| Otherwise, I agree that Tesla FSD Beta has been
| progressing nicely. I don't know if it will take 1, 2, or
| 5 years to get FSD Beta to an acceptable rate of graceful
| failures, but I agree it looks likely to get there before
| the end of the decade!
| Veserv wrote:
| I've yet to see Tesla FSD Beta perform in any meaningful
| operational environment, no matter how restricted, within
| a factor of 100x of Waymo or Cruise, and Waymo and Cruise
| are still at least a factor of 10x off of "equal to human
| drivers". Superiority can not be claimed if a system is
| unacceptably bad in all circumstances (i.e. 1,000x worse
| than the minimum acceptable standard for real commercial
| usage) and worse in every case than a comparable
| alternative. It only makes sense if the system is better
| at _something_ other than being allowed to create
| unacceptably bad results in a more diverse range of
| circumstances.
| Initial_BP wrote:
| I totally agree with you that Tesla FSD seems more likely
| yo have a serious crash, but if actual fully autonomous
| cars are the end goal, then the behavior of learning/beta
| models doesn't really matter except to the extent that it
| let's them get to the end goal (for the sake of this
| argument).
|
| All fully autonomous cars are in a different legal
| situation then Tesla. Tesla sells Joe Shmoe a car and
| then tells him he can rub FSD but he's responsible and
| has to remain attentive then they get info about every
| disengagement and (mostly) avoid legal responsibility or
| accidents in many cases.
|
| Waymo is fully responsible for every accident, etc so
| they HAVE to proceed more cautiously or they'll lose the
| ability to run their cars. As someone else pointed out
| they often are only operated in very specific areas, and
| often even specific streets within a geofence. So while
| on the surface Waymo may have full self driving operating
| more effectively with less problems, they're doing so in
| a much more controlled environment and not getting the
| variety of data that Tesla has from cars disengaging
| Literally anywhere in the US.
| badpun wrote:
| Compared to general self-driving, it's relatively simple to
| make self-driving taxis work in just a couple of cities
| (preferably ones with minimum adversarial weather, too) - you
| just test the code against that particular dataset until it
| performes reasonably well, manually fixing the edge cases
| along the way if need be. It's still a monumental, multi-
| billion dollar project, but I would be surprised if it wasn't
| achievable.
| rayiner wrote:
| > In the short run, technological progress is much slower than
| anyone hopes, but in the long run it is much faster than anyone
| expects.
|
| But it doesn't happen in predictable ways. A particular area of
| technology hits a wall and plateaus all the time, for myriad
| reasons. In 1950, you might have thought that by 2022 we would
| have done a lot more with nuclear technology or supersonic
| airplanes than we have.
| sausagefeet wrote:
| > Moreover, just two decades later, anyone could get their
| genome sequenced for pocket change by companies like 23andMe,
| founded in 2006.
|
| Sequencing your genome is still relatively expensive, Probably
| around $15k. 23andme does not sequence your genome. They look
| at specific regions looking for specific markers. This doesn't
| invalidate your point of how great progress has been, though.
| cs702 wrote:
| You're right. I updated my comment. Thank you!
| GioM wrote:
| Whole genome sequencing is commercially available for $299.
|
| https://nebula.org/whole-genome-sequencing-dna-test/
| cs702 wrote:
| Not quite pocket change, but getting close!
| guelo wrote:
| > Prediction: Before the end of the decade, this article will
| seem... short-sighted.
|
| Can we say that all the self-driving optimists that were
| completely wrong about the last decade were shortsighted?
|
| Also, no idea what progress in biotech has anything to do with
| self driving. Your argument is that because some tech advanced
| all other possible tech will advance, seems like a logical
| fallacy.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| > but in the long run it is much faster than anyone expects
|
| I saw the first Moon landing.
|
| At the time, everyone, the experts, the public, everyone,
| expected us to colonize the Solar System within a few decades.
| We expected that fusion power would be too cheap to meter and
| that burning fossil fuels would be a thing of the past. We
| expected human life expectancy would soon rise to over a
| century in developed countries.
|
| Serious, respected scientists said all these things, and
| everyone took them for granted.
|
| None of these things did in fact come to pass.
|
| Humans have not ventured in person even as far as the Moon in
| fifty years.
|
| Our first atomic "pile" was 80 years ago in a few months, and
| we still don't have a fusion reactor. The tokamak was the big
| fusion design 50 years ago, and it still is, and we are better
| at them, but we still are nowhere near actually producing real
| power.
|
| Life expectancy increases stalled quite fast, and then life
| expectancies started to regress. Americans have lost about two
| years of their life, basically because of their group mistrust
| of medical science.
|
| It is simply diminishing returns on the amazing discovery that
| is the scientific method - it is unavoidable.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| > _Americans have lost about two years of their life,
| basically because of their group mistrust of medical
| science._
|
| I don't think that's the actual reason for the decline, it's
| more likely another effect of the real cause. While I'm not
| American, it's the same story all over the world: our diet
| keeps getting worse, there is plastic everywhere which breaks
| down into micro plastics which end up in the water we drink
| etc. We're preparing our food with carcinogenic utensils
| (everything "non stick") and all of our western societies
| went from a healthy worker/academic career choice into mostly
| just getting exploited by the established players.
|
| There have been a lot of societal changes since the post WW2
| times, and summing that up into "losing trust in medical
| science" is a very confusing take, especially if you consider
| all the medical professionals that spread outright lies to
| profit. (The person that started the antivax movement was a
| doctor as a notorious example)
|
| And drug companies that sold bad medicines (knowingly!) As
| they judged the cost of liability to be lower then the cost
| of not selling the drug.
|
| Just to be clear, I'm not saying that any of these things are
| causing this decline either. Our societies have just changed
| _too much_ since to make any confident claims about their
| impact.
| 123_abc wrote:
| I think the quote you are referring to in the article [a]
| states "At the time, that [the 500 genes already sequenced] was
| thought to be about 1% of the total, and given the pace of
| discovery, it was believed that complete sequencing of the
| human genome would take at least 100 years"
|
| The 'given pace of discovery' I would read as an extrapolation
| using (then) available technologies, not as a scientific
| consensus about what would be possible using new technologies
| in the near future.
| nichochar wrote:
| [Disclaimer] I worked for Cruise for 4 years.
|
| I agree with everything you said, but chuckled at this
| particular part (which is very wrong): > Tesla is significantly
| ahead of everyone else.
|
| Everyone in the industry knows that Tesla is nowhere near the
| tip of the technology. What Tesla does is _fantastic
| marketing_. Their whole self-driving division is just a
| mechanism to sell more cars.
|
| At a high level, this is why:
|
| - The hard thing about self driving isn't the first 95%, it's
| the impossibly long tail of the last 5% with unique, chaotic
| and rare scenarios (think, a reflective citern tank with a
| reflection of the back of a truck transporting stop signs, or
| terrible weather illusions with fog).
|
| - Doing well on the last 5% is where most of the energy from
| Waymo/Cruise goes (the two leaders by quite a margin).
|
| - Tesla is camera only. Weather alone means you can't reach
| critical safety because of this. Cameras don't do fog well,
| precipitation well, or sunsets/bad lighting well (see many
| Tesla crashes on freeways bc of this)
|
| - Tesla does well on the 95% and Elon is a marketing genius,
| with those 2 things it's easy to convince outsiders that "Tesla
| is significantly ahead of everyone else".
|
| My prediction: before the end of the decade, cruise and waymo
| have commoditized fleets doing things that most people today
| would find unbelievable. Tesla is still talking a big game but
| ultimately won't have permits for you to be in a Tesla with
| your hands off of the wheel.
|
| edit: formatting and typo
| mota7 wrote:
| Excellent example: "reflective cistern tank with a reflection
| of the back of a truck transporting stop signs"
|
| People tend to forget just how hard the edge cases in vision
| are!
| katbyte wrote:
| It's weird to me people forget how bad vision can be for
| driving and Exocet Tesla to somehow be better then our own
| eyes.
|
| How often a do you encounter situations like bad fog/sun
| set/rain at night where it's a total struggle to drive and
| you slow right down to a crawl and even then only do
| alright because of a ton of inference?
|
| i think Tesla deciding to go vision only will be regarded
| of one of the greatest blunders is self driving history.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| The counterargument to this is that since humans reach
| acceptable safety levels with vision only, it must be
| possible to do self driving with vision only. That said,
| augmenting vision with other methods does seem like a no
| brainer for better performance.
| PinguTS wrote:
| I remember the gnome thing. But that is nothing I have any
| knowledge about. So this area was for me like unknowledged
| people learn about things.
|
| Automation is actually my area. Self-droving cars are in
| development for more than 50 years. In the 1970s it was more
| analogous technology that needed a lot of space. Fact is today
| technology is not that much better than that. Except, at the
| days it was highly supervised by professionals.
|
| Many hardware devices we have in our cars today profited from
| those developments. Because radar and things are now cheaply
| avalaible. But self-driving is still not a thing. All the
| improvements in AI even didn't realy helped.
|
| What many people seems to forget AI is about to detect
| (learned) patterns and to make decisions based on those
| patterns. But AI is completely unpreditcable on patterns it
| can't recognise. AI will classify those into a know pattern.
| But this is random and as such the judgedment is random. That
| is the big difference to a human, which can still cope with an
| unknown situation.
|
| That is the reason why many people from the industry say: real
| self-driving cars will take very much longer than the average
| publics thinks and was told by Elon, Uber and others.
| lionkor wrote:
| > In fact, no one has come close to making an AV
|
| Correct me if im wrong, but Honda has done this?
|
| https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35729591/honda-legend-lev...
|
| https://global.honda/newsroom/news/2021/4210304eng-legend.ht...
|
| Toyota:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-08-02/toyota...
|
| And Cruise:
|
| https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1132494_cruise-opens-up-...
|
| I don't really see how this all qualifies as "not close to AV",
| when really, it looks quite viable (with some already driving
| autonomously...?)
| smt88 wrote:
| This is literally what the entire article is about.
| Reventlov wrote:
| AV is basically level 4 or 5 in the SAE classification (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car ). And those
| vehicles are either not existing yet (i.e. just marketing
| ploys), or far from it (requiring remote drivers, for example),
| or just research prototypes that have not been really tried at
| scale.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >or just research prototypes that have not been really tried
| at scale.
|
| Furthermore, all of those research prototypes are geofenced,
| since they rely on extremely detailed mapping and lots of
| training data from humans driving the same routes. There is
| not a single AV in the world close to capable of driving on
| any road, at any time, in any condition, that a skilled human
| could drive on without ever having seen it before.
|
| In my mind, that means we are indeed nowhere close to a true
| AV.
| XorNot wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with this success metric: for one
| thing, there's plenty of roads any given human can't or
| won't drive on due to perceived difficulty.
|
| But when I think "autonomous vehicle" I definitely don't
| think "arbitrarily capable of driving on roads" - I think
| something capable of navigating well-understood national
| roads. I don't see any inconsistency with the idea that
| there'd be "no automation" zones or roads, or that pre-
| approved travelways for AVs is a failure scenario.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| What is the value add of AVs if they are only restricted
| to well-understood, national roads? Wouldn't their
| purpose be better served by high speed trains along those
| roads instead?
|
| My (and Doctorow's) definition of AV is so stringent
| because AVs need to deliver the same value add of regular
| cars relative to other forms of transportation: i)
| relatively fast, ii) unscheduled, and most importantly,
| iii) point-to-point transportation between any two points
| connected by roads. Trains are bad at iii), decent at ii)
| if run often enough, and far superior at i). If iii) is
| off the table, then the relative value add of cars is
| greatly diminished.
| threeseed wrote:
| Cruise has robo-taxis operating in San Francisco [1].
|
| Obviously we don't know to what extent they have remote
| drivers but you wouldn't be able to run such a service if
| every ride required them.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP1rvCYiruh4SDHyPqcxlJw
| nickspacek wrote:
| When I was recently in SF, one early morning I came across
| a Cruise vehicle on a one way street at a 30 degree angle
| blocking traffic (of which there was very little at the
| time). Another was pulling up behind it (maintenance
| vehicle?). Not sure what the story was with it.
| [deleted]
| gala8y wrote:
| > I don't really see how this all qualifies as "not close to
| AV", when really, it looks quite viable (with some already
| driving autonomously...?)
|
| Also Tesla. You can see real advancements in these videos of
| Tesla FSD Beta [0].
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/c/AIDRIVR/videos
| ahahahahah wrote:
| Tesla has nothing close to an AV. They're at about Waymo 2014
| level at best.
| SergeAx wrote:
| I have a feeling that we have something like Pareto principle in
| effect here. We spent 20% of effort to solve 80% of the problem.
| Now we have to spend 80% of effort to solve remaining 20% of the
| problem :(
|
| I am starting to believe in hybrid system at least for self-
| driving taxis. Autopilot works 80% of time, but in the case of
| uncertainty it calls a remote human driver to solve a particular
| problem. With 4G/5G coverage it is already technically feasible
| to drive a car remotely on a slow speed. Will have to master
| emergency slow down and stop on autopilot and of course detection
| of malicious or inadequate action from remote pilot.
| [deleted]
| origin_path wrote:
| The main lesson here seems to be about the value of
| incrementalism. This project was always pitched as self driving
| cars in one leap, which set huge expectations and more or less
| ruled out just shipping incrementally better driver assistance
| year after year. Probably because the space became dominated by
| Google and Page-ist futurism, so they weren't able to sell
| anything that would be expected to come with an actual car
| because "automotive supply chain" didn't fit with Google's self
| image. And then everyone got scared that they'd succeed and tried
| to copy their approach.
|
| The mining site thing is probably where things should have begun,
| or highway driving only, but the question is, could a company
| have motivated ML and programming experts with such a humble
| starting point? Or was the hole-in-one approach required to build
| a team that could get anywhere at all?
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| It's because self driving doesn't provide much value until you
| can remove the human. If you can remove the human, last mile
| package delivery is suddenly super cheap; taxis are cheap;
| trucking is much cheaper; share car services are transformed as
| a business model.
|
| With the human still required you get nothing, so why invest at
| all?
| onethought wrote:
| You get safer drivers, less crashes and less death.
| origin_path wrote:
| I think a lot of people would be happy to put their feet up
| once they'd navigated onto a highway, or have their car go
| find a parking spot by itself, or come back from one. The
| sort of stuff Tesla is trying to do is in many ways far more
| practical except they keep diverting resources to FSD and end
| up not nailing thee more prosaic conveniences.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| The cost benefit analysis just doesn't add up though. I can
| see this adding a small amount to the purchasing decision
| of a prospective buyer, but without "remove the human" as
| the end goal these technologies do not provide the return
| on investment. No one has a crystal ball though, and a few
| years ago "autonomous vehicles" looked promising. It's just
| that we are now looking at the sunken cost fallacy when it
| hasn't worked out.
| leksak wrote:
| Did not expect Doctorow to be posting on Medium. I wonder what my
| biases are.
| Reventlov wrote:
| He is posting it everywhere: twitter, medium, [...], but, as
| usual, he posts it on his blog too !
| https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/
| smt88 wrote:
| This is the better and canonical link then, in my opinion.
| Medium is not pleasant to use as a reader.
| dang wrote:
| We've changed the URL from
| https://medium.com/@doctorow/100-billion-later-autonomous-ve...
| to the original source.
| Kiro wrote:
| What are you referring to? Was the link changed and if so, why?
| leksak wrote:
| It was, why it was I do not know
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| It's quite sad. Even not-so-bright representatives of our
| civilization can drive a car successfully, and we still can not
| achieve this level in software. It means that we are extremely
| far from implementing something more interesting and
| sophisticated.
|
| All of these "AI" are too much "neural networks" and don't have
| enough "intelligence".
| black_13 wrote:
| coldtea wrote:
| Self-driving cars might not be going anywhere, but $100B made
| several people rich.
| feketegy wrote:
| I've said it before, if you truly want to experience what a real
| life raod looks like in most of the World, just go to Eastern
| Europe and create the test models there.
| saimiam wrote:
| And then there is India. Please come here if you want zero
| infra AND zero adherence to basic rules of driving AND the
| language and script changes every few hundred kilometers AND
| all roads have human and non-human users at all hours of the
| day.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| It's odd that it's treated as a matter of pride that, while
| other cities have AVs _today_ , your own city or nation will
| take much longer simply because it's full of dangerous
| drivers breaking the law and infrastructure full of literal
| roadblocks. It's like claiming that cars are infeasible
| globally because the roads around you are full of potholes
| and manure. Congratulations?
|
| Rather than assume this is a death knell for self-driving
| cars, a more pragmatic view would be other nations will be
| able to benefit from them while you are left behind. Self-
| driving cars don't need global saturation to be worthwhile.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| It doesn't matter what your 'real' roads look like, the money
| is a hemisphere and a continent away.
| techwiz137 wrote:
| Absolutely agreed. No road markings, speed bumps also not
| marked. Lack of road signs, potholes, what about non-clearly
| defined sidewalks, because nature has taken most of the
| sidewalks' blocks or even overgrown with grass.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Discussed a week ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106739
| edwnj wrote:
| Productivity & efficiency unlocks in trucking, ride hailing,
| public transportation, vehicles, insurance, human capital,
| medicine etc..
|
| We are talking tens of trillions in value unlocked around the
| world.
| Kukumber wrote:
| They should have hired game developers, they have a headstart
| martythemaniak wrote:
| It's really bizarre that people are treating autonomous EVs as
| somehow pitted against transit.
|
| The core of public transit is having a monopoly on local service
| and using profitable routes to subsidize unprofitable ones for
| the benefit of the public.
|
| Transit agencies don't build their own vehicles, they buy them
| and operate them. Having the option to buy autonomous EVs does
| not change the core of public transit, but it does give them the
| ability to save on operations, run more routes, more frequent
| service, use a different mix of vehicles for their fleet, etc.
|
| Replacing one 50 seat $500,000 bus with 5 $100,000 10 seat vans
| that cost a fraction to operate will make public transit far
| better than it is today.
| zxcvbn4038 wrote:
| I'm still waiting for my ray gun. Unless the aliens are made of
| paper, and move really slow, and are in the same room as me, I've
| got nothing. The space princess is going to do more damage
| throwing her high heels at them.
| case0x00 wrote:
| This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg
| article, which is more interesting IMO.
|
| Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes,
| and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a
| degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully
| autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive
| infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to
| cities/urbanized areas) if you want autonomous cars to work with
| anything less than AGI. Until companies start pursuing that, they
| are actually unknowingly using all that money to push for AGI and
| obviously coming up short because they don't even understand what
| they are trying to do.
| Fricken wrote:
| This bullshit shows up in every HN thread on autonomous
| vehicles. Really only on HN. It's wrong, uninformed, and won't
| seem to go away.
|
| The challenges self-driving cars have nothing to do with
| infrastructure and everything to do with the other moving
| objects on the road. It's not that the vehicles can't detect
| the other things on the road. It's that they can't anticipate
| reliably what they're going to do.
|
| (However you may be correct that we need AGI or something close
| to it to do autonomous vehicles robustly)
| andrepd wrote:
| Teslas, despite the ludicrous promises of "full self-driving
| in 6 months, just you wait", completely choke if there is so
| much as a traffic cone or a road-work barrier for it go
| around.
| Fricken wrote:
| Tesla doesn't come anywhere close to having the sensor
| suite or compute to be taken seriously as a developer of
| level 4 autonomy.
| onethought wrote:
| What sensor suite is that?
| oliveshell wrote:
| Radar, ultrasonic proximity sensors, and/or LIDAR,
| presumably.
|
| Tesla has famously removed all radar/ultrasonic sensors
| from their newer cars in favor of a purely camera-based
| system.
| sneak wrote:
| How do humans drive without these sensors?
| onethought wrote:
| But they removed them well after they showed they could
| accurately predict distance with vision.
|
| LiDAR doesn't make sense as a sensor to me because it
| only works in good weather. Its Like a car without
| windscreen wipers.
| fpoling wrote:
| I recently drove a rented Tesla 3. On a highway in Norway it
| failed to detect speed limit signs in like 25% of cases. And
| if the speed limit sign was a temporary one due to road
| repairs it failed with those like 50% of times.
|
| And this is with stationary objects designed to be seen and
| easily grasped by humans.
| hasmanean wrote:
| Signs are nice but the simplest way to know the speed is to
| store it in a database and look it up from position.
|
| In fact roads should have barcoded position markers
| everywhere. That way you could navigate without gps and all
| road signs could become virtual. Just download a road
| marker update.
| YawningAngel wrote:
| That's not really how speed limits work though. People
| take their cues from road design and conditions, not what
| the speed limit actually is. Virtually changing speed
| limits is dangerous because it causes you to _think_ you
| are altering the behaviour of traffic without actually
| doing so.
|
| https://youtu.be/bglWCuCMSWc?t=280 goes into detail on
| this
| aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote:
| We could put GPS beacons on all pedestrians.
| Veserv wrote:
| Teslas do not read speed limit signs or basically any signs
| other than stop signs, including not reading "Do Not Enter"
| street signs. It is using the wrong speed limit because
| their maps do not list the correct speed limit.
| muststopmyths wrote:
| Unless... the infrastructure change they propose is removing
| the "other things on the road". Sounds brilliant. You could
| call that system a "rail" road as the cars would be on rails
| in a manner of speaking
| Fricken wrote:
| Vancouver's Skytrain has been fully autonomous since, I
| think, the 1980s.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| This is where I see the problem being with autonomous
| vehicles, too. They can only react to other vehicles, they
| can't predict them.
|
| Humans are _good_ at predicting.
|
| You don't consciously know you've seen the guy a couple of
| cars in front checking his mirror and his shoulder but you're
| hanging back because you just _know_ he 's going to pull out
| any second. The guy that's wavering a bit in the middle lane
| is about to dash across to the far lane of the sliproad
| that's coming up, clipping the zebra stripes a bit, because
| he's concentrating on the sat nav not the road, but you just
| _know_ - out of all the other drivers in your space at the
| moment - that red Ford is the one that 's going to do
| something boneheaded.
|
| Autonomous Vehicles won't be able to do that, probably not
| ever.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Object detection is an issue, but it doesn't only apply to
| "moving" objects. The current state of the art is having
| trouble differentiating between a "solid" stationary object
| like a tire or chunk of metal that must be navigated around,
| and something like an empty plastic bag that can be safely
| ignored. Regarding infrastructure, AVs also seem to have a
| lot of trouble with faded lane lines on roads.
| Fricken wrote:
| If you're relying only on cameras, then yes, that's an
| issue. Level 4 vehicles can locate themselves without the
| need for lines on the road. Everything has been carefully
| mapped out ahead of time.
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| > Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time
|
| This doesn't scale. This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and
| Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of
| investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow
| area or a very specific route. Then they drive the
| route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive.
| Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to
| YouTube. Just like me taking a thousand half-court shots
| with a basketball, hitting one, and then claiming I can
| do it every try. There, I just gave you the formula to
| raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.
|
| There's also no such thing as a Level 4 Autonomous
| vehicle. It doesn't exist.
| Fricken wrote:
| Many of the original Google self-driving car project
| members came over directly from Google Street view, which
| has since scaled all over the world. Autonomous vehicles
| have big scaling issues, but it's not the maps holding
| them back.
| n0tth3dro1ds wrote:
| Street view is not an ultra-HD map for autonomous
| driving. Cruise isn't using street view, or anything so
| primitive and easy to collect in comparison, to navigate
| SF. And it doesn't scale in and of itself without being
| backed by a search ads monopoly that prints money at
| will.
| criley2 wrote:
| >Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time.
|
| That sounds sustainable and scalable to earth-size, for
| sure.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Well, it's been mostly done once with Google maps and
| street view. Presumably once it was done once and in use
| cities would have a vested interest in keeping it updated
| themselves. Judging by how many large potholes stick
| around for years near me I wouldn't keep my hopes up
| about it being well maintained though
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| Earth size? When was the last time you drove in
| Madagascar? Most driven miles are the same commute in the
| same city 10 times a week.
| silisili wrote:
| This reminds me of something the Rocket League devs said.
| Something to the effect that bots wouldn't be effective at
| the game because it's too challenging.
|
| This is -not- my line of work, so I have no idea if that's
| true. But if it is, I don't see how we could have perfectly
| safe self driving vehicles.
| andrepd wrote:
| Cars are bad. Electric cars are a bit better than ICE cars, and
| self-driving cars might one day be better than human-driven
| cars. But they're still terrible: they're still big,
| inefficient, polluting, loud, dangerous, and take up precious
| space. _Cars are completely unsuited to cities, and cities
| which are designed around cars are terrible_.
|
| This to say: _the future is having cars removed from cities
| entirely_. Focusing on self-driving technology, or on electric
| cars as if they 're going to "save the planet", is entirely the
| wrong direction imo.
| fooker wrote:
| >the future is having cars removed from cities entirely.
|
| Sounds somewhat authoritarian to impose your idea of the
| 'future' to inconvenience a large number of people.
| sneak wrote:
| Los Angeles has already been built, however.
| almost_usual wrote:
| This is the logical answer but companies need to profit off
| something and EVs are what "save the world" right now.
|
| Everyone is committed to being green as long as their
| lifestyle isn't inconvenienced and they have the funds to buy
| the green equivalent technology.
| fpoling wrote:
| EV promotes energy independence of a country. In the worst
| case they can use electricity from coal that is widely
| available on this planet. And as long as the coal plant is
| modern they still will generate less CO2 than petrol-based
| cars.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| Personally, I think while probably too futuristic large
| drones that are autonomous and deliver people would be safer.
| Its arguably easier to avoid objects when you can dodge in
| 360 degrees of direction.
|
| It's also easier to avoid pedestrians as most can't fly.
|
| It also could save on gas and energy as you can go directly
| as a bird flies to your destination instead of taking 20
| minutes it takes 3.
|
| Of course this would be a huge infrastructure ordeal as well
| probably and require a damn good system as you don't want
| vehicles landing on houses all over the place, but it'd be
| amazing for people with long commutes.
|
| You could probably have airbuses that pick up like 30 people
| say in a small town and fly them to the city to be delivered
| individually by smaller vehicles locally. What took 45
| minutes, now maybe takes 15.
|
| These would be better if maybe electric with gas as an
| emergency backup system, and then just have good batteries
| and solar power fuel most trips.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| No-one cares about cities.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Statements about X specialized task requiring AGI are
| questionable now, just like they were questionable when they
| were said about Chess, Go and Video Games.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Show me a chess engine that can deal with a chess peice that
| has been mangled so you can only tell what it is with context
| clues. Also a plastic bag occasionally obscures one of the
| other pieces. There's also construction on one side of the
| board every few turns that it has to route around using lanes
| that arnt normally legal. It has to do this while a drunk
| human is also moving the pieces, sometimes in ways that arnt
| legal, and if it takes too long it can hit a wall and die
| davedx wrote:
| Beyond questionable. It's anti-intellectual defeatism.
| Kye wrote:
| Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future
| results.
| davedx wrote:
| > autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a
| degree that is safer than a human with other humans.
|
| This is really an astonishingly large claim without any
| evidence.
|
| I question if you understand what AGI actually is? It's not "AI
| that can solve game theory" or "AI that can play cooperative
| games" - conventional video game AI's do this all the time in a
| myriad of permutations.
|
| For others agreeing autonomous driving needs "AGI", first read
| what it is:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
|
| Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the ability of an
| intelligent agent to understand or learn *any intellectual task
| that a human being can*.
|
| It's a very difficult engineering problem but we don't need AGI
| to solve it.
| oplaadpunt wrote:
| I always imagined the future of self driving cars wouldn't lie
| in cities (except maybe some main ringroads or arterial roalds)
| but in highways. Just tell the computer to go to highway X exit
| Y, and from there the driver can drive the last few miles.
| Basically geofencing known 'sane' locations, which cuts down on
| the boring bits of driving significantly.
| _dain_ wrote:
| And then in those safe geofenced locations we could put down
| metal guide rails so that navigation is easier. And then use
| metal wheels with flanges to reduce rolling resistance. And
| then hook many cars together into one long vehicle. And ...
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| I'd be impressed a train service that had 8 parallel lines
| plus dedicated lines at each station so that it was
| economical for 1-5 people to alight directly at their
| destination.
| fooker wrote:
| Highways have that many lanes only near large cities,
| where rail lines are also fairly parallel if you look at
| maps.
| usrusr wrote:
| That could be more than just a joke though: special lanes
| for computerized slipstream driving could make cars and
| trucks approach railroad efficiency. A "driver agent" posts
| its itinerary to the routing network, finds peers going the
| same direction at roughly the same time,
| accelerates/decelerates to find them and hook
| (contactlessly) into the moving paceline, at a position
| that fits the vehicle's frontal area (you wouldn't want
| small cars breaking the slipstream between trucks). The
| routing network bills some of the slipstream savings on
| behalf of the vehicle(s) in less favorable positions at the
| front.
|
| Like the visionary dream of individually routed rail cars,
| but built bottom-up, with cars/trucks that are perfectly
| useful in standalone driving on regular roads. And it could
| scale even closer to rail: perhaps some long-haul
| connections get metal rails integrated in the floor like
| tram rails, that some long-haul trucks with a special bogey
| option could slot in, in the fly? That would be an
| impressive stunt if performed by humans, but easy for
| computers. Perhaps some connections add overhead wires?
| Perhaps some trucks, with the overhead wire pantograph
| option, add a robotic power handover arm because that's
| cheaper than wear and tear on two pantographs? Could all
| start bottom up, with few installations.
| kenjackson wrote:
| That would be great. But the minute I have to get out of my
| car to get in another vehicle to then get in another car at
| my "destination" then you've lost me.
| rtpg wrote:
| Car rental services, taxis, buses, bikes, just having the
| station nearby. There are a billion options beyond "bring
| your own car"
| cinntaile wrote:
| That's just trying to solve a simpler problem. It wasn't what
| we were promised!
| oplaadpunt wrote:
| I know, I think the promises are unrealistic :) This has
| always been my own imagined future
| jamiek88 wrote:
| I'd be very happy with that.
|
| Especially in an RV. Enter the interstate, sleep for 8
| hours, wake up 600 miles down the road.
|
| That's the dream!
| [deleted]
| nier wrote:
| Where is this kind-of-a-wrapper-article you write about? What
| am I missing?
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-06/even-afte...
| dang wrote:
| We've changed the URL from
| https://medium.com/@doctorow/100-billion-later-autonomous-ve...
| to the original source.
| noobermin wrote:
| Why should we change city infrastructure to work with less than
| AGI driven cars? It sounds instead like yes, AV companies are
| over selling what they can do and they should be restricted to
| things like highways and the like where the easier, less
| complex driving environment already exists.
|
| Cities are by far the most complex relative to every other
| driving environment, in fact there is a good argument that, in
| cities, cars should be much more restricted because of health
| effects and traffic deaths, and the less complex areas
| (highways) are already the bulk of the drudgery in driving, but
| are much easier to automate, so why not do it for there?
| brutusborn wrote:
| One good reason is to help the AIs make better decisions
| through greater certainty. For example, if a road sign has
| machine readable data there is a greater certainty that an AI
| will interpret it correctly. This could affect safety and
| ease of implementation.
| almost_usual wrote:
| The environment requires too many constraints, in a city it
| wouldn't be unusual for someone to vandalize these road
| signs.
| ehnto wrote:
| Then someone spray paints the sign, a taxi parks in the
| bike lane just behind a box truck blocking half the
| entrance to where you're going, meanwhile a cyclist rides
| the other direction directly toward you because human
| agents are chaotic and cities are full of them. Oh, a
| racoon!
|
| Less tongue in cheek: I think we should optimize city
| centers for human scales and activities, rather than
| sending cars right through them at all. We already
| sacrifice so much for cars in their current state, if we
| have to optimize for their mobility even moreso we are
| going in the wrong direction I feel.
|
| I'm not saying get rid of cars, just keep them out of the
| denser parts of cities and the CBD. Put them on roads, not
| streets.
| c7b wrote:
| How well would that work during snow, fog, storms, how
| resilient would it be to vandalism? Sounds extremely
| fragile.
| viscanti wrote:
| The question is what value would a city get after, what
| seems to be, a very expensive process? What value do they
| get from unlocking semi competent AI cars that's worth the
| time, effort, and requires dedicated street space and an
| inconvenience to everyone else who travels a different way?
| It doesn't seem like it's replacing public transit and if
| someone needs a private vehicle to go beyond the area
| that's optimized they'll need a different transportation
| solution. It seems like a lot of cost for a very small
| benefit.
| oblio wrote:
| A very small benefit for society but potentially a very
| large benefit for a select few stakeholders.
|
| Musk largely became the richest person on the planet off
| the back of the promise that nobody else would have
| decent EV tech (turns out, they do), nobody else would
| have the battery production capacity (turns out, they do,
| plus super ironic when Tesla is partnering with Panasonic
| for battery production), AND the promise of fully self
| driving cars (which will happen for Tesla immediately
| after flying cars).
|
| I don't have a good term for this, but it's basically
| corruption: a few benefit at the cost of everyone else.
| treis wrote:
| It's an enormous benefit to society. A huge number of
| people are killed or seriously injured in car crashes
| every year. Plus the quality of life benefits and
| reduction in property damage.
| YawningAngel wrote:
| It seems like it would be cheaper and easier to get rid of
| cars entirely
| oblio wrote:
| But not politically palatable :-)
| incone123 wrote:
| If a so-called AI needs help reading a road sign then it
| stands no chance dealing with the rest of it's
| surroundings.
| paganel wrote:
| Not all driving outside city areas happens on the highways.
|
| My brother lives in the countryside (somewhere in the EU),
| and, as a driver, he shares the paved road just outside his
| house with the village's cows (including his two cows). I
| don't see any non-AGI system being able to negotiate that, as
| at times is difficult even for me, a reasonably AGI system,
| to make sense of it all when I encounter a herd of loose cows
| on the road.
| davedx wrote:
| Oh come on, it's just collision avoidance, you don't need
| general AI for that
| lolc wrote:
| Collision avoidance that needs object permanence
| including theory of mind (for cows). How hard could it
| be?
| andrepd wrote:
| Sparsely populated rural areas are really the only place
| where personal autos make sense. Long distance highway
| travel is better serviced by train. And transportation
| inside the city is better serviced by _literally anything
| except a car_ (bikes, e-bikes, subway, trams, scooters,
| walking).
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| How do you get around the sparsely-populated rural areas
| at either end of the highway?
| cwalv wrote:
| > Sparsely populated rural areas are really the only
| place where personal autos make sense
|
| This might be true, if rural areas and densely populated
| uran areas were the only 2 states, but there's a lot of
| intermediate density in between
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Even cities with decent public transport networks (such
| as Prague) tend to have a problem with tangential
| relations. Most lines go from some periphery to the
| center and to another periphery. If you need to travel
| between two peripheries, you have to be somewhat lucky to
| have a line connecting them at your disposal. Going
| through the center and back to the other periphery is
| possible, but usually takes too long. (e.g. 1h 30 min
| instead of 15 minutes by car).
| benj111 wrote:
| Sheep are worse. They run from one side of the road across
| you to get away from you.
| dm319 wrote:
| Add to that the vagueness of where the road ends and
| field/bank begins for many country roads.
| davedx wrote:
| You don't need AGI to do edge detection it's purely a
| vision problem
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Practically all the AI-assisted automation systems I'm familiar
| with, whether its identifying objects in an image or parsing
| documents, have the same problem. They work for 90-95% of
| problems but get trumped up by edge cases and a human has to
| intervene.
|
| That's not a problem when you're transcribing a video, but
| becomes a matter of life and death when you're driving a car.
| rasz wrote:
| Are there even any racing/sim games with solved driving AI? All
| the ones I can think of cheat, replay hardcoded paths, and/or
| are terrible. And thats with perfect information about the
| world and other cars.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Those games ai systems get substantially less budget and time
| than the automakers. There's also been a lot of talks about
| players not really having fun with ai that is too good, the
| players will always assume the ai is cheating whenever it out
| maneuvers them if you make it too well done
| batmanturkey wrote:
| WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue,
| given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural
| requirements are such a large expense and social and
| environmental problem relative to the benefits provided?
|
| I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular
| hill?
|
| I consider an _actual_ hyperloop to be a much more compelling
| vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in
| suburban US locales coupled with maglev capsules being routed
| around electronically by magnetic field switching, etc... Or
| flying jetson mobiles etc...
|
| Why is the current obsession a robotic driver of a boring old car
| ?
| SergeAx wrote:
| Hyperloop is a long range solution. Most of the commute today
| are within 20km. These are two completely different problems.
| EricDeb wrote:
| how about robotic driving of an electric bus? I feel like that
| would be much more useful for cities + no driver cost.
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| Those infrastructure requirements are already satisfied - and
| ~3000 people died on US roads last year.
| AtomicOrbital wrote:
| 30,000+ fatal vehicle accidents annually, not 3000
| JoshGG wrote:
| The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has
| released its early estimate of traffic fatalities for 2021.
| NHTSA projects that an estimated 42,915 people died in
| motor vehicle traffic crashes last year, a 10.5% increase
| from the 38,824 fatalities in 2020. The projection is the
| highest number of fatalities since 2005 and the largest
| annual percentage increase in the Fatality Analysis
| Reporting System's history. Behind each of these numbers is
| a life tragically lost, and a family left behind.
|
| https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-
| estimate-2021-tra...
| darkerside wrote:
| This sounded off to me, and according to Google it is. You
| are too low by an order of magnitude.
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| Cars and trucks continuously degrade the roads beneath them.
| The infrastructure requirement is _never_ satisfied -- it
| requires constant, very expensive upkeep.
| [deleted]
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| What if cars were mini maglev trains (or pods), hovering
| above buried tracks on the road and can 'convert' into a
| car for last-mile delivery, and parking.
|
| Then you'd still have the asphalt etc, but hovering over it
| - you degrade it less than actually driving on it. In this
| situation you could order up any size vehicle you need from
| 2 seater to 20 seater.
| gizmo wrote:
| Not to mention that the upside of self-driving cars is capped
| at the cost of an uber driver, and even in a world with
| ubiquitous fully autonomous cars you still want public
| transportation.
|
| Driver assistance on highways is probably the right 80/20
| solution, at least for the foreseeable future.
| weezin wrote:
| > Not to mention that the upside of self-driving cars is
| capped at the cost of an uber driver
|
| An uber driver that can drive 24/7. Also there are a lot of
| cars that sit in parking lots 95% of the day that can be
| used.
| smileysteve wrote:
| The parking lot problem is way far off though, and efforts
| like Zipcar attacked the utilization problem but have not
| seen wide adoption
| Paradigma11 wrote:
| I am excited because then you can have far cheaper taxis ->
| less people need to own a car.
| Sahbak wrote:
| Automatic public transportation will solve a lot of issues.
| occz wrote:
| Luckily, that already exists in driverless trains.
| painted-now wrote:
| I think what looks interesting on the surface for self-driving
| cars is that "it is just a software problem". The other
| projects you describe require actual "stuff".
|
| Still, that argument doesn't count if the software problem is
| "impossible" to implement, or if it turns out that you also
| need "stuff" for it.
|
| Edit: typo
| concordDance wrote:
| I dunno, being able to easily get places (to visit or work or
| have fun) is pretty important. Time is finite and valuable, so
| things that less us spend time in more satisfying ways are
| valuable.
| c-cube wrote:
| Denser cities and electric bikes would go a long way. But
| somehow in the US people only want to go places in a deadly
| metal box, even to fetch bread.
| fooker wrote:
| Some people also want to go to places outside cities! ^_^
| Keyframe wrote:
| - 1.3 million deaths worldwide, annually (94% cause by human
| error)
|
| - existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no need
| to build anything)
|
| - reduced traffic congestion (autonomous vehicles can better
| react/drive)
|
| - improved supply chains (autonomous trucks) (can work 0-24)
|
| just to name a few off top of my head
| lamontcg wrote:
| - more autonomy for disabled people / elderly
|
| (although the risk is clearly that vehicles will transition
| into subscription services that cost many thousands of
| dollars a year and price them all out)
| dionidium wrote:
| > 1.3 million deaths worldwide, annually (94% cause by human
| error)
|
| You don't need full autonomy to mostly fix this, but the
| fixes are politically untenable (currently). The cars should
| be speed-governed, they should be speed-limit aware -- the
| car should _routinely_ be overriding the desire of the
| driver. No, you can 't go into the bike lane to get around
| traffic. No, you can't make the split-second decision to
| swerve around a car braking in front of you. No, you can't
| operate the vehicle at 100 mph in a residential zone. No, you
| can't go that fast right now; it's raining way too hard,
| doofus. No, you can't operate your vehicle onto a scheduled
| parade route.
|
| You don't need full autonomy to create cars that prevent a
| significant percentage of driver -- to put it charitably --
| _errors_. These are fairly straightforward problems. The
| opposition is political.
| airza wrote:
| The existing infrastructure is _absolutely_ going somewhere.
| Maintaining asphalt roads and highways is a constant,
| expensive, and neverending struggle.
| zinekeller wrote:
| > existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no
| need to build anything)
|
| I think that this is a sunk-cost fallacy. Sure, you would
| need to build infrastructure for trains, but after that
| trains are now reasonably automated, can carry cargo, and do
| other things with the exception of stopping at the exact
| destination you wanted to (in other words, it requires
| predetermined stops which people outside the US shrugs and
| just walk or bike the last feet). Also, they're proven to
| work: even China (which previously didn't have trains to its
| far-flung places) and they've done what you've expect. I
| think that the sole reason that anyone wants to invest in
| automated (non-train) driving is because trains are boring
| while AI is oh-so-shiny.
| cwalv wrote:
| > with the exception of stopping at the exact destination
| you wanted to
|
| This, and leaving from the exact starting point you want
| to, at the exact time you want to, without out-of-the-way
| intermediate stops that you don't want, without switching
| lines. I can also easily move a table, couch, 2 shopping
| carts full of groceries, etc.
|
| It's not an insignificant difference in convenience
| yreg wrote:
| Trains won't do last mile delivery.
| oblio wrote:
| Current trains? Not directly.
|
| But with the levels of investment in cars and roads, we
| could have mini trains on reduced tracks (think stuff
| like mine tracks) going almost anywhere, probably for a
| fraction of maintaining our road infrastructure and cars.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| We're not going to stop maintaining roads. They exist for
| military defense as much as they do for road trips and
| trucks.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highway_System_(Un
| ite...
| jaxrtech wrote:
| Or have the train get your delivery drones close enough
| to the last mile for the battery to last :^)
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I mean, 1.3M people die every year in road accidents. Real
| number is likely far higher since reporting isn't uniform
| across the world.
|
| That's at least one reason to warrant the investment.
| bumblebritches5 wrote:
| almost_usual wrote:
| People in the US will absolutely die on a hill for their car.
|
| Companies will invest endless amounts of money to convince you
| cars are the future, their infrastructure isn't wasteful, and
| they're good for the environment.
|
| People buy into this because it fits their existing lifestyle.
| amelius wrote:
| Funny thing is, with self driving cars we can actually own
| less cars as you can just hail them. More convenient and less
| waste.
| newsclues wrote:
| A) people want transportation as a service without the human of
| a taxi or driver, not just for cost but comfort and not having
| to associate with people (of a lower class)
|
| B) creating a scalable transportation as a service business for
| profit and power (data)
| amelius wrote:
| Because the current generation of VCs watched Knight Rider as a
| child?
| awillen wrote:
| A hyperloop is a much, much harder problem. Not technically,
| but practically. Just look at California's high speed rail and
| how that's gone - with that history, the idea that we could
| introduce hyperloops in US cities is, to put it only mildly
| punnily, a pipe dream.
|
| As others have pointed out, millions are dying in car accidents
| now, so a "more compelling vision for the future" is much less
| important than something that can get done. While we certainly
| haven't seen the progress many have hoped for/promised on self-
| driving cars, I'd wager everything I own that we'll see a
| significant percent of cars on the road in CA operating
| autonomously before we see that high speed rail finished.
| sgtfrankieboy wrote:
| Hyperloop is crap, just go with highspeed trains. They get the
| job done in city corridors.
|
| But you can't have a train stop in front of your house... Nor
| can you build massive tubes everywhere in place of cheap roads.
|
| Walking, Bikes, Busses, Metros, Trains, Cars, Planes. They all
| have a place in how we transport, right now the distribution
| between them is just out of whack.
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| Hyperloop is still cool because you could have really fast
| transit over large areas. Mass transit across cities is still
| quite slow. High speed trains are fine but just not fast
| enough. Imagine a large city where you could get from one
| side to the other in only a few minutes.
| wil421 wrote:
| Musk coined Hyperloop as a distraction to high speed rail.
| He wanted people to buy Teslas instead of thinking about
| high speed rail in California. A lot of people fell for his
| con.
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| It is a shame that other partial vacuum systems are not
| being developed. They seem like a useful concept, fast,
| less air resistance means less energy use. Surely a
| technology you'd want to have in a future city.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| why does it need to be a vacuum system? Couldn't a
| similar device be a pod-like maglev device that floats
| above a magnetic track and maybe can temporarily hover
| albeit more slowly via some drone-like propeller on the
| bottom when 'off track', or for final-mile portions,
| could even turn into a car when not in maglev mode.
| lozenge wrote:
| If you chose to build a train with only two stops, yes you
| could get from one side to the other in only a few minutes.
| That would have its downsides, like the station not being
| near your destination, which is why it's rarely done. You
| would also need a very straight track, which means lots of
| space for points (places where trains separate from the
| route onto platforms). This constraint is also shared by
| Hyperloop.
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| I gather that you never used public transport in Tokyo.
| andrepd wrote:
| For anything except sparsely populated rural areas, a train
| gets you to the city/town, and a mix of public transport +
| e-bike/e-scooter gets you to your final destination. This is
| potentially quicker, and much _much_ more efficient than
| lugging 2-ton capsules around and needing hundreds of
| thousands of square km of land to keep the things parked 95%
| of the time.
| jimmytidey wrote:
| I think non-human payloads make more sense for virtually every
| kind of innovation:
|
| -- Radically reduced safety margins, if the vehicle itself
| contains no humans.
|
| -- You can often move cargo at any time of day or night, and
| therefore do a much more sophisticated job of collaboratively
| load-levelling traffic.
|
| -- Doesn't matter how uncomfortable a non-human payload is with
| in reason. Acceleration, cornering, waiting, daylight, motion
| sickness are all constraints that are eased for cargo.
|
| -- It would be nice if you can move freight anywhere, but even
| if you can only serve a very limited network its still useful -
| say between fixed points in major cities. By contrast, a car
| that can't go almost everywhere is very severely limited.
|
| Example: in major cities, all the freight moves in lorries,
| which are extremely dangerous and polluting. Meanwhile, the
| humans are packed into trains in underground tunnels. Surely
| freight should be moving in autonomous underground trains and
| the humans enjoying lorry free surface travel?
| usrusr wrote:
| Humans are freight units that embark and disembark and change
| vehicles autonomously with very little instruction. Other
| freight units aren't. Parcel hubs are a hard problem that's
| far from solved enough to set them up in masses.
| jimmytidey wrote:
| You can have humans 'embark' and 'disembark' the freight,
| the same way we do now...
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Companies are going to die on that hill. I would not call it a
| waste of money.
|
| It might work in the end, and even if the current tech is not
| sufficient to attain the goal of fully autonomous driving, the
| car is a very good guinea pig for robotic research.
|
| We're collectively learning a lot in this process.
|
| I am not surprised that it turns out to be much more difficult
| than anticipated.
|
| I think it is 95% vaporware, but I liked the ideas behind the
| latest Nvidia presentation.
|
| Machine learning is all about the training quality, useful robots
| (such as autonomous vehicles) have to operate in the real world.
|
| We can't have robots that kills by accident.
|
| It is difficult/risky/costly to train them in the real world.
| Good virtual twins are needed to achieve safe training with
| infinite repetitions in extreme situations.
|
| Not sure if that is sufficient, but it is worth trying.
| bwilli123 wrote:
| We already have self driving cars. We call it public transport.
| techwiz137 wrote:
| The idea is to have private transportation, some of us like the
| peace and quiet.
| Foreignborn wrote:
| Cars aren't quiet
| flohofwoe wrote:
| That "peace and quiet" is only for car owners though, not so
| much for pedestrians.
| paulcole wrote:
| If you like private transport, then you should be doing
| whatever you can to get as many people as possible to use
| public transport so there's less traffic on the road for you.
| concordDance wrote:
| Doesn't allow point to point. I lose about 5 hours a week due
| to cycling and using public transport.
| presentation wrote:
| Then public transit should be built to wherever you live.
| given the amount of investment to self driving cars and
| maintenance of roads that are way bigger than they should be,
| we could be using that capital for transit.
| lozenge wrote:
| Yet remove all the cycling and public transport and
| everybody's journey would be slower due to the road filling
| up with traffic.
| CyanLite4 wrote:
| These companies are swinging for the fences and instead striking
| out. A base hit would suffice for most people.
|
| I just want a reliable car that can steer in the highway so I can
| eat a burger or answer a text message. GM's SuperCruise is nearly
| there but has too many safety restrictions. It doesn't need to
| work in inclement weather or construction zones. Being able to
| answer emails or watch a YouTube clip on a long road trip gives
| me back precious time that is worth paying a few thousand for.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I believe there was some news that Mercedes was going for
| exactly that use case some time ago.
| [deleted]
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Why don't you go by train?
|
| If you don't like driving, don't drive.
| joshuaheard wrote:
| I think the mistake was trying for full pattern recognition of
| the environment to control the car. Even human drivers need lane
| markers and traffic signals. They should make a custom "Botts
| Dot" that the AI can use to stay in the lanes. Every intersection
| should have a server broadcasting instructions to the vehicles to
| control traffic at that intersection. I'm not an expert, however.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| It will come eventually, but I wonder how much of my lifetime I
| will be able to appreciate it, i'm already almost 40 and I don't
| drive.
|
| I live in a small city, I can walk most places and I get the
| train to larger cities for social events, I save a huge amount of
| money and I love it.
|
| But the trains are awful, good, decent public transport and self-
| driving transportation would be awesome. I might never get to the
| point of having owned a car and i will be pretty happy with that.
| nikanj wrote:
| The roads clogged by cars would be replaced by the roads
| clogged by self-driving cars. Self-driving cars are not the
| solution to awful public transport
| mg wrote:
| $100B is not that much when you compare it to the value self-
| driving cars will create.
|
| There are over 1 billion cars on the road which need humans to
| drive them. How much are they used? I don't know. Let's say one
| ride per day. When cars turn into a service business, the
| "driver" will be software. What will be paid to the driver? Let's
| say $1 per ride.
|
| That is 1B * $1 * 365 = $365B per year. Give that a p/e ratio of
| 10 and the value is $3650B.
|
| So we could spent 30 times more and still break even.
| roenxi wrote:
| I would like to nit-pick and say you're estimating some novel
| metric. The value add would be somewhat higher than that
| because the alternative is a human driver, so the value-add of
| the software is approximately ($/h value of driver x hours)
| that it frees up to do something else. Plus all the evidence I
| see suggests that whatever the current state, sooner rather
| than later computers are going to be superhuman at driving
| (like they are at most other discrete tasks) and save a lot of
| lives. Plus reduced wear & tear on vehicles.
|
| $365B in value is probably a serious undercall. The only reason
| to complain here is if _only_ $100B has been put in to the
| venture so far.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>Plus all the evidence I see suggests that whatever the
| current state, sooner rather than later computers are going
| to be superhuman at driving (like they are at most other
| discrete tasks) and save a lot of lives.
|
| What is that evidence, exactly? I agree that we might
| eventually get there, but the scale seems to be 50-100 years
| at this point. We are as arrogant as the researchers in the
| 60s who famously announced that absolutely perfect image
| recognition is only 1-2 years away - except the problem is
| several orders of magnitude harder.
| roenxi wrote:
| Typically from what I've seen computers go a long period
| being hopeless at a task, then slightly subhuman-par-
| superhuman very quickly. It seems to me that as far as
| algorithm-and-Hz cares human intelligence lives in a very
| narrow window and once computers get close to it they tend
| to jump over it.
|
| I'd judge self driving to be slightly subhuman right now -
| there are definitely worse drivers on the road (typically
| impaired - drunk, near-blind or high). I'd expect
| superhuman performance this decade just based on that and
| the rate of improvement in anything AI related right now.
| subroutine wrote:
| I think computers will become superhuman at driving under the
| _right conditions_.
|
| However, there will inevitably be conditions that require the
| use of general intelligence (rather than driving heuristics),
| and in those situations all you can do is pray the computer
| acts rationally despite not having GI.
|
| I think self driving cars have already passed the test of
| "number of crashes" or "number of fatalities" per mile
| driven. But I don't think that's enough to sway the public,
| if every once in a billion miles a self driving car slowly
| drives off a cliff for no apparent reason.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >I think self driving cars have already passed the test of
| "number of crashes" or "number of fatalities" per mile
| driven.
|
| This is not definitively known. The distribution of
| conditions under which self driving cars operate is very
| different from the distribution of human driving. Self
| driving car miles are disproportionately on the highway,
| with little traffic, in perfect weather (i.e. by far the
| safest driving conditions). In addition, we don't know how
| many disengagements (or remote interventions) would have
| resulted in an accident.
| subroutine wrote:
| True, true. However, if I had to bet... I'd bet in a
| fully self driving world (using today's tech) there'd be
| overall far fewer fatal accidents. However there'd also
| be a lot of bullshit we are simply unwilling to deal with
| (e.g. cars going 10mph in the rain; slow motion fender
| benders; car unwilling to turn left; gridlock at
| intersections; lots of random oddities). I guess my point
| is that safety metrics are certainly important stats to
| gauge self driving progress, but certainly not the only
| metrics that matter, and perhaps not even the most
| important.
| Retric wrote:
| I think that's underestimating just how bad people are at
| driving. There is little meaningful difference for other
| drivers from a bunch of self driving cars suddenly
| blocking traffic and an actual traffic accident.
|
| People aren't going to trust cars to safely do level 5 if
| they can't do level 4 99.999% of the time. So sure there
| will be occasional stories of i95 blocked for 3 hours due
| to software bug, but how is that different from a major
| accident that occurs regularly?
| subroutine wrote:
| This is the argument self driving car companies are
| currently trying to make. My contention is this reason
| doesn't seem compelling to the general public. For
| whatever reason the public seems more tolerant of human
| error than machine error. At this point anyway. I foresee
| a long period of trust-building before widespread
| adoption.
|
| An interesting experiment would be for Uber to send two
| cars for pickup, one human and one self driving. And let
| people choose.
| Retric wrote:
| That's fair. I suspect we are at least 30 years from a
| drunk to be legally able to order their self driving car
| home without issue simply due to cultural inertia.
|
| Assuming we get to that point it will probably be another
| 20 years after that before non self driving is seen in
| the same way as driving a motorcycle is today. Aka
| something that's not suicidal, but defiantly excessively
| dangerous.
| Retric wrote:
| Nothing says self driving cars can't phone a call center
| for the 0.001% edge cases. Just add a cellphone connection
| and a Starlink receiver in the roof for a backup. At which
| point we would need to add some cell reception to some
| tunnels and cars can have literally global coverage.
|
| High drips the problem drops from near AGI to not
| outrunning the cars ability to stop without hitting
| anything.
| tgv wrote:
| It's not only off topic, it's also wildly unrealistic (IMO).
| 1$/day may seem little, but that's for middle-class US
| standards, and it gets proportionally worse when you realize
| many people make more than one trip per day. What incentive do
| you have for people to pay that amount?
| tkk23 wrote:
| With self-driving cars, you don't have to own cars anymore.
| That $1 per day frees your $5.000 per year budget for owning
| a car.
| gambiting wrote:
| No one is going to rent you a car for $1/ride, self driving
| or not in fact I doubt you could rent a bike for that much.
| Even if you eliminate the driver from the equation, you
| still have to pay for the value of the car, wear and tear,
| and fuel/electricity to run it. The $1 on top is an
| extremely optimistic cost of a self driving software only.
|
| Let me put it this way - it would already be cheaper for me
| to just take an Uber to work than own my car. And yet,
| I(and I imagine most people will too) prefer to own my car.
| tgv wrote:
| A short taxi ride costs much, much more than 1$.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| I'm not sure I get your valuation model. "we're" not investing
| in self driving it's the car companies, because (presumably)
| they believe that self driving will make their cars more
| sellable compared with other brands.
|
| If after another $50B or $100B spent some companies start to
| pull back on funding because they think diverting funds to
| other areas will give a better return (better batteries,
| cheaper manufacturing etc), it's likely others will too.
| davidgerard wrote:
| > will create.
|
| just think of the huge economic value that faster-than-light
| travel will unlock!!
|
| you're assuming your conclusion
| JamesianP wrote:
| But we know driving is possible because people can do it.
| paulcole wrote:
| Are you interested in investing in my lead into gold startup?
| Just think of the value it _will create_.
| [deleted]
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Because we are nowhere close to Artificial Intelligence in
| layman's sense of understanding. Not even close, as long our
| computing principles are still based on zero and one.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Even After $100B, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106739 - Oct 2022 (107
| comments)
| dubeye wrote:
| Is it binary? I get a lot of value from the level 2 systems
| already common. And appreciate the incremental improvements.
| Lutger wrote:
| Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public
| transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives.
| What a tragedy.
| pirate787 wrote:
| It wasn't your money.
| ehnto wrote:
| It's a non-trivial amount of our society's wealth, doesn't
| really matter who owns it in regards to talking about it's
| use. Just like we can talk about how spending a billion hours
| on reality TV is probably not an amazing use of time. It's
| not our time, do what you want, but you can still talk about
| it.
| oblio wrote:
| I'll be blunt about this.
|
| Most of this research is funded in the US and the hyper
| individualistic Americans as a group don't believe in public
| transport.
| D13Fd wrote:
| That's really not true. Americans love good public
| transportation where it's available and works well. Most US
| cities have lots of buses, and many have light rail. But in a
| big country with a spread-out population, public
| transportation is tough.
|
| American _corporations_ perhaps aren't as interested in
| public transportation, because there is no money to be made.
| And that is who is largely funding this self-driving vehicle
| research.
| dionidium wrote:
| > _But in a big country with a spread-out population,
| public transportation is tough._
|
| This is oft-repeated, but it doesn't really survive a
| moment's scrutiny. You might as well say it's pointless to
| build a path from your back door to your shed, because the
| county is just too big.
| oblio wrote:
| The built up areas of the US have almost the same
| population density as the EU ones.
|
| Nobody cares about the Rockies or farm fields or Death
| Valley.
| Fiahil wrote:
| > Americans love good public transportation [...] Most US
| cities have lots of buses
|
| So... Apparently not...
|
| The USA is probably the worst place in the world for 1)
| high speed trains 2) buses. And the only place I know where
| the train _waits_ for cars to go through.
|
| If only they could see by themselves how bad it is during
| their next trip to Switzerland, the Netherlands, Japan,
| London, Paris (even France in general) and many many other
| countries and cities that have a functional network of high
| speed trains, metro, tramway and regional lines...
|
| I hope you're not ready to die on that hill.
| SergeAx wrote:
| Self driving tech could and will be applied to public
| transportation too. With self-driving mini-buses we can serve
| more destination much more efficiently, fine-tuning commute
| supply to better fit the exact demand.
| jmartrican wrote:
| My commuter train be packed though.
| oblio wrote:
| Where? And is it filled with people coming from the local
| P&R?
| kybernetyk wrote:
| Having been the victim of public transport for the first 30
| years of my life: nope. You just can't polish a turd. (Maybe
| other countries can but here in Germany it's a lost cause and
| you can't make individual mobility expensive enough for me to
| ever take public transport again).
| ninethirty wrote:
| In Minneapolis, our billion dollar tram has become a rolling
| homeless shelter.
| pavlov wrote:
| As a counter-anecdote, I've been using public transport
| exclusively for 35 years (since first grade) in Helsinki,
| London and New York, and never felt like I'm a "victim" of
| anything.
|
| I only ever take a car for trips outside the city.
| mft_ wrote:
| Indeed, and I think you're quietly pointing at the nub of
| the problem: _if_ you like in a major city or sufficiently
| close to one of its public transport 'spokes', _and_ you
| want to travel to somewhere also covered in a similar
| manner (be that short- or long-distance) public transport
| is usually somewhere between great and acceptable. As soon
| as you fall outside that usability window, it often becomes
| close to unusable.
|
| (One exception: local countryside bud services can
| sometimes be really valuable for local travel; but they
| often don't link well with other public transport
| modalities, IME.)
| Spivak wrote:
| The budget for just the MTA in NYC is 18 billion / year and
| that's really only for the ongoing costs. A 100 billion
| investment in public transportation over the entire US over 10
| years once wouldn't have done shit.
|
| A fleet of self driving cars are realistically the only
| scalable public transportation because the costs increase with
| the number of people not the area to be served. Do people just
| forget how unbelievably spread out everything but the densest
| cities are? 24/7 bus service to within 0.5 miles of every house
| in my city is already impossible even if you allowed them to be
| on the every 4 hour. To replace cars people would realistically
| need them on the hour and want on the 20 minutes. Bet you my
| shirt at that point it would just be cheaper for the city to
| just run a free taxi service.
| Sakos wrote:
| This pretty much. Building public infrastructure is insanely
| expensive and there are capacity limits that can't easily be
| solved. We need to add public transport to the mix that 1)
| doesn't require heavy additional investment in infrastructure
| and 2) solves convenience concerns that make buses
| unappealing and 3) can reliably replace privately owned
| vehicles.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| I'm about as big of a fan of mass transit as you can get, but
| this is completely overblown.
|
| That's $1Bn for the hundred largest cities in the world.
|
| Assuming even 40% of that went to the US, that's $1Bn for the
| top 40 cities. That leaves out 22 entire states [0], and like
| 75% of the population...
|
| Look to NYC, LA, and SF for what $1Bn gets you... It's about 1
| mile of subway [1]. And it takes close to 15 years to build.
|
| We wouldn't all be riding around on space elevators with
| materially better lives if this money was invested in subways
| or trains.
|
| If you spent $40Bn on busses - you'd have to spend another
| $250Bn to pay people to ride them...
|
| Self-driving cars will eventually change cities. I think
| there's evidence it's already starting to happen.
|
| I don't think this money would've been better spent on trains,
| and definitely not busses.
|
| What else are you thinking of?
|
| I'd be interested in a better cost breakdown of bike lanes and
| how much it would cost to get a significant percentage of
| people in cities biking & scootering around - but I'm
| skeptical, and also, it's not mass transit!
|
| NYC installed 29.5 miles of protected bike lanes last year [2].
| I can't find the cost, but next year they're asking for $3.1Bn
| to build 500 miles of protected bike lanes, among many other
| things [3]. I know it costs less than $1M to pave a two-lane
| road one mile [4] - so a protected bike lane _should_ be well
| under $1M - but then everything costs way more in the city...
|
| If protected bike lanes cost substantially less than $5M per
| mile in the city (like $0.5M) - $40Bn could get you pretty far!
|
| That's 80k miles of protected bike lanes! That's about 4x the
| amount of total bike lanes we have now.
|
| Bike commute rates in NYC are decent (by US standards). I'd
| love to see a study on how much bike commute rates increased
| after these new lanes were completed.
|
| Copenhagen has only 240 miles of bike lanes and 600 miles of
| paths for 70 square miles and 750k people [4]. That's enough to
| get 62% of people commuting by bike [5]!
|
| For the top 40 cities, you'd be looking at like 80k miles of
| protected bike lanes for 4000 square miles and 81M people.
| That's better than Copenhagen!
|
| That could potentially get you close to 62% of people biking
| instead of driving - just depends on if that many people live
| within 5 miles of work / school / going out. 5 miles being the
| average commute distance in Copenhagen [6].
|
| 62% of cars off the road in the top 40 US cities would
| DEFINITELY change my life for the better - but I'd be surprised
| if we could even get 15%. Still, it's something you could do in
| a couple of years - and for $40Bn - would definitely be worth
| it. But it's decidedly not _mass_ transit.
|
| [0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/vividmaps.com/map-of-largest-
| me...
|
| [1]
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyre...
|
| [2]
| https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/cyclingintheci...
|
| [3] https://www.6sqft.com/council-wants-additional-3-1b-to-
| build...
|
| [4] https://homeguide.com/costs/asphalt-driveway-
| cost#:~:text=Co....
|
| [5] https://www.latimes.com/world-
| nation/story/2019-08-07/copenh...
|
| [6] https://www.latimes.com/world-
| nation/story/2019-08-07/copenh....)
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| How far has the $100bn spent on self-driving cars moved the
| needle?
| biztos wrote:
| I don't think you're refuting the parent post so much as
| lamenting the difficulty of doing anything "infrastructure"
| in today's America.
|
| There are lots of places all over the world where $1B would
| make a big difference in many, many people's lives -- and
| where people eagerly ride the busses they actually have,
| which are often not that nice.
|
| Do we need things to work in the USA for them to be worth
| doing?
| benj111 wrote:
| But you could say that about a lot of things. Instead of going
| to Starbucks you could have fed a starving African for a week.
|
| Instead of wasting research money on computer networking, you
| could spend it on stamps and envelopes.
|
| Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But you don't know what's going
| to come out of that research before hand.
| emporas wrote:
| Well, why not then create bigger cars, or smaller buses?
| Between 5 people in a car or a 100 people in a bus, an optimal
| solution should be able to converge slowly, to 20 people in a
| vehicle. It would be different for every city, or region or
| country.
|
| Most cars spend most of their time, being stationary in a
| parking lot or a garage, 93 percent of the time to be more
| specific, or 23 hours/day. Buses spend a lot less time being
| stationary. The trade off here is the speed of driving. Cars
| offer an unlimited amount of speed, while buses do not. An
| optimal economic solution should exist in which the economic
| actors, i.e. people will figure it out after a lot of trial n
| error.
|
| A crucial factor in self driving cars no one mentioned, is the
| data the machine uses to drive should be incorruptible. A
| blockchain which supports billions of tps, offer a solution to
| that.
|
| Additionally road variables change over time, and data should
| change as well. Economic actors, not just people should feed
| the machines with updated data every day. That means that a
| marketplace of information is required, in which the most
| efficient economic actors with the best accuracy and the best
| reputation are rewarded, and the worst economic actors, who's
| data aggregation cause a lot of crashes, fall off the market.
|
| A marketplace of information, doesn't exist for the time being,
| so there is no chance for self driving cars to be safe and
| effective.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| I think the goal is to solve public transport by having a fleet
| of autonomous vehicles that pick you up where you are and drop
| you off where you need to go and would roam freely in between -
| basically driverless, electric ueber.
|
| As cars need charging, they would congregate at some charging
| plot outside the busy areas.
|
| Personally, I rather like this vision as it combines the best
| of public transport and car traffic. Especially, if the
| existing, personally owned cars that just stand around 99% of
| the time vanish over time.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| This isn't going to work for the most obvious case: rush
| hour. Which is the case that is the root cause of most
| issues.
|
| If you're still stuck with peak road usage nearly equivalent
| to that today, your goal isn't to solve prominent issues
| today.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| I guess it's just a question of capacity. If you can cram a
| lot of travelers into a subway train during rush hour, you
| could just as well imagine an uber pool type function where
| clever route finding combines riders into a single car
| during rush hour.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Carpooling failed because people prefer having everything
| under control in the face of how cheap car-based travel
| is already. Thinking self-driving cars will fix a luxury
| problem is a pipedream.
|
| Whether it is self-driving with an incredibly optimized
| algorithm (good luck with that) or manual carpooling, the
| same problems are still going to bubble up. The solutions
| already exist. We, as a society, just don't want to deal
| with the consequences.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| If you have a networked grid of cars you can run them much
| closer together and increase road capacity. (Even with
| failures, likely less dangerous than leaving critical
| decisions to individual human drivers.) You can also
| automate away the poor behaviours that contribute to
| delays.
|
| This would require collaborative networked/distributed
| self-driving, which is not the same as the let's-use-this-
| as-an-excuse-for-AI-research individual self-driving we
| have today.
|
| But really most people shouldn't be commuting anyway. WFH
| should be much more of a thing, even if it's not full-time.
| Avicebron wrote:
| Brilliant option, we could cut the front off one car and
| the back off another and weld them together, think of the
| room saved for more people! Talk about a dense network!
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Yes, exactly. The whole premise of self-driving removing
| peak load rests on arguments which exist in theory, but
| are stupidly difficult to create in practice. The costs
| made today will pale in comparison to the costs required
| to get this off the ground.
|
| Meanwhile, we have solutions which work today, several of
| which _can_ be done today. WFH, incentivizing working
| outside peak hours, building more densely and closer to
| cities, investing in public transport, and more. We just
| don 't _want_ to do it.
|
| We see this in The Netherlands. Public transport has
| gotten noticeably worse, car usage is going up as a
| result, and roads are expanding to compensate. In a
| country where housing is a massive problem, which means
| people will move to less desirable places (read: places
| further away from work hubs). Now we have a chicken-and-
| egg problem with regards to public transport, and
| increased car usage is pressuring space which could be
| used to create more homes and _remove_ cars from the
| peak.
|
| We simply don't need to wait another 10-15 years for
| self-driving to finally be a thing. What needs to be
| done, is accepting that things will suck for a bit to
| then get better eventually. Continuing on the same path
| with self-driving cars will only stall the problem
| instead of solve it, anyway.
| CrimpCity wrote:
| This is true but the gains are surprisingly limited. From
| Algorithmic game theory there's the concept of "the price
| of anarchy" it measures the gap between cooperation (a
| centrally designed or coordinated solution) and
| competition (where each participant is independently
| trying to maximize the outcome for themselves). Selfish
| routing basically what we have now has price of 4/3. This
| means the greedy status quo is only 33% worse than
| perfect coordination.
|
| I'll quote from one of my favorite books Algorithms to
| Live By:
|
| "It's true that self-driving cars should reduce the
| number of road accidents and may be able to drive more
| closely together, both of which would speed up traffic.
| But from a congestion standpoint, the fact that the price
| of anarchy is only 4/3 as congested as perfect
| coordination means that perfectly coordinated commutes
| will only be 3/4 as congested as they are now."
| harry8 wrote:
| I too rather like rainbows, unicorns, chocolate waterfalls
| and free happiness growing on trees as a solution to all
| problems.
| wolframhempel wrote:
| I feel that this one is a rather realistic solution. It
| uses existing technology (cars), existing infrastructure
| (streets) and existing data infrastructure (cloud
| providers) to solve a massive problem. The "only" thing
| that's missing is the self driving part (the only being in
| very large quotes of course).
|
| This means its much less of a stretch to get this scenario
| working than proposals like Hyperloop, Flying Taxis or
| other things that require a lot more innovation and
| infrastructure work before they become feasable.
| aniken wrote:
| The "only" thing missing, is to get the best engineers,
| and pay them double what they normally make.
|
| Source: https://youtu.be/DkGMY63FF3Q
| jonas21 wrote:
| This is all private money. If these companies didn't spend the
| $100B developing autonomous vehicles, it wouldn't suddenly be
| available for building public transit.
|
| Beyond that, $100B doesn't go as far toward building transit as
| you might expect. For example, San Diego recently spent $2.3
| billion on a light rail extension that's projected to have
| 34,700 daily trips by 2030. If you assume most of these are
| round-trips, it's serving fewer than 18,000 people. Spending
| $100B at this rate would serve around 750,000 people (0.2% of
| the U.S. population).
|
| The most cost-effective form of public transit in most places
| is busses because they can reuse existing road infrastructure,
| and in the U.S., labor accounts for around 70% of the cost of
| operating busses. As a result, autonomous driving technology
| should be helpful in scaling public transit systems as well.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Do you mean the La Jolla trolley line? It seems like a nice
| idea (I've lived next to several trolley stops) but the
| virtually nonexistent ticket validation tends to make the
| trolley a magnet for negativity, and keeps me in my car.
| themitigating wrote:
| It's not government money for the most part, these companies
| would not have put it into public transportation if they didn't
| work on self driving cars
| iinnPP wrote:
| According to the UN, it's enough to save over 40million lives
| (for almost two years)
|
| We have our priorities all twisted.
| kybernetyk wrote:
| And what after those 2 years?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Same question applies to self-driving research.
| melling wrote:
| The knowledge gained is forever. Once we learn something
| in science and engineering...
| rrss wrote:
| ... it vanishes when the companies fold?
| melling wrote:
| Unlikely. The knowledge is with the employees, filed
| patents, etc.
|
| in fact, the information is probably constantly leaking
| out of the company. It's hard to keep secrets.
| jongjong wrote:
| It goes to show how much office politics has been strangling
| innovation. I'm sure this problem could have been solved for $100
| million.
| sgtfrankieboy wrote:
| So? Okay, we're not there yet with autonomous vehicles, and have
| spend tons of money on it. But the tech we have now didn't exist
| a decade ago. Give it another decade.
| amelius wrote:
| Perhaps we should pour more money in adapting the
| infrastructure to these cars, so they can become more like a
| train in some sense.
|
| And perhaps we can design city centers to be car free.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| _adapting the infrastructure to these cars_
|
| This is an important piece I have not seen addressed in the
| US. In places where there is snow and ice on the road a good
| part of the year self driving cars will need help from
| sensors and guide objects in some form. Perhaps sensors
| injected into the road? Humans barely manage in my area
| because people have a cognitive awareness and memory of the
| terrain. Road lines are often absent. Sidewalks are obscured.
| Even simple things like parking at the grocery store is
| _relative parking_ and people just make a best-guess as to
| where a spot is.
|
| I am also curious if any testing has been done in snow
| blizzards and squalls. Squalls can occur without warning and
| visibility drops to nothing.
| wainstead wrote:
| This. I recall most predictions saying 2024 would be the
| tipping point, but even then I doubt regulations at the local
| and national level will change that fast.
| rvz wrote:
| Another decade for prototype self-driving cars to cover another
| state part of the US? $100BN in funding these gadgets and
| contraptions that don't work. Not even Tesla FSD can drive
| itself reliably at night _without_ supervision, because it is
| not Level 5.
|
| Until LiDAR becomes more cheaper and these cars CAN drive
| themselves safely at night without supervision in any state at
| scale and as advertised like a robotaxi, then you're looking
| into multiple decades of these research prototypes being
| 'useful'.
|
| So far, that $100BN is a VC scam until proven otherwise.
| sgtfrankieboy wrote:
| >Another decade of researching a cancer cure to cover another
| different type of cancer? $1400BN in funding these cancer
| treatments that don't work. Not even radiotherapy can fully
| cure cancer...
|
| Thats how I read it, sorry. We made tremendous leaps in the
| past decade with improving automated driving, is it fully
| automatic? No. Does it mean we should somehow stop funding
| it? No.
| lizen_one wrote:
| LiDAR is finally cheap.
|
| I repeat my comment on LiDAR that I gave a few days ago. The
| gist is that LiDAR is cheap and you will be able to buy a
| LiDAR with sufficient resolution for in the next 1-2 years
| because it will be integrated in normal passenger cars for
| L2/L3 assistants. These cars are coming out now or in the
| next year.
|
| LiDAR is finally getting cheap. OEMs (like VW) are very price
| sensitive. It is estimated the sensors from Valeo cost about
| 500 dollars. The fact that you see more and more normal
| passenger cars with higher resolution LiDARs means that
| LiDARs are getting cheaper.
|
| The Audi A8 used Valeo's (with Ibeo) first generation low
| resolution LiDAR Scala 1 from the automotive supplier Valeo.
| Mercedes new models will be using Valeo's second (or third)
| generation LiDAR. All these are used for L2/L3 assistants.
| Valeo is a traditional large automotive supplier.
|
| Luminar, a public company from the US, cooperates with Volvo.
| Some models will come with a LiDAR in the base configuration.
| These are "new LiDARs" with high resolution.
|
| Innoviz, a 'startup' from Isreal, will supplies LiDARs to VW.
| Its angular resolution is (in its focus area) about 0.1 (or
| 0.2) degrees, which is sufficient for higher levels of
| autonomy and surpasses/equals the resolution of the expensive
| Velodyne sensors of the past. They will probably be in the
| same price range. Due to the limited FOV due to the
| technology, you will need multiply LiDARs.
|
| Many new models from Chinese car brands will also ve equipped
| with a LiDAR. Most of them with Chinese LiDAR manufacturers
| like RoboSense or Hesai. Some are equipped by European
| manufactures like Ibeo/ZF. For example, there is the
| automotive sensor AT128 by Hesai. It targets normals vehicles
| (see price range above) and claims a similar performance
| (except for FOV, so you need multiple) like the Velodyne
| Ultra Puck (~$50000).
|
| So costs of LiDARs are a not the very expensive obstacle they
| were in the past. The only problem could be that the new
| LiDAR manufactures cannot scale up series production. For
| example, Ibeo just filed for insolvency because they could
| not close another round after aggressively increasing
| spending in the past years.
| viscanti wrote:
| > So far, that $100BN is a VC scam until proven otherwise.
|
| A lot of the self driving tech has already made its way into
| safety systems in cars. Things like automatic breaking seem
| generally useful. There's a question about if it's worth
| $100B for research into partially autonomous safety
| solutions, but I don't think it's useful to attribute zero
| value to self driving research until we get full self driving
| (certainly some value is being realized already).
| nrclark wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why is lidar necessary?
|
| When a human drives a car, their only sensors are eyes, ears,
| and maybe vibration. Somehow we manage to muddle through it.
|
| Why do L4/L5 cars need anything extra sensors-wise?
| [deleted]
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| welcome to the future
|
| maybe its just the case that we have already picked the low
| hanging fruit in computing...from this point forward, the
| remaining loftier goals will take decades and billions to achieve
|
| don't fall into the trap of thinking something can't be done if
| it can't be done easily. quickly and cheaply
| prmoustache wrote:
| I'd rather see we remove all non professionnal motorized vehicles
| from the road and invest those billions in high frequency and
| coverage public transport. That would mean more accessible
| transport to everyone, including disabled people, less people
| dying on the road, safer transport for pedestriants, cyclists,
| bicycles, scooters, rollerskates, better emergency services who
| don't have to deal with ugly traffic.
|
| Our world do not need one car for everyone.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| "Our world do not need one car for everyone."
|
| Where you live.
|
| Where I live, it's not unreasonable for everyone to need a
| couple of vehicles each depending on what they're doing.
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| Self driving cars are slowly degenerating from intelligent
| autonomous machines to just another version of train - see
| sensors in a road/signs, special lanes, etc.
|
| If they can't drive on existing roads together with human
| drivers, then they are utterly pointless.
| insanitybit wrote:
| > It all sounds great until you encounter an actual robo-taxi in
| the wild. Which is rare:
|
| I see them all the time. They work fine.
| yohann305 wrote:
| Have you noticed that lately there has been a symphony of media
| news to bash everything related to green energy, including EVs,
| self driving cars, batteries and so on?
|
| It feels like we are getting brainstormed to induce us to remove
| investments in this sector so that others can get in at a much
| lower entry point.
|
| Is it just in my head?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| What does self-driving have to do with any of the other things
| though? Whether there's a human behind the wheel of an EV or an
| algorithm doesn't make any difference for climate change. If
| anything, the money wasted on self-driving could have gone into
| more pragmatic goals.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Fewer people owning cars and instead hailing from a shared
| pool of autonomous EVs as needed sounds like a solid
| improvement over the current situation.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Car sharing is already a thing without self-driving, yet
| people still seem to prefer their own car. That all sounds
| to me a bit too much like the 50's flying car utopia.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I think the big difference is convenience. Car sharing as
| it exists requires prior planning/coordination, you can't
| just grab one on a whim. That's enough friction that a
| lot of people would prefer to own a car instead,
| especially when you consider that a huge part of the
| appeal of a car is agency and freedom -- no need to
| operate on anybody else's time tables or predefined
| stops, just step out and go wherever you please. The
| closest we have to autonomous hailing is Uber/Lyft, but
| that becomes prohibitively expensive, not to mention
| there's places Uber drivers won't want to pick you up
| from or take you to.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of public
| transportation )lived in Japan for a while and loved the
| trains) and think it should be greatly expanded, but
| driving in the US isn't going away any time soon and so
| alongside efforts to improve public transportation,
| efforts should also go into autonomous driving to try to
| take even more cars off the road. Ideally the bulk of
| commuters and errandrunners would be using rail, with the
| second largest group using autonomous car sharing, and
| the last and by far smallest group still owning their
| cars.
| deng wrote:
| I must say, the linked video in the article to the rogue Waymo
| car is like a hilarious Black Mirror episode:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdKCQKBvH-A
| hasmanean wrote:
| Self driving trains would be far more achievable and
| practical...more tiny engines and smaller cars means latency and
| switching delays would go down. I don't think it even needs much
| technology.
| micwag wrote:
| There are already many self driving trains operating around the
| world:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system...
| MrDresden wrote:
| > "more tiny engines and smaller cars means latency and
| switching delays would go down."
|
| Thorougly disagree.
|
| The whole reason why trains are so efficient is due to their
| ability to haul so much weight in one go without practically
| any other traffic being in the way. Train track infrastructure
| could not handle multiple mini trains without more track which,
| as we know from the excessive road construction for car
| traffice, does not solve the congestion issue.
| hasmanean wrote:
| Yeah, efficiency for a train means cargo divided by the cost
| of the driver and the costs of the locomotive.
|
| Take the driver out of the equation, and suddenly making the
| train longer doesn't provide any savings. You might as well
| switch to smaller and cheaper engines and divide one train
| into 10.
|
| There are a lot of variables that affect efficiency but new
| technology alters the landscape. Self driving public transit
| is one such thing. Would you rather be on a bus with one
| driver or a self driving taxi that costs the same?
| satisfice wrote:
| There is no good reason for self-driving cars. This is not a
| problem that anyone has been clamoring to solve. Human-caused
| death by driving is a small problem (quoting statistics does not
| in any way make it into a big problem, nor do the people who
| quote those statistics compare them with statistics about how
| much safer robot drivers are, because no reliable statistics
| exist).
|
| If you think that deaths and injuries are intrinsically bad, then
| look at the stats for injuries while skateboarding
| (https://skateboardsafety.org/injury-statistics/). Surely you
| think something must be done about that, right? But we don't
| care, because the FACT of injury is not the important thing. The
| important thing is fairness; reasonableness; agency. People on
| skateboards and who do other dangerous things are choosing to
| risk themselves and we think that's okay.
|
| Human-caused accidents are considered by society (that's you and
| me) to be acceptable because we have agreed to the bargain. This
| is not so with robotic drivers. I have NOT CONSENTED to share the
| road with robot drivers because they are not bound by the same
| social bargain-- their real drivers are programmers, who risk
| nothing. Uber was not charged at all in the killing of that
| pedestrian in Arizona. Only the human safety driver was, who
| rashly had bought into the supposed safety of self-driving cars.
|
| I don't want to ride in a box where no one takes responsibility
| in case of disaster. EVEN IF, there are fewer accidents. This is
| the key point: AI stands for "Automated Irresponsibility" or
| "Agency Interrupted." Irresponsibility is the bigger problem; or
| loss of agency.
|
| If you truly, madly believe that mere numbers are the crux of
| morality, then consider. If you save 10 people from drowning in
| your boat, is it okay for you to pull out a gun and shoot one of
| them in the head before returning to shore? You will still have
| saved 9 people. You're a hero, right? Obviously, this is not
| okay-- because HOW one dies matters. Responsibiliy and agency
| matter.
| neximo64 wrote:
| They wont go anywhere until theres a legal way for the company
| making the tech to shift liability to drivers for the odd chance
| it'll crash. That's the issue, that needs to be solved more.
| k5hp wrote:
| https://archive.ph/sMhUt
| m0llusk wrote:
| It seems like some metrics and well named domains might help with
| this. There are different levels of driving challenge and self
| driving cars can handle some of the most basic challenges
| already. Cars are used for all kinds of tasks in all kinds of
| places, but currently self driving cars are making a significant
| impact on taxi services in some big cities. All of that is
| limited and should be noted as such, but having mastered many of
| the basics and now offering taxi service in many areas it is
| clear that self driving cars have made and continue to make
| progress which is very different from the "going nowhere" this
| clickbait article claims.
| tech2globeweb wrote:
| SteveNuts wrote:
| seshagiric wrote:
| Is it a data problem? If you have data modeling every nook and
| corner of the world and every possible combination of human,
| objects, roads and traffic/ weather conditions, then the AI can
| learn. If not, it keeps getting confused, will enter private
| driveways or get bamboozled by traffic cones. Till then it will
| be an iterative process where the AV companies will keep learning
| from incidents like those described in the article.
|
| On the other hand, I do think the biggest impact of AV will be in
| controlled environments like the mine dump trucks in the article
| or the relatively easier long-distance highway only trucks (AV
| trucks haul till city outskirts, human drivers supply into
| cities).
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