Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars • Hacker News Board

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#101

Post by justin66 » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:32 PM UTC

losteverything wrote: post #34

francoisdevlin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you concerns? What should engineers in this space be considering?

It is all gut. No data. No logic. Cars == freedom. Freedom == control Freedom as in own Geographic control. When. Where and how we get places with that freedom. We control our freedom. Before furnaces we burned wood. Furnaces helped. We accepted them. But cars are different. An extension and expression of our freedom. Out health. Cars have been our best (& worst sometimes) friend as we used our freedoms. There is no…

> Risking the loss Is where my gut says people will fight this.

I imagine there will be a fight, but it will be completed a lot quicker than people anticipate. For seniors and disabled people unable to safely operate a motor vehicle, the benefits of self-driving vehicles are huge. Those people care about their freedom as well, and they're well represented.

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#102

Post by alkonaut » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:34 PM UTC

CPLX wrote: post #19

I find it odd the way people talk about moving through the levels sequentially without really acknowledging there's a massive phase change that happens somewhere between level two and four, where a self-driving car could easily be way more dangerous than the average human driver. That comes as soon as you have a situation where the automation has to be able to handle all foreseeable scenarios without failing because…

I think we will soon be in a situation where self driving cars are better than humans for 10% of driving scenarios(highway, gridlock commute, some parking, ...) but nearly useless in others. I think the acceptance for half decent AI will be much lower than it is for poor human drivers, and the hardest parts of autonomous driving is still a very long way out.

That's probably fine though, if the automation can reliably discover when the environment changes. Especially since perhaps a majority of the time spent driving is in the very few "easy" scenarios.

Human drivers are probably happy to drive 10% of the commute time for the next 2-4 decades.

What this means however is that the dream of completely autonomous Ubers and transport trucks is probably much further out than some might hope.

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#103

Post by ForrestN » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:34 PM UTC

In the last two months I've become substantially more credulous that the U.S. might lose the competition to make autonomous vehicle progress fastest. I don't know how exactly to weight the relative likelihood between countries, but there is a non-trivial chance that the Trump administration can be bribed to create regulatory impediments to various actors. For example, it would be very easy in the current environment for, say, Ford to bribe the Trump administration to kneecap some aspect of Tesla's approach. Likewise, it would be very easy (and may already be happening) that foreign governments are bribing the new administration in order to disadvantage American companies in various ways related to trade, regulation etc. I'm not saying we have any means of knowing if this is happening or will happen, but it is worth noting that the lack of a "trustworthy government pursuing American public interest in good faith" should have a non-trivial effect on any predictions related to relative technological progress among countries.

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#104

Post by greedo » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:37 PM UTC

3chelon wrote: post #65

pif wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copying form an old comment of mine: - Yielding to an emergency vehicle with sirens on. - Moving backwards to a safe and large enough spot when the route is too narrow to fit self-driving car and oncoming huge lorry (and there is no line marking the limit between road and ravine). - Upon instructions from authority, recognize that the highway is closed due to an accident and, no matter what the driving code says, you…

- Moving backwards to a safe and large enough spot when the route is too narrow to fit self-driving car and oncoming huge lorry (and there is no line marking the limit between road and ravine). Surely you're missing the point? With V2V comms there will never be a need to go backwards. All vehicle trajectories become 100% predictable (mechanical failure aside). The problem of massive trucks on narrow country roads (wh…

Autonomous vehicles can't rely upon V2V comms. There are far too many ways for such comms to degrade.

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#105

Post by nsgi » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:38 PM UTC

aetherson wrote: post #41

bluGill wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remember that self driving cars do not have to be perfect, they just need to be better than humans. The use is at just over 1 death per million miles. If self driving cars can reach .5 they are better already. If the cars can detect the times they are bad and pull over (screw your appointment) that might be enough.

Would you get into a self-driving car that you knew had fewer fatalities per mile than the overall human average, but more fatalities per mile than the average of non-drunk, non-sleepy human drivers below the age of 70 and above the age of 20 with more than 5 years of driving experience? Serious question.

Would you get into a car with a driver under 20, above 70, with less than five years of driving experience or who is a little sleepy?

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#106

Post by schintan » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:39 PM UTC

yoz-y wrote: post #87

schintan wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I drive, at least I am in control. I don't give any thoughts to accident statistics. A self driving car may become safer statistically, but I don't see myself in a self driving car that is safer on an average but still has a non-zero chance of getting me in an accident.

There will never be a non-zero chance of getting into accident. But if the car is a safer driver than you then it is a net win.

Factually that may be true, but its a matter of belief. When I drive, I am 100% confident that I will not get into an accident. A self driving car with <100% safety is a net loss in my mind.

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#107

Post by Retric » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:39 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #94

Retric wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to defend driving while impaired in any way. Sadly, it's still really common to drive while impaired. 121 million self-reported episodes of alcohol-impaired driving among U.S. adults each year Just remember, even if you are sober, driving home from a party at 3AM is still significantly more dangerous than average.

So 1/4 is just a seat of the pants estimate? I sloppily implied causation above, but I didn't actually say 1/3 of crashes are attributable to alcohol, I said that a "big chunk" are attributable to poor decisions and separately pointed out the large percentage of fatal crashes involving alcohol.

Sure, this is a spin heavy subject which is why the term is related. People want to fix a major problem and IMO go overboard when the underlying problem needs no exaggeration.

Anyway, 1/4 is from someone with access to raw data who spent some time trying to get less biased numbers. So, wider error bars than NTSB estimates, but less biased assumptions.

Drunk driving is still a major issue, but there is a reason people are still spouting 20 year old data. When trying to make a point there is a tendency to cherry pick to the point of distortion.

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#108

Post by Fricken » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:44 PM UTC

Ajedi32 wrote: post #16

dahart wrote: post #10

> Level by level or straight to level five? This strikes me as a slightly strange question. Maybe it's just an excuse to present the six level system as a framework for thinking about it, but a huge chunk of commodity new cars on the market this year are level 2. A small chunk of higher end cars are level 3. Teslas are arguably level 4, and we all know there are level 4 & 5 cars on the road around the bay and few oth…

AFAIK there are no cars yet that are _truly_ levels 4 or 5. Both Google and Tesla's cars strive towards that goal, but SAE level 4 requires that the system perform ["all aspects of the dynamic driving task, _even if a human driver does not respond appropriately to a request to intervene_"][1]. (Emphasis mine.) So until you can fall asleep at the wheel without endangering yourself or other passengers, neither of those…

The NHTSA originally designated a 0-4 system for classifying Autonomous vehicles. Then the SAE (engineers love adding features) added Level 5. When the NHTSA adopted the SAE system, they reworded the description of Level 5 to what you've quoted. And seriously, it's a meaningless designation. To have a driverless car that perform as well as an expert human driver in all conditions will take decades, it may require something approximating sci-fi grade AGI to pull it off. There are situations when driving that require creativity and generalist knowledge that is completely outside the bounds of what AI can do.

There's no point in discussing L5 realistically, nobody is anywhere close to pulling it off.

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#109

Post by lg » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:44 PM UTC

knz wrote: post #29

lg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if self-driving cars will be as safe as people say, manual driving should have the same legal status as drunk driving due to the unnecessary danger it creates.

It's a false comparison though. 1) Society tolerates a small amount of alcohol for most drivers. 2) Driving while drunk impairs your physical and mental ability to drive safely and only gets worse as you drink more. Obviously a manual driver has slower reaction times than an autonomous system but they are within a level that society tolerates and far better than someone who is drunk. There are also risks with autonom…

> they are within a level that society tolerates

For now, because there are no alternatives so we've all gotten used to ~31,000 annual US motor vehicle deaths. If self-driving tech drastically cuts down on that, society's tolerance will change.

Re: Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

#110

Post by ghaff » Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 5:48 PM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #102

CPLX wrote: post #19

I find it odd the way people talk about moving through the levels sequentially without really acknowledging there's a massive phase change that happens somewhere between level two and four, where a self-driving car could easily be way more dangerous than the average human driver. That comes as soon as you have a situation where the automation has to be able to handle all foreseeable scenarios without failing because…

I think we will soon be in a situation where self driving cars are better than humans for 10% of driving scenarios(highway, gridlock commute, some parking, ...) but nearly useless in others. I think the acceptance for half decent AI will be much lower than it is for poor human drivers, and the hardest parts of autonomous driving is still a very long way out. That's probably fine though, if the automation can reliably…

>if the automation can reliably discover when the environment changes.

That sounds about right. The ability to read/write/etc. while driving on the highway would actually be a huge win for a lot of people. And, equally important, it seems achievable in, perhaps, a single digit number of years.

But there would need to be an unambiguous mode change from "you can do Facebook now" to "you're driving" with plenty of time to make that shift.

This isn't as sexy as roboUber, shared cars, etc. but I'm inclined to agree that getting the last 10% of the way to unsupervised self-driving in essentially all situations is going to take a very long time.