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Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

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Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#111

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

jacquesm wrote: post #89
fdej wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a computer crashes, you can identify the software or hardware flaw that caused the crash and fix it once and for all. Improving human driving skills collectively is much more difficult. Even if one driver learns from their own mistake, other drivers and the next generation of drivers will still be just as prone as before to make that mistake. Better education can only do so much anyway, since people often don't th…

> If a computer crashes, you can identify the software or hardware flaw that caused the crash and fix it once and for all. Right. Except that 40 years later computers still crash. The more complex a system the harder it becomes to debug and there is no complex software system without bugs. It's like rocks in a field, you'll never get the last one out even if you think you did.

We build lots of computing systems that rarely have components crash and almost never (eg, not even once over decades) have the whole system go down. We know how to do it.

It's just not worth the effort in the vast majority of circumstances -- so you get computer crashes.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#112

Post by ghaff »

scarmig wrote: post #77
monkmartinez wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't read the entire piece... People think the autonomous car is going to solve a lot of the current problems; Accidents, Parking, Congestion. It kind of makes me giggle a bit, as I ponder what may happen. That is, the conclusions drawn from "self-driving" vehicles are possibly way over cooked. The certification process for these cars are going to be very, very expensive. Think about the software involved for the…

If driverless cars work at all, they'll be substantially safer than human-driven ones. There's a strong moral case for banning human-driven cars on public roads if it'll save tens of thousands of lives. There's also a strong possibility of media-driven moral panics. Think of poor little Billy, hit by one of those irresponsible human drivers! Insurance companies will charge steep premiums to the risk takers who want t…

>Insurance companies will charge steep premiums to the risk takers who want to drive their own car.

People make this claim. Why would there be a premium over what is paid today? Maybe there's a big premium relative to much lower premiums associated with new types of vehicles although there will still be insurance needed. But that's relative to a future state, not relative to today.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#113

Post by kinghajj »

foolfoolz wrote: post #78
aianus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Killing a few extra people today to bring self driving cars to market faster could actually save more lives in total. I have much more respect for Tesla for shipping something.

I think you slept through an ethics class

Maybe they just subscribe to an extreme utilitarian ethical philosophy?

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#114

Post by dmix »

Pigo wrote: post #53

After seeing the movie Logan, I was curious if the movie was taking a jab at the autonomous vehicle trend by portraying them as a danger to ma & pa drivers on the highway. It showed a crowded highway full of shipping containers pushing a truck hauling horses off the road. It seems the message was not that the technology can't be courteous, but that once it's accepted, corporations will abuse the roads to help their b…

> but that once it's accepted, corporations will abuse the roads to help their bottom line

Those evil corporations, being all corporate-y!

I haven't seen the movie Logan but the gist is that you think BigCorp will modify their cars so they drive dangerously fast, threatening the other non-AI cars on the road? And they will risk killing people or damaging vehicles in order to improve shipping time? And you think this will be prevalent? There won't be economic, legal, hiring, or social consequences from police, shareholders, politicians, employees, and the AI companies? Because they're big corporations run by greedy CEOs who get away with anything?

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#115

Post by rhino369 »

monkmartinez wrote: post #37
abvdasker wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transportation in general will become much cheaper. Because driverless cars will get into far fewer accidents than humans the cost of insuring them will be a fraction of what it costs to insure a human driver today. And when transportation gets cheaper basically every product that needs to be moved gets cheaper (assuming the companies using this technology don't just pocket the savings). Also, basically drivers of al…

How are you so sure driverless cars will get into less accidents? Furthermore, how is this technology going to be make everything less expensive. Please explain. For the record, I think this technology will make the prices for these vehicles prohibitively expensive for the mass market.

The additional hardware and software will be expensive as hell to develop, but once it's invented, the marginal cost should be fairly cheap compared to the price of a car.

processing power = cheap

software (marginal cost) = just gotta pay for updates and fixes

sensor package = expensive now because nobody is making 6 million of them a month. Once they do, it'll be a lot more affordable.

That doesn't mean it'll pay off for Google, uber, Telsa, Ford, etc., but if they build it, it'll move to all cars rather quickly.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#116

Post by chiliap2 »

Spare_account wrote: post #79
maxfurman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably. Tesla has not done a good job educating their customers on the limits of their "Autopilot" system, which has led to at least one preventable death. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/28/tesla_autopilot_dea...

Is it possible to extrapolate from the recorded reduction in accidents after the introduction of autopilot and work out if fewer people have died as a result of introducing when they did? Here's an article which describes a 40% drop in the accident rate: https://electrek.co/2017/01/19/tesla-crash-rate-autopilot-nh... The NHTSA's figures show a drop from 1.3 crashes per million miles before Autosteer to 0.8 crashes af…

The utilitarian approach is such an interesting way to frame problems like this. It's obviously wrong for me to murder to my neighbor for their organs, even if those organs could save five other lives. But is it okay for a car company to roll out an AI program if it saves more lives than it costs? When viewed from afar the utilitarian mindset is always so alluring.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#118

Post by nickparker »

Fifer82 wrote: post #107

I would like to see little leased pod cars which trundle around at the local speed within a certain range, and have the ability to go to a Bus Lane (I presume the bus is dead), and join a Magnetic Track of sort where they go 200 miles an hour. That would be pretty amazing. Why they are sticking shit all over 2 ton vehicles? If they are solving Fuel and Emissions and Driver, can't they just take the final step of a re…

Hyperloop One is working on this. Small self driving cubicles drive around the city and pop into larger pods that go 700 mph in the Hyperloop between cities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fze5spdN3nU

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#119

Post by skuzye »

jacquesm wrote: post #89
fdej wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a computer crashes, you can identify the software or hardware flaw that caused the crash and fix it once and for all. Improving human driving skills collectively is much more difficult. Even if one driver learns from their own mistake, other drivers and the next generation of drivers will still be just as prone as before to make that mistake. Better education can only do so much anyway, since people often don't th…

> If a computer crashes, you can identify the software or hardware flaw that caused the crash and fix it once and for all. Right. Except that 40 years later computers still crash. The more complex a system the harder it becomes to debug and there is no complex software system without bugs. It's like rocks in a field, you'll never get the last one out even if you think you did.

Regular software, yes, they crash all the time. But I would think these systems would be more safely handled. For example, nuclear energy, air traffic control, bank systems and automated train lines don't crash nearly as often, for example.

Being such an important feature (not crashing) it shouldn't be ignored. I am also skeptical but we have examples of reliable systems so I believe they can work.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#120

Post by jacquesm »

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #111
jacquesm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a computer crashes, you can identify the software or hardware flaw that caused the crash and fix it once and for all. Right. Except that 40 years later computers still crash. The more complex a system the harder it becomes to debug and there is no complex software system without bugs. It's like rocks in a field, you'll never get the last one out even if you think you did.

We build lots of computing systems that rarely have components crash and almost never (eg, not even once over decades) have the whole system go down. We know how to do it. It's just not worth the effort in the vast majority of circumstances -- so you get computer crashes.

I know we know how to do it. It's just that the cost-benefit analysis usually falls to 'let it crash' rather than 'let it crash and put a supervisor on top of it'. Besides the fact that most developers don't care too much about their stuff crashing (for instance: one valid excuse for not digging in and solving a problem is 'can't reproduce', whereas those are the worst problems to allow to persist).

In the end it is all economics. But I really would like to see some real life stats on how these self driving cars perform over the longer term in less controlled situations and with an honest accounting of the root cause of any issues. Fat chance that will ever happen but that's the sort of rigor that would get me to switch from driving myself to being driven by a pile of software.

That's the good bit about Google being involved: at least they really 'grok' software and reliability engineering. As opposed to your average car manufacturer where software is a dirty word best outsourced to some contractor.

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