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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

#211

Post by notahacker »

scarmig wrote: post #181
notahacker wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If driverless cars work at all, they'll be substantially safer than human-driven ones. That sounds like a bold claim. I mean, the current standard of technology works to quite a good extent already, performing many aspects of driving with considerably greater acumen than humans and being able to operate for extended periods without human intervention. It's also fairly well documented that the number of situations i…

I agree with your evaluation of where things stand now. I disagree that you can really call that "working." Working, for me, is when a typical consumer can buy it and use it day-to-day, on typical routes.

Fair enough. I agree that there's no way they'll be allowed to be sold as a consumer product to operate hands-free on regular routes unless they become regarded as substantially safer than the median driver.

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

#212

Post by fucking_tragedy »

stevenh wrote: post #205
jonmc12 wrote: post #146

Am I the only one feeling the press + big tech narrative of "driverless vehicles = safety" is way ahead of itself? OK, "driver error is blamed for 94% of crashes", but what is the validation strategy to show where driverless cars can quantifiably improve? In 2016, Philip Koopman of CMU discusses that there are non-trivial engineering challenges of achieving safety in NHTSA Level 4 vehicle automation: https://users.ec…

Imagine ransomware infecting your car that gives you 30 minutes to pay or you'll be rammed into a tree at 90mph. I don't care about any contrived and well-funded narratives about how unthinking, unfeeling, driverless cars will somehow save lives. No thanks, I'd rather take my chances continuing to share roads with human drivers who are careful because they fear their own death just as much as I do.

Or the inability to drive your car because of an unpaid parking ticket.

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

#213

Post by Neliquat »

nvr219 wrote: post #72
Asooka wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that they only let you borrow for now. Will car ownership be killed with self-driving cars? Will Waymo let you actually buy and own a car that isn't network connected and fully yours? Seeing how value extraction works in today's enterprise, i.e. via rent-seeking, I'm guessing we're headed to not owning cars any more.

> Will car ownership be killed with self-driving cars? I hope so.

Serious question; Why would you hope this?

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

#214

Post by Qwertious »

stevenh wrote: post #205
jonmc12 wrote: post #146

Am I the only one feeling the press + big tech narrative of "driverless vehicles = safety" is way ahead of itself? OK, "driver error is blamed for 94% of crashes", but what is the validation strategy to show where driverless cars can quantifiably improve? In 2016, Philip Koopman of CMU discusses that there are non-trivial engineering challenges of achieving safety in NHTSA Level 4 vehicle automation: https://users.ec…

Imagine ransomware infecting your car that gives you 30 minutes to pay or you'll be rammed into a tree at 90mph. I don't care about any contrived and well-funded narratives about how unthinking, unfeeling, driverless cars will somehow save lives. No thanks, I'd rather take my chances continuing to share roads with human drivers who are careful because they fear their own death just as much as I do.

In all seriousness, ransomware that would kill someone won't be a remotely common thing - for one thing, it will be represented as "$COMPANY's lack of security KILLS PERSON X", and the bill for the ransom will need to be paid by them.

And then the cops/secret-service would get involved. If there's a death involved (and reason to believe more will occur in the future, which would be necessary for ransom as a prolonged business model), then they will come down on any ransomware (and responsible negligent parties, such as auto companies with shitty security) like a TON OF BRICKS.

Plus, there's still a lucrative malware model that goes like this: Infect the car, then quietly make it steal itself in the middle of the night (or at your moment of choice). Bam, you now have a stolen car that you can't be connected to, and nobody will notice for a while.

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

#215

Post by loup-vaillant »

stevenh wrote: post #205
jonmc12 wrote: post #146

Am I the only one feeling the press + big tech narrative of "driverless vehicles = safety" is way ahead of itself? OK, "driver error is blamed for 94% of crashes", but what is the validation strategy to show where driverless cars can quantifiably improve? In 2016, Philip Koopman of CMU discusses that there are non-trivial engineering challenges of achieving safety in NHTSA Level 4 vehicle automation: https://users.ec…

Imagine ransomware infecting your car that gives you 30 minutes to pay or you'll be rammed into a tree at 90mph. I don't care about any contrived and well-funded narratives about how unthinking, unfeeling, driverless cars will somehow save lives. No thanks, I'd rather take my chances continuing to share roads with human drivers who are careful because they fear their own death just as much as I do.

The correct answer to that is very simple, and very expensive: just make correct software.

Such malware are only possible because the targeted system has vulnerabilities to begin with. One just has to ensure the absence of such vulnerabilities, possibly using machine checked proofs.

One obvious approach is to properly isolate the driving software and sensors from external input.

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

#216

Post by hart_russell »

swiley wrote: post #104
hart_russell wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By all accounts, autonomous vehicles will be much safer than human drivers. Companies will be sued up the ass if they program their vehicles to take risks and end up killing people.

Only if it can be proven. That's why vehicle firmware should be open source, so the public can know exactly what kind of risks they take.

You can request to view source code as part of a lawsuit.

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

#217

Post by monkmartinez »

jliptzin wrote: post #189
monkmartinez wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious counter question; Why is nobody talking about cost? Cars are very expensive... is self-driving tech going to increase or decrease the cost of a vehicle? Do people generally want more freedom or less freedom choice? Why does everyone assume the cost will decrease with scale? How many people can afford a Tesla right now? Let alone a fully autonomous car? If flying were more affordable and less strict more peopl…

I'll bet you would have said the same thing about a $5,000 personal computer in the early 90s.

We still have $5000 personal computers in the '10s! Hell a new MacBook Pro with everything and some upgrades is $3499 to $4299... very few people can truly afford that.

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

#218

Post by kcorbitt »

Animats wrote: post #194
MarkMc wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I think Waymo is too cautious. Tesla has thousands of customers effectively acting as test drivers for their autonomous software, which allows them to collect data at a much faster rate and discover more 'edge cases' than with a more cautious test environment. 33,000 people die each year on US roads and self driving cars offer the chance to dramatically reduce that figure over time. The more aggressively we…

Tesla no longer sells cars with automatic driving capability. The hardware is there on newly shipping cars (although the sensor suite is weak) but it's not active. There's a lawsuit.[1] It's unlikely that Tesla gets much useful data from vehicles. To debug a vision system, they'd need the camera data from all the cameras, and that's too big to upload over the cell phone data link. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bro…

They don't need all the vision data -- likely what they're doing is running their beta self-driving features in the background all the time, and only send data back (1) when the driver's input differs dramatically from what the self-driver would have done itself, presumably because the driver saw something their software missed, and/or (2) when a driver gets in a crash (at which point they can check if their algorithm would have prevented the accident).

They just need to send back data from a few seconds before either of those scenarios to quickly accumulate a giant library of one-in-a-million edge cases they can test future algorithm tweaks against. I think it's a reasonable strategy.

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

#219

Post by yellow_viper »

monkmartinez wrote: post #153
jonmc12 wrote: post #146

Am I the only one feeling the press + big tech narrative of "driverless vehicles = safety" is way ahead of itself? OK, "driver error is blamed for 94% of crashes", but what is the validation strategy to show where driverless cars can quantifiably improve? In 2016, Philip Koopman of CMU discusses that there are non-trivial engineering challenges of achieving safety in NHTSA Level 4 vehicle automation: https://users.ec…

No you are not! HN seems to think the same way, and it is one of the worst cases of rose colored glasses I have ever witnessed. What about the cost? Who is going to be able to afford this? Also, what about people that rely on a vehicle for work? Retrofit $75K work trucks with another $75K in self driving gizmos? Find me a practical plumber, carpenter, A/C, lock smith, self-employed guy/gal that will sign up for that!…

People won't buy self-driving cars (well some will, but not the majority). These cars will be running 24/7 in a ride-sharing service.

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

#220

Post by Animats »

dangrossman wrote: post #84
Siecje wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to the video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYav3_7miIc

That's terrible performance.

The problem seems to be that Tesla's system is extremely dependent on a nice clear white line at the outer edge of the road. On this road, near the traffic islands, the roadside grass sometimes overgrows the road edge and obscures the white line. The white line has also been scuffed by cars near the edge of the road. [1] The Tesla runs off the road in that situation.

There are two kinds of self-driving. One came up from the DARPA Grand Challenge, which was off-road. That kind first looks at the terrain and obstacles, and figures out where it can physically drive safely. There's LIDAR profiling of terrain. Then it looks at road markings and figures out where it's supposed to go. If the road markings lead into an obstacle or drop-off, it will stop or go around the obstacle. That's Waymo.

The second kind came up from lane-keeping and auto-brake systems. Those are very dependent on highway markings, and only work right on freeways. That's Tesla's original system.

It's hard to tell about the others. Volvo has an extensive sensor suite. Otto seems to be mostly a lane-keeping system for freeways. Uber hasn't released much detail.

[1] https://youtu.be/UZ1XLqc5IUg?t=46

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