Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 411 posts

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

#351

Post by maverick_iceman »

iandanforth wrote: post #320
Noos wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem though is that humans can adapt, and the AI in general can't. A go AI can play Go perfectly, but if a player overturns a board, it can do nothing to right this situation and resume playing. It's just following a list made for it, albeit a fairly substantial list. The worry is this, the cars will not fail like a human will. It may even be dangerous The car may not even be able to move in certain situations…

This. When these systems fail they will fail in surprising and inhuman ways. The accidents will appear to average people as easily avoidable which will give the impression of low quality engineering. e.g. Who doesn't slow down when a semi crosses their path on the highway?

>they will fail in surprising and inhuman ways

It's an improvement as long as those are few percent of the unsurprising and human ways human drivers fail.

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

#352

Post by maverick_iceman »

legulere wrote: post #305
smlacy wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is about the same as "Humans can calculate arithmetic perfectly accurately, why do we need computers to do it for us?" There are a host of obvious reasons why even a "simple" L4 car will beat a human hands down: * Reaction time. * 360 awareness / visibility. * Lack of exaggerated "Human Reflex" to surprising events (i.e. swerving violently to avoid a dog, and hitting other vehicles) * Keeping perfect sp…

> "Humans can calculate arithmetic perfectly accurately, why do we need computers to do it for us?" It's more like humans can think, why should we trust a computer with a task where unforeseen circumstances can arise? Further, if I got the current state correctly, no self-driving car system so far works in rainy conditions.

We already trust computers to operate all vehicles to some extent. Almost all vehicles sold today have large amount of software controlling them.

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

#353

Post by maverick_iceman »

aetherson wrote: post #270
smlacy wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is about the same as "Humans can calculate arithmetic perfectly accurately, why do we need computers to do it for us?" There are a host of obvious reasons why even a "simple" L4 car will beat a human hands down: * Reaction time. * 360 awareness / visibility. * Lack of exaggerated "Human Reflex" to surprising events (i.e. swerving violently to avoid a dog, and hitting other vehicles) * Keeping perfect sp…

Quick, what's the reaction time for Waymo's driverless cars? Support your answer with evidence. For extra credit: describe what the reaction time is for Waymo's driverless cars are during various points of the garbage collection cycle. People here have a tendency to imagine an idealized version of driverless cars and assume that actual driverless cars are the idealized versions of those cars, and then compare the ide…

Don't you think the engineers building self-driving cars would consider reaction times and make adequate safeguards? If your thesis requires a group of very smart people to be completely oblivious to a very basic issue for multiple years, then you should reconsider your thesis.

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

#354

Post by projectorlochsa »

jdietrich wrote: post #344
Noos wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem though is that humans can adapt, and the AI in general can't. A go AI can play Go perfectly, but if a player overturns a board, it can do nothing to right this situation and resume playing. It's just following a list made for it, albeit a fairly substantial list. The worry is this, the cars will not fail like a human will. It may even be dangerous The car may not even be able to move in certain situations…

>It's just following a list made for it, albeit a fairly substantial list. You're operating on a completely archaic understanding of AI. Modern systems can and do adapt to situations on-the-fly. What's more, they can adapt on aggregate - the experiences gathered by a single car can be shared to all cars. Very quickly, every car in the fleet will have billions of hours of cumulative driving experience. The overwhelmin…

The main approach of how AlphaGo went around the issue of never seeing the positions and playing good moves is search (monte carlo tree search).

In the same way, if the world is modelled accurately and succintly, can a car predict the various scenarios and adapt, even if the current sitation was not seen before (extremely high speeds or unusual number of cars, etc.)

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

#355

Post by Noos »

jdietrich wrote: post #344
Noos wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem though is that humans can adapt, and the AI in general can't. A go AI can play Go perfectly, but if a player overturns a board, it can do nothing to right this situation and resume playing. It's just following a list made for it, albeit a fairly substantial list. The worry is this, the cars will not fail like a human will. It may even be dangerous The car may not even be able to move in certain situations…

>It's just following a list made for it, albeit a fairly substantial list. You're operating on a completely archaic understanding of AI. Modern systems can and do adapt to situations on-the-fly. What's more, they can adapt on aggregate - the experiences gathered by a single car can be shared to all cars. Very quickly, every car in the fleet will have billions of hours of cumulative driving experience. The overwhelmin…

I don't think so. I think when you introduce computers to anything, you add more edge cases, not less. They are just different ones though. And I'm also skeptical about the quality of this software once it hits an actual mass-market. People here are assuming high levels of rigor when for all we know, it could be similar to Android in the long term.

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

#356

Post by maverick_iceman »

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.

Your car already comes packed with software. If you're worried about hackers gaining access you should be worried right now.

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

#357

Post by maverick_iceman »

monkmartinez wrote: post #263
MarkMc wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out this graph about airplane accidents: http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/2... Since 1970 total airplane casualties have halved, while there are now 7 times the number of passengers. Much of this improvement has been due taking decisions away from pilots and into the hands of 'unfeeling' automated systems.

And look at the cost of planes and those systems. Absolutely out of reach for 97% of the world.

You do realize that the cost of air travel has become much less since the 70s?

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

#358

Post by maverick_iceman »

sebleon wrote: post #226
stevenh wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It can actually be a lot worse - entire countries will be held ransom when car networks gets compromised. Beyond disabling a countries transportation ability, a remote hacker could weaponize every car to attack passengers and pedestrians.

Why wouldn't the same argument apply to electric grid or internet infrastructure?

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

#359

Post by Noos »

maverick_iceman wrote: post #350
Noos wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem though is that humans can adapt, and the AI in general can't. A go AI can play Go perfectly, but if a player overturns a board, it can do nothing to right this situation and resume playing. It's just following a list made for it, albeit a fairly substantial list. The worry is this, the cars will not fail like a human will. It may even be dangerous The car may not even be able to move in certain situations…

This is not true. DeepMind has built AI that can understand the rules of the game just by looking at the screen and then play it perfectly.

When I was a kid, we used to have to replace chess pieces we lost while playing during lunch break with ersatz ones...pennies, nickels, etc. I'd like to see Deep Mind try to tell a game from that.

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

#360

Post by c22 »

rainbowmverse wrote: post #338
bdamm wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the odds of many drunk drivers killing thousands of people? p(x)=1.0, it happens every year.

Humans are bad at risk assessment. You won't convince everyone a self-driving car is safer with math.

I agree that self driving cars have the potential to be much safer in the long run, but the concern that a single error could have outsized consequences is too serious to just be swept under the rug because "lol driving is already scary". How many drunk programmers are out there?
Post reply on HN