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Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

ben-evans.com

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Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#71

Post by new299 »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #68
dgregd wrote: post #59

So much talk about LIDAR and other sensors. Why nobody talks about obvious idea of Road Object Message Bus? ROMB is a protocol where each road object (a traffic light, a sign, a car, etc.) can transmit info about itself. A car could broadcast its direction vector, intention to turn, any non ROMB moving object it sees. A traffic light could broadcast current state and when it is going to change. That additional inform…

And when something goes wrong with the infrastructure - chaos.

Are there any reports showing what happens when all the traffic lights in a city stop working? I would guess it would be similarly chaotic.

The infrastructure would need to be designed such that large scale outages are unlikely I guess.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#72

Post by mikhailfranco »

Combining maps with road journey data is already an oligopoly, based on: first mover advantage, economies of scale, network effects, satnav products/apps, in-car systems, mobile device OS oligopoly, fleet management data and value added data analytics.

The 3+1 companies of sufficient scale to dominate the market are: Google (Android), HERE (was Navtek, was Nokia), Tom Tom (Apple iOS), and Inrix (startup) - which does not create its own maps, but has captured enough driving data to compete with the Big 3.

The only other major map provider is Microsoft Bing, but it does not (AFAIK) have significant products based on driving data, although it does have 'T-Drive' and various other research efforts. Losing the battle for mobile OSes has crippled its efforts.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#73

Post by 6d6b73 »

icebraining wrote: post #62
mypalmike wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is one reason they will be better to rent than own. How many times have you had a perfectly drivable car with some failing sensor? In an autonomous vehicle, such sensor failures will essentially brick the vehicle until it's fixed.

If the sensors are redundant enough, a failure or two shouldn't prevent the car from driving; it'll just drop you off and drive itself to the nearest repair place.

Plus this will make these cars safer. There are thousands of people who drive cars that should not be on the roads.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#74

Post by 6d6b73 »

jcranmer wrote: post #48
6d6b73 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Good drivers really distinguish themselves in the moments where the inputs and behaviors that are expected do not occur (ex: tire blow out). Autonomous cars will be much better at handling these types of situations - in your example, the machine will know what's going on few milliseconds after it happens and will be able to adjust speed and direction almost instantaneously. All you need is lots of sensors.

And engineers who can recognize every possible failure and make the car react to them. There are two things where human beings far outpace AI in competence. The first is the ability to recognize when inputs just simply don't make sense and thus the intended algorithm is going to return garbage results. A related, but important issue (particularly if you talk about networking cars together) is being able to recognize…

You're giving us humans superhuman abilities. How many people are prepared for tire blowout? Have you ever had your wife calling you asking what is this red light on the instrument panel? Heck I myself questioned myself when ABS light turned on in a middle of my trip.. Should I continue? Pull over? Will my breaks work? When the autonomous vehicle gets that signal it will most likely play it on a safe side, pull over and call service, all automatically. Me? I just kept driving...

And yes, we can deduct light color from other clues, but we can also go through a red light because we were preoccupied with our cellphones. AV will on the other hand have access to multiple cameras, looking at the light from multiple angles, possibly with some polarizing filters that will make this non-issue.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#75

Post by reacweb »

ruytlm wrote: post #34
mabbo wrote: post #29

One way to help prevent a winner-take-all situation is to have more open protocols for some of the hard problems. An example that I feel needs to be done right now: an open protocol for signaling intent. Today we have left and right blinkers, brake lights, the horn, and some 'body' language when you use the whole vehicle to show your intent. But with fully autonomous cars, we could be giving out signals that are rich…

Highly agree. While reading this article, I had a paranoid convergence of ideas. I was reading another article the other day about stock trading strategies, and how some particular strategies only work if a small number of people are using them; once they go mainstream, they lose their advantage. The example used was a whole lot of funds jumping into a particular strategy, which then effectively killed the strategy's…

Already solved for aircraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#76

Post by damnfine »

icebraining wrote: post #61
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All you need is lots of sensors. Which rapidly reduces the MTBF at which point you're stuck with an overpriced manual drive vehicle.

Do you also replace cars when a tire gets punctured?

When the tires cost more than the car you do.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#77

Post by oh_sigh »

stephengillie wrote: post #11

Given the lack of network effect in cars already, it's not likely we'll see a huge explosion of inter-car connectivity anytime soon. Even Tesla see their cars largely as individual machines, and not nodes on a highway network. Example: Driving with cruise control on at 60 mph. The car in front is going ~59.5 mph, so you slowly gain on them. Why do the cars not communicate their speed, so your car can adjust speed to…

Cars already communicate their speed through the EM spectrum, and it's very hard to spoof this. LIDAR can easily determine if it is approaching an object at even 1 cm/s.

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#78

Post by icebraining »

hossbeast wrote: post #30
6d6b73 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

System will know that they are failing. this is not rocket science.

Actually, rockets work like this.

On that note, here's an interesting interview with the analysis lead for Mission and Fault Management on the NASA’s Space Launch System program: http://omegataupodcast.net/100-system-health-mgt/

Re: Winner-take-all effects in autonomous cars

#80

Post by amelius »

djyaz1200 wrote: post #7

Autonomous cars are going to kill people, lots of people. They are going to kill passengers, bicyclists, pedestrians etc. It has already happened and will continue. Even though autonomous cars will be (and Tesla argues already are) safer than human drivers the fact that these deaths will be at the hands of machines rather than people will outrage the public. The industry will become even more heavily regulated, and t…

> Even though autonomous cars will be safer than human drivers the fact that these deaths will be at the hands of machines rather than people will outrage the public.

Of course. If somebody is a much-better-than-average driver, then suddenly their probability of getting killed is going to be equalized with the rest of the population and may become higher as a result.

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