See also discussion on the actual paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15756020
Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research
161–170 of 181 posts
Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an interesting point. It's in every self-driving vehicle company's best interest to gain public trust in the industry as a whole. A high pedestrian injury/fatality rate from Google's self-driving tech reduces confidence in Apple's tech and the entire idea of self-driving vehicles. The incentives are there for these companies to work together to create highly reliable self-driving tech.
I don't think this is completely true. If someone actually has a meaningful advantage in safety, it's in their best interest to publicize that and use it as a wedge between them and the competition. Bonus points if you can use the ensuing backlash of your competitors killing people to write regulations that lock them out of the market. Not necessarily what is best for people, but I don't think their incentives are as…
Well known from the airline industry decades ago that you just don't talk about safety vs your competitors.
Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
One study by RAND says: "Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and, under some scenarios, hundreds of billions of miles to create enough data to clearly demonstrate their safety... Under even the most-aggressive test driving assumptions, it would take existing fleets of autonomous vehicles tens and even hundreds of years to log sufficient miles to adequately assess the safety of th…
> Another question: if somebody you loved was killed by a self-driving car, would you be comforted in knowing that the technology was in aggregate saving the lives of other people? I have no answers to these questions... it's a hard problem. We already have analogous situations with things like airbags. Airbags unarguably save lives, and yet they've also unarguably killed kids.
How many of those deceased children would have survived the collision if no airbags were installed?
Self-driving cars preform predictably under a set of conditions. The primary problem arises when the car, for whatever reason, doesn't correctly detect that it's in an unfamiliar condition and continues moving as normal. Humans are intelligent enough to notice when something is "off".
For a machine as heavy, large, fast, and close as a car, limited intelligence is not enough.
Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research
#164There was a time when I thought of regulations as progress killers, but I find myself shifting on that and getting nervous every time I hear about self-driving tech. It's great stuff, but I really do not want my family to be the brave eggs we had to crack to get to the omelet of a driverless future. I now _like_ that someone somewhere has a book listing chemicals that aren't allowed to be shipped on an airplane, and…
The brave eggs will likely live in 3rd world countries with roads even worse than those in the US and drivers magnitude more insane.
Most likely, it will take a while until the locals understand the value of the training data to tax / sell it, so the vendors will have it nearly for free.
Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research
#165There was a time when I thought of regulations as progress killers, but I find myself shifting on that and getting nervous every time I hear about self-driving tech. It's great stuff, but I really do not want my family to be the brave eggs we had to crack to get to the omelet of a driverless future. I now _like_ that someone somewhere has a book listing chemicals that aren't allowed to be shipped on an airplane, and…
One study by RAND says: "Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and, under some scenarios, hundreds of billions of miles to create enough data to clearly demonstrate their safety... Under even the most-aggressive test driving assumptions, it would take existing fleets of autonomous vehicles tens and even hundreds of years to log sufficient miles to adequately assess the safety of th…
> Crucially, this study models scenarios such as AVs being _half_ as safe as human drivers
See, this is the main reason why AVs are great: accidents are caused by speeders, drunk, tired, inexperienced drivers, morons driving while high on pot or ecstasy, that is, those who are MUCH worse than an average driver used as a yardstick to measure the performance of the autonomous cars.
Replace them by an imperfect machine lacking common sense, and the overall driving skill still goes up.
Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research
#166There was a time when I thought of regulations as progress killers, but I find myself shifting on that and getting nervous every time I hear about self-driving tech. It's great stuff, but I really do not want my family to be the brave eggs we had to crack to get to the omelet of a driverless future. I now _like_ that someone somewhere has a book listing chemicals that aren't allowed to be shipped on an airplane, and…
One study by RAND says: "Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and, under some scenarios, hundreds of billions of miles to create enough data to clearly demonstrate their safety... Under even the most-aggressive test driving assumptions, it would take existing fleets of autonomous vehicles tens and even hundreds of years to log sufficient miles to adequately assess the safety of th…
Another quesion: if somebody you loved was killed by a driver's human error (quite possibly their own), would you be angry about the delays in making autonomous cars available?
Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so you feel about the 30k people who die each year the tech is delayed? Or do you really think the litigation system (where currently car manufactures almost are never liable) is properly tuned to minimize the time until that is achieved?
How do you feel about the 30k people who die each year the tech is delayed? I'd say, let's ban using your phone while driving and drinking before driving like many other countries did 10 and 20 years ago. That could save 15k of those people right away.
Over the past decades, phone usage has surged while deaths have fallen or stayed flat (modulo the miniscule uptick that was all over the news). Distracted driving is dangerous, but phones aren't contributing nearly that much (and it's mostly illegal).
Drunk driving is super deadly, but it's already illegal. More importantly, self-driving cars will be vastly more effective at getting drunk drivers out from behind the wheel than all the legistlative in the world.
Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you feel about the 30k people who die each year the tech is delayed? I'd say, let's ban using your phone while driving and drinking before driving like many other countries did 10 and 20 years ago. That could save 15k of those people right away.
Over the past decades, phone usage has surged while deaths have fallen or stayed flat (modulo the miniscule uptick that was all over the news). Distracted driving is dangerous, but phones aren't contributing nearly that much (and it's mostly illegal). Drunk driving is super deadly, but it's already illegal. More importantly, self-driving cars will be vastly more effective at getting drunk drivers out from behind the…
Driving while using a phone is illegal in most areas, but still very common, just like speeding -- it clearly isn't being addressed very seriously. And standards for "drunk driving" vary a lot; sometimes you're allowed two or even three drinks before driving.
Another commenter here linked to an excellent NYT article exploring this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/america-is-now-an...
The US had one of the world's lowest rates of driving deaths in 1990, but since then other countries have pulled ahead significantly. Why is that?
Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they were writing code that "would probably lead to someone's death" Versus cars, where I'd be shocked if there's a single mass-produced model that hasn't killed someone.
As of 2015, there were 9 car models without recorded deaths - https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/record-9-models-have-... I'm not sure how statistically significant the numbers are, but it's something!
More complete driver death rate statistics can be found here.
Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
One study by RAND says: "Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and, under some scenarios, hundreds of billions of miles to create enough data to clearly demonstrate their safety... Under even the most-aggressive test driving assumptions, it would take existing fleets of autonomous vehicles tens and even hundreds of years to log sufficient miles to adequately assess the safety of th…
> Crucially, this study models scenarios such as AVs being _half_ as safe as human drivers See, this is the main reason why AVs are great: accidents are caused by speeders, drunk, tired, inexperienced drivers, morons driving while high on pot or ecstasy, that is, those who are MUCH worse than an average driver used as a yardstick to measure the performance of the autonomous cars. Replace them by an imperfect machine…
The "replacement" implies that people you mentioned want to be replaced. I don't think that's the case; speeders will just disable AI and crank up the speed themselves. People who are reasonable enough to activate AI when they are drunk will probably just order a taxi now, and so on. The only way to have that "replacement" is to force the autonomy on drivers, but that's not gonna fly well on a market.