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Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

reuters.com

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Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#171

Post by [deleted] »

curioussavage wrote: post #144
lorenzhs wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driverless trains have been here for a while. They're great. With platform-edge doors, nobody can fall or jump onto the track, not to mention that they increase brake cooling efficiency and decrease air resistance (less air to push). But of course you weren't talking about trains. I see this sentiment a lot on HN that self driving cars are going to fix everyone's transportation woes, but I'm not convinced that they w…

I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone claim driverless cars will fix everything Mass transit specifically trains have serious problems I don’t think there are solutions for. The first is that they make centralized points of failure. Broken trains can bring a whole city to a halt. The second is they are the perfect germ delivery system.

[deleted]

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#172

Post by vnchr »

karmapolic wrote: post #70

how do you convince the midwest to use self driving tech? maybe start with nascar?

Detroit is a hotbed of self driving technology right now. The biggest automakers in the world have not been sitting on their hands.

As a guide to midwesteners, it might help to think of them as any other consumer who is driven by economics and convenience when it comes to car purchases.

How do you convince the valley to use self driving tech? Maybe start with putting beds in the back seats since they can't afford exorbitant housing prices.

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#173

Post by larkery »

abecedarius wrote: post #151
larkery wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your scepticism about solving the commute traffic with a self-driving silver bullet. The research for traffic flow [1] says that, with human driven cars, a slice of a 4m wide lane will pass about 1000 people/hr in cars, about 7000 people on foot or bicycle, and about 10,000 people by bus. That means that to get competitive flow with buses, self-driving cars need to deliver a tenfold improvement in flow.…

Outside of NYC, in the U.S. public transit in my experience takes two or three times as long to get you where you're going. Until the typical experience gets better or people get poorer, the resource efficiency won't matter.

I guess part of the issue here is that cars are a kind of coordination problem - if nobody else is using a car on the roads, cars are quite a good choice. They are fast and easy, and go where you want.

However, each person who uses a car creates some external costs (a high traffic factor / unit of person-flow) which are borne by all the other road users. Once people choosing the "defect" strategy (cars) have enough numbers, the "cooperate" strategy (not cars) gets broken for other solutions that use the road network, so the system fails to a bad equilibrium if there are enough defectors in the population.

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#174

Post by vadimberman »

lambdadmitry wrote: post #170
vadimberman wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> The "replacement" implies that people you mentioned want to be replaced

Not the entire world is America. Oftentimes "want" is replaced by "forced".

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#175

Post by abecedarius »

larkery wrote: post #173
abecedarius wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of NYC, in the U.S. public transit in my experience takes two or three times as long to get you where you're going. Until the typical experience gets better or people get poorer, the resource efficiency won't matter.

I guess part of the issue here is that cars are a kind of coordination problem - if nobody else is using a car on the roads, cars are quite a good choice. They are fast and easy, and go where you want. However, each person who uses a car creates some external costs (a high traffic factor / unit of person-flow) which are borne by all the other road users. Once people choosing the "defect" strategy (cars) have enough n…

Congestion pricing would solve that, and go nicely with robocars too.

(I'm not a fan of cars; I don't drive one myself. But I don't expect people to accept any less convenient and flexible solution.)

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#176

Post by jessriedel »

iainmerrick wrote: post #168
jessriedel wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I could imagine a million reasons. Maybe the US has a higher natural rate of accidents but deaths have fallen earlier because we implement sophisticated safety tech earlier. But once safety tech reaches diminishing returns, other countries pass us.

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#177

Post by iainmerrick »

jessriedel wrote: post #176
iainmerrick wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I could imagine a million reasons. Maybe the US has a higher natural rate of accidents but deaths have fallen earlier because we implement sophisticated safety tech earlier. But once safety tech reaches diminishing returns, other countries pass us.

Maybe the US has a higher natural rate of accidents

Natural?? Roads and cars are all human-made! Are you saying the "deaths per road mile travelled" metric is wrong or biased somehow?

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#178

Post by jessriedel »

iainmerrick wrote: post #177
jessriedel wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could imagine a million reasons. Maybe the US has a higher natural rate of accidents but deaths have fallen earlier because we implement sophisticated safety tech earlier. But once safety tech reaches diminishing returns, other countries pass us.

Maybe the US has a higher natural rate of accidents Natural?? Roads and cars are all human-made! Are you saying the "deaths per road mile travelled" metric is wrong or biased somehow?

"Natural" in this context is just shorthand for "at fixed level of safety tech". You can substitute "baseline" if you want.

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#179

Post by iainmerrick »

jessriedel wrote: post #178
iainmerrick wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the US has a higher natural rate of accidents Natural?? Roads and cars are all human-made! Are you saying the "deaths per road mile travelled" metric is wrong or biased somehow?

"Natural" in this context is just shorthand for "at fixed level of safety tech". You can substitute "baseline" if you want.

Why would the US have roughly the same baseline safety as everywhere else in 1990, but be 2x worse today?

Re: Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research

#180

Post by jessriedel »

iainmerrick wrote: post #179
jessriedel wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Natural" in this context is just shorthand for "at fixed level of safety tech". You can substitute "baseline" if you want.

Why would the US have roughly the same baseline safety as everywhere else in 1990, but be 2x worse today?

The idea is that the US leads in safety tech adoption (which I believe is just an empirical fact) but that safety tech is reaching diminishing returns (conjecture), so that as time goes by it's tech lead helps less and less at lowering deaths per accident (relative to other countries), while it's accident rate remains higher.

This is really not that important. My point is that there are a million ways to explain the data besides the one you are suggesting.

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