181–190 of 256 posts
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I'm sure Waymo will make a lot of progress with their massive investment but using SV money as an indicator for a project's ultimate success seems unwise at this point. I think the real question is whether the big investors in self-driving cars will make progress creating virtual rails for their vehicles, e.g. roads where we can keep pedestrians out.
That is a train or a tram, not a car.
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> So put them on the road. Let's give it a try. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't and people die and they sue. That's been part of driving since day one. Roll the dice. I'm sick of the endless debates. Well I'd certainly hope that there is a high level of confidence that they don't kill people BEFORE they're put on the road with other people.
All we need is that they don't kill more people than average human drivers do per passenger-mile. Assuming ride-sharing we could even let them be a little more deadly than human drivers and still save lives.
Don't. Cost isn't stopping people today from ridesharing. Carpooling won't become cool just because there is no driver, in fact I could see it becoming less cool as you will be much more alone with strangers. Many people today would be uncomfortable on a bus at night without a third party present (ie the driver, or at least many other strangers).
Think about all the extra traffic from autodriver cars doing jobs that today are too expensive. And the double-commute possibility. Your car takes you to work, drives itself home to park/recharge, then drives back to pick you up at the end of the day. Any 2-way trip could become 4-way, doubling the per-trip traffic. Or, rather than pay for parking while you shop downtown, you ask your car to drive around in circles until you are ready to go home.
The crashes that the article claims came from edge-cases that the engineers didn't account for weren't, in fact, edge-cases. The Tesla crashes are due to the way Tesla's system works, it doesn't recognize stationary hazards. Similarly Uber's system failed to brake for a hazard that it could clearly see. That's not an edge-case, it doesn't have to know that the object is a woman pushing a bicycle. It's a solid object…
Citing the Uber case is particularly egregious. Have we all forgotten the NTSB report? It was only a few weeks ago. The Uber car tried to brake, but Uber had deliberately disabled the brakes for a more comfortable ride.
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As someone who has used Autopilot and many of its "clones" as well as worked with several OEMs on these features, Tesla's offering is not more mature, it's more irresponsible. Autopilot is a combination of ADAS features that many other OEMs have had for a while and deliberately chosen not to tie together due to safety concerns. These concerns have been validated multiple times now by Autopilot errors. The "clones" ar…
How mature a system is and whether it's morally responsible (or imperative) to release it are different questions. > The "clones" are deliberately less good because the manufacturers offering them care more about safety and reliability than about marketing beta products. When I say "maturity," I'm not talking about holding back features. I'm saying that Tesla's system works better in situations where other manufactur…
Thanks for the links to your other comments. I don't think there's fruitful debate to be had here - we're just of different opinions. I think autopilot encourages bad driving behavior in drivers who would otherwise be more alert, and if I've read your comments correctly you think the responsibility is nevertheless still on the drivers and autopilot probably helps more people than it harms. I'd love to revisit this if we ever get apples to apples accident data showing comparisons between autopilot-enabled vehicles and comparable vehicles from other manufacturers in the same price and age range (thus with corresponding modern and expensive ADAS systems).
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How mature a system is and whether it's morally responsible (or imperative) to release it are different questions. > The "clones" are deliberately less good because the manufacturers offering them care more about safety and reliability than about marketing beta products. When I say "maturity," I'm not talking about holding back features. I'm saying that Tesla's system works better in situations where other manufactur…
Tesla seems to have focused on getting lane following to behave well. That gives the user the impression that the system is competent. Obstacle detection, though, is not reliable, as has become painfully clear from crash reports.
Waymo seems to be the only question mark in my mind making me doubt my bet that we're a decade or more away from usable self-driving cars. If Waymo has truly solved the problem while everybody else is just trying to catch up and/or bluffing, I guess I wouldn't be that surprised. Edited to add: The reason is that they've apparently ordered 10's of thousands of these cars. Can they really use that many only in good-wea…
All journalists covering the self-driving car beat are basically required to ignore Waymo so they can continue writing “When will cars drive themselves? Experts say nobody knows” articles. If you ignore Waymo it’s a race; if you include Waymo it’s not. This article makes the further error of assuming “AI” is required for self-driving cars, rather than just a shitload of code.
Waymo is doing better than almost everyone else, a testament to their skill and their rigor, but they are still a long distance away from truly autonomous vehicles. The temptation is to say "well, they are so close, I'm sure they'll finish up the niggling details", but the reality is that the stuff they are failing at are some of the hardest remaining problems and will probably require at least as much work as they've put in already, if not significantly more, to tackle. I think we'll end up with self-driving cars eventually but probably not on a time scale of within the next 5-10 years, more likely it'll take that long or longer for the technology to reach maturity and then yet another decade plus for it to start seeing practical application.
> “Rather than building AI to solve the pogo stick problem, we should partner with the government to ask people to be lawful and considerate,” he said. “Safety isn’t just about the quality of the AI technology.” Wow. What a goal post move. I don't think this is how successful technology spreads. Governments usually accomodate tech because it proves itself in the market, not vice versa.
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> So put them on the road. Let's give it a try. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't and people die and they sue. That's been part of driving since day one. Roll the dice. I'm sick of the endless debates. Well I'd certainly hope that there is a high level of confidence that they don't kill people BEFORE they're put on the road with other people.
All we need is that they don't kill more people than average human drivers do per passenger-mile. Assuming ride-sharing we could even let them be a little more deadly than human drivers and still save lives.
This is tangentially related, and something I have wondered, so I will ask it here. Does anyone know how self driving cars will react to attempts by law enforcement officers to pull over the vehicle?
They will pull over.
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Please don't post like this to HN. It degrades discussion and encourages worse. Downward-spiraling is the internet default, so effort is needed to avoid it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Can you tell me more about downward-spiraling, and how this relates to the guidelines? The guy in the article seems to be implying that pedestrians don't have the right to be in the road. I think it's pretty OK to be dismissive of that.