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The dream of driverless cars is dying

spectator.co.uk

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Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#61

Post by ghaff »

sentdex wrote: post #42

People just expect it to happen much too quickly, there's no patience. The time it takes to get from say a car that just drives about randomly to a car that drives pretty well 75% of the time is about a day's worth of work with today's technology. Going from 75-80% is a week or two. 80-85% is months. Getting to the 90% is years, and who knows what we need for 99+%. I did a self-driving car in GTA V project that strea…

I'm not sure why anyone would say the "dream" is dying. If anything is dying, it's unrealistic hopes that fully autonomous vehicles will be widespread and dirt cheap to be driven around in by the end of this decade.

I suspect the hype's been fueled by--in addition to the usual suspects--the growth of young professionals in urban areas who have this vision of never having to own a car and being driven around everywhere. For that to be a reality, self-driving has to happen right now--not incrementally over the coming decades.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#62

Post by falcolas »

hodgesrm wrote: post #56

One thing I have never understood about the driverless vision is how it seems to ignore economically significant problems like (a) traffic congestion and (b) extremely inefficient energy use in transportation, especially personal vehicles. Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane highway, regardless of how vehicles comport themselves. It seems more productive to solve congestion by gettin…

Automation for flight is easier because there is a central authority controlling all (major) flights. Airspace and behavior therein is very tightly regulated, and the automation has a lot of dependencies upon extra-vehicular infrastructure (navigation aids, approach radio beacons, etc). There's also relatively few planes in the air at any given time. Scaling that up would not be trivial.

As for that Kittyhawk prototype - one prop failure at altitude and the pilot is dead. There's a reason they're testing over water at very low altitudes. Quadcopters have a very bad failure mode: they always crash. You want at least six motors, if not more, to avoid a crash every time a single motor fails. But, of course, more motors requires more battery power, which raises the weight, which makes it less maneuverable, and so forth.

From a pure "worst case failure mode" ground traffic is a better first automation target for moving small quantities of people.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#63

Post by bryanlarsen »

Isn't the author already wrong? There are Waymo autonomous cars operating right now on public roads in Chandler, Arizona without safety drivers. Sure, those are very carefully mapped and selected routes, but they are not closed routes, they have to deal with anything that can happen on a public road. As any engineer knows, the last 10% is always harder than expected, but scaling from 0.1% to 90% coverage seems fairly straightforward IMO.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#64

Post by hodgesrm »

freehunter wrote: post #44
paganel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still don’t have flying cars nor self-conscious robots, things that have been prophetized 100 to 50 years ago. Going back more in time we still don’t have a philosophical stone. The idea is that some technological prophecies are indeed wrong.

>We still don’t have flying cars Why does no one consider a helicopter to be a "flying car"? What can a flying car do that a helicopter can't? The only difference I see is that a flying car would be cheaper and owned by more people, which a helicopter could easily be if people actually wanted a flying car. Helicopters are expensive because they're very niche devices. The fact that almost no one owns a helicopter prov…

Helicopters are complex machines that require lots of maintenance and significant training to fly safely. It's hard to see how you would reduce even the maintenance costs enough to make them practical for universal use.

To your second point, people with enough money and training do commonly buy them for personal use. (I know this anecdotally from a relative involved in sales of Airbus helicopters.) If you addressed the cost and safety issues no doubt more people would buy them.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#65

Post by mpweiher »

grigjd3 wrote: post #55
mpweiher wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a system can be built to replace long haul truck drivers with even being slightly safer than a human driver I think such a system can be built. It's called a train .

That's a disingenuous comment. Trains don't deliver to stores directly. In the US, there is a severe infrastructure imbalance. Trains don't make sense for smaller (less than train-sized) loads.

Thanks for the softball: the practice of heavy trucks delivering directly to stores is a scourge on our cities, a practice that needs to be banned as quickly as possible.

Here in Berlin, two children were killed by these monsters on one day last month, with the children doing nothing wrong.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#66

Post by hodgesrm »

falcolas wrote: post #62
hodgesrm wrote: post #56

One thing I have never understood about the driverless vision is how it seems to ignore economically significant problems like (a) traffic congestion and (b) extremely inefficient energy use in transportation, especially personal vehicles. Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane highway, regardless of how vehicles comport themselves. It seems more productive to solve congestion by gettin…

Automation for flight is easier because there is a central authority controlling all (major) flights. Airspace and behavior therein is very tightly regulated, and the automation has a lot of dependencies upon extra-vehicular infrastructure (navigation aids, approach radio beacons, etc). There's also relatively few planes in the air at any given time. Scaling that up would not be trivial. As for that Kittyhawk prototy…

You are right that it's not an easy problem to solve but I think you would also agree the economic incentives are there and you don't necessarily have to have people in the vehicles to see improvements on the problems I cited above.

Amazon's scheme for drone delivery seemed kind of crazy at first glance but it does have some sound economics behind it. Here's a reference that seems to have a reasonably balanced view: http://thedronegirl.com/2017/05/07/drone-delivery-economics-...

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#67

Post by mannykannot »

StavrosK wrote: post #20
CPLX wrote: post #7

The part that I can't figure out is why everyone seems to act like driverless cars will be some kind of all-at-once phase change transition instead of being incremental. It seems almost a certainty that we will gradually ease into the concept. Some cars will be able to do some things autonomously, a little, for some people, some of the time. Eventually the cost/benefit levels will improve, more features will roll out…

This is how everything happens, and it's why we're living in the future even though we never realized it. We have a small square in our pockets that can do real-time translation, you talk into it and it'll say the same thing in another language. I remember reading about this exact thing in the 90s and thinking that it was completely incredible, but I didn't even notice it when it happened. We first got computers that…

Your car has approached the point of difficulty for incremental improvement, which is when human attention is needed, but only very rarely. The way for an incremental approach to get beyond this is to have clearly-defined and well separated domains, one being where automation works safely without a human overseer, and the other being where advanced automation is not used. Furthermore, it must be obvious to drivers when they are one and when they are in the other; a distinction based on features of how the technology works does not cut it unless it also leads to an obvious distinction for the non-technical driver.

Limiting the use to highways appears to meet this criterion, but it does not yet do so, on account of problems, like stationary-obstacle detection and adverse weather, that are relevant to highway driving.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#68

Post by dragonwriter »

hodgesrm wrote: post #56

One thing I have never understood about the driverless vision is how it seems to ignore economically significant problems like (a) traffic congestion and (b) extremely inefficient energy use in transportation, especially personal vehicles. Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane highway, regardless of how vehicles comport themselves. It seems more productive to solve congestion by gettin…

> One thing I have never understood about the driverless vision is how it seems to ignore economically significant problems like (a) traffic congestion

Capacity is a function of maximum density at speed, which both consistency of behaviour and speed and accuracy of detection and reaction have a role in setting. Automated driving — if it is exclusive — addresses congestion (provided added “deadhead” runs don't offset max density gains), and that's always been part of the self-driving vision, even back when it was about “smart roads” and not smart cars on dumb roads.

> (b) extremely inefficient energy use in transportation, especially personal vehicles.

Self-driving might help address that, too, as it allows lower friction exchanges between local personal transport and higher capacity—and higher efficiency—shared long-range transport.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#69

Post by ghaff »

maxharris wrote: post #3

Reminds me of this famously wrong column dismissing the Internet back in 1995: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv... > How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, pr…

To be fair, one of the main things Stoll was critiquing at the time was whatever the educational tech hype du jour was which he was more right than wrong about. And twenty years later there's still a huge amount to criticize about how little tech has transformed education, especially in K-12.

ADDED: One thing Stoll did get quite wrong was missing the utility of mass amounts of often uncurated information. Though, in this regard, he has a lot of good company among science fiction authors who mostly envisioned centralized encyclopedias created by experts, not Wikipedia or the Web generally.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#70

Post by marcosdumay »

ghaff wrote: post #61
sentdex wrote: post #42

People just expect it to happen much too quickly, there's no patience. The time it takes to get from say a car that just drives about randomly to a car that drives pretty well 75% of the time is about a day's worth of work with today's technology. Going from 75-80% is a week or two. 80-85% is months. Getting to the 90% is years, and who knows what we need for 99+%. I did a self-driving car in GTA V project that strea…

I'm not sure why anyone would say the "dream" is dying. If anything is dying, it's unrealistic hopes that fully autonomous vehicles will be widespread and dirt cheap to be driven around in by the end of this decade. I suspect the hype's been fueled by--in addition to the usual suspects--the growth of young professionals in urban areas who have this vision of never having to own a car and being driven around everywher…

> For that to be a reality...

Those on demand trip services (Uber, Lyft, etc) are already cheaper than owning a car. What you describe already exists.

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