So, why is google driving cars?
what about if GM announced a search engine? Everyone would have their opinion then.
Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
121–130 of 216 posts
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#122It will take a decrease in sensor costs for this to become commercially viable. The "device" on top of the car is a Velodyne LIDAR system, which if I recall correctly, costs around $75k. Using a sensor that costs more than the vehicle it controls makes selling this difficult, to say the least.
If Google sees the cost as a problem they'll buy Velodyne and sell the LIDAR for $500 so that adoption leaps forward (just like the Nexus One).
Or they'll develop their own and sell it through a third party.
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#123Very cool, but I sometimes worry that the illusion of safety is more dangerous than the original danger itself. In Boulder, where I live, several crosswalks were identified as being particularly dangerous for pedestrians, and pedestrian crossing signs with big flashing lights were installed at these locations over the past 5 years. This spring, a report was released[1] that showed accidents at many of these crosswalk…
I walk a lot and the times where I've been nearly hit by a car have ALWAYS been at crosswalks and traffic lights (where the pedestrian light is green and cars should be stopping). Crosswalks are a problem because you can't predict car behaviour: some will stop. Some will completely ignore them (for reasons unknown). If there were no crosswalk you know exactly what cars will do. That's much safer for both parties. The…
"Once I had a cop have a chat to me about jaywalking but I've never been fined. I would be pissed if I ever was. In a fight between a car and a pedestrian the pedestrian loses (big time) so pedestrians have a higher vested interest in their own safety"
Look at how many people drive off cliffs, into trees, or into other cars when a deer runs across the road. Vested interests in safety aside, it's always dangerous to do something unexpected in traffic.
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#124Very cool, but I sometimes worry that the illusion of safety is more dangerous than the original danger itself. In Boulder, where I live, several crosswalks were identified as being particularly dangerous for pedestrians, and pedestrian crossing signs with big flashing lights were installed at these locations over the past 5 years. This spring, a report was released[1] that showed accidents at many of these crosswalk…
I walk a lot and the times where I've been nearly hit by a car have ALWAYS been at crosswalks and traffic lights (where the pedestrian light is green and cars should be stopping). Crosswalks are a problem because you can't predict car behaviour: some will stop. Some will completely ignore them (for reasons unknown). If there were no crosswalk you know exactly what cars will do. That's much safer for both parties. The…
I really wish that cars had front brake lights so that pedestrians could see when a car is most likely stopping.
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
2) I wholly agree... as long as other people are driving. Get rid of people's irrationality / drunken behavior on the road, and automated car driving becomes a much easier problem. A computer can take more into account than a human, and decide faster. Even if you have near perfect data about where the other cars are there's always uncertainty about other objects on the road: tree branches, deer, a child running after…
True, but once you know what other cars are doing, and get data from cars ahead, you should be able to identify things like that before you even encounter them. A tree falling on a car while it's driving: relatively unavoidable. Cars hitting that car: far less likely with computers. They don't get "shocked", or hit the wrong pedal, and have faster reaction times. And pile-ups due to an accident are often far more dea…
> They don't get "shocked", or hit the wrong pedal, and have faster reaction times.
Yes they do. You could perhaps argue they do so less.
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#126"Google is an AI company, they just don't advertise the fact."
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, but once you know what other cars are doing, and get data from cars ahead, you should be able to identify things like that before you even encounter them. A tree falling on a car while it's driving: relatively unavoidable. Cars hitting that car: far less likely with computers. They don't get "shocked", or hit the wrong pedal, and have faster reaction times. And pile-ups due to an accident are often far more dea…
> They don't get "shocked", or hit the wrong pedal, and have faster reaction times. Yes they do. You could perhaps argue they do so less .
OK, kernel panics aside.
Unless they're using a random number generator seeded with outside data, all computer operation can be called deterministic and 100% predictable. Because it's 100% repeatable given identical preconditions. People? Not so / not currently doable.
If the wrong operation for a situation were performed, it'd be due to a higher-level decision going wrong, not the command. Meanwhile, people can "hit the brakes" (high-level command) and instead slam the accelerator (command not carried out). And fully believe they hit the brakes, and that the car accelerated uncontrollably.
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like I said, you'd have to do the math. It's very possible that's true. But it's not a certainty. People have a limit on how much they want to drive regardless of how easy it is. After all, the store itself will still suck when everyone decides to go at 5. I'm in NYC, I could hop on the subway any time I want without any hassle at all, but it's not like I do just because the option's there. Transportation is a means…
Like I said, you'd have to do the math. Uh, maybe you'd have to look at the history of urban planning for the past 50 years? In densely populated urban areas, just about every time people add more roads, the capacity gets used up by increased development in the outlying areas served by those roads. Network bandwidth and CPU capacity are subject to the same phenomenon. Do end-user desktops really have more functionali…
I'm granting that miles driven or number of cars on the road could go up, maybe way up. I'm just guessing, subject to actually doing the math, that increased efficiency and assumptions of reasonable limits on how much latent demand is actually out there could be sufficient to make time spent in cars, fuel consumption, emissions, or other metrics better regardless. Since we're using networking analogies, basically I'm guessing that current uncoordinated human-driven traffic is copper wire to an automated system's fiber-optic cable.
But again, it's just a guess, and I'd be the first to accept that I was wrong if the numbers didn't actually work out.
Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#129Re: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
#130Very cool, but I sometimes worry that the illusion of safety is more dangerous than the original danger itself. In Boulder, where I live, several crosswalks were identified as being particularly dangerous for pedestrians, and pedestrian crossing signs with big flashing lights were installed at these locations over the past 5 years. This spring, a report was released[1] that showed accidents at many of these crosswalk…
This especially scares me as a cyclist. I'm sure they'll put a lot of effort into preventing automated cars from hitting other vehicles or slow-moving pedestrians. Now what about bicycles traveling around 20 mph in the right-hand side of the lane?
Many people seem to neglect or completely fail to understand the risk of increased perception of safety leading to an overall decreased safety in these systems. We can't have the best of both worlds – a machine's constant attention and reaction time coupled with a human driver's intuition – because the moment you give him an autopilot that he thinks will keep him out of trouble, the human sits back and stops paying attention to the road.
These automated systems may eventually become all-around better than any human driver, but it will be take many iterations to get there, and the first versions will certainly lack a human's ability to anticipate trouble before it arises. It will be a long while before an autopilot can say "hey, that car ahead is weaving unnervingly, the driver might be drunk so I should keep my distance" or "the cars ahead of me are curving slightly to the left, there might be a cyclist riding on the shoulder so I should slow down a bit and do likewise." And until we have that level of automation, I'm afraid our roads are about to become a lot more dangerous.