Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality • Hacker News Board

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#21

Post by save_ferris » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 6:35 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #15

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more citie…

> But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity

While I completely agree with you, the cultural barriers to this are petty much a non-starter in much of the country. I love not owning a car and being able to rely on mass transit where I live (Austin, TX), but Texas is so culturally opposed to anything like this.

A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, and the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.)

I hate that mentality, but driverless cars represent the "have your cake and eat it too" solution. It more closely aligns with the culture of driving here in the US, while also claiming numerous commercial and infrastructure benefits.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#22

Post by bussierem » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 6:36 PM UTC

x220 wrote: post #12

melling wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t say speech recognition is solved. It’s still quite error prone. Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die. Perhaps self-driving cars can be deployed in a limited way, as taxis, for example.

>I wouldn’t say speech recognition is solved. It’s still quite error prone. Sure it is, but it's doing a hell of a lot better than many critics thought ever possible. >Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die. People will always die. Requiring with certainty that self-driving cars will never cause accidents is a purely emotional instinct with no regard for facts or well-being of people. The only th…

>Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die.

He is right - the problem with your response to this statement is that it doesn't identify the _actual_ reason behind why they need to be better, and it's a problem identified by the article in question: When a human driver swerves randomly and kills someone, we know EXACTLY who is to blame, and something can be done. If a driverless car, or even a car with "driverless technology" that also has a driver in it (like the Tesla driver mentioned in the article) hits someone and god forbid kills them, we still have no idea who is to blame for that problem, because it practically becomes a marketing argument in some cases.

Before we can be okay with driverless cars, ESPECIALLY if we don't plan on them being 100% accident free, we need to solve a lot of ethical and legal battles that don't seem to be even on the minds of the people that tout this as the future, or a necessity.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#23

Post by jazzyjackson » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 6:37 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #15

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more citie…

This is the part that drives me crazy - America HAD electric railroads all over the place. Or at least Illinois (my homestate) did. You can look up 'Illinois InterUrban' and see maps of rails connecting every rural city.

Many of the carriages were used as scrap metal for WWII, and once cars took off the demand wasn't there to rehabilitate them. But it would be so much cheaper to build out than even just replacing the signals in NYC would be. All the right of ways are still there, many of them turned into bike trails (which is great, but I'd rather have a $5 ride to the next town over)

The carriages back in the day were pretty slow, maybe 20mph, so I get why cars won, but rebuilding this infrastructure with modern equipment would be a really nice situation, and if gas was 10$/gal we would probably see the demand, but as long as gas is cheap we lack the ability to plan ahead...

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#24

Post by bytematic » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 6:37 PM UTC

Buldak wrote: post #9

cicero wrote: post #2

"Our love affair with self-driving cars is a form of 'techno-chauvinism,' Prof. Broussard says. 'It's the idea that technology is always the highest and best solution, and is superior to the people-based solution.'"

We like the idea of technological solutions that don't require us to change our lifestyle or make hard choices. Driverless cars are appealing because they would allow us to largely maintain the status quo (as opposed to, say, reorienting toward public transportation). It's like an obese person who says, "I don't want to eat healthy and exercise. Why can't scientists just invent low-calorie versions of the food I like…

Sounds preferable in both cases to me What is the non tech solution for automobiles, better designed cities?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#25

Post by wiz21c » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 6:38 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #15

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more citie…

> America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s.

c'mon, who is gonna dream about that ?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#26

Post by lemoncucumber » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 6:38 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #15

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more citie…

Exactly. Driverless trains are a solved problem, so why don't we just build some of those?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#27

Post by bunderbunder » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 6:39 PM UTC

save_ferris wrote: post #21

djsumdog wrote: post #15

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more citie…

> But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity While I completely agree with you, the cultural barriers to this are petty much a non-starter in much of the country. I love not owning a car and being able to rely on mass transit where I live (Austin, TX), but Texas is so culturally opposed to anything like this. A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, an…

> driverless cars represent the "have your cake and eat it too" solution

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#28

Post by GCA10 » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 6:39 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #11

cicero wrote: post #2

"Our love affair with self-driving cars is a form of 'techno-chauvinism,' Prof. Broussard says. 'It's the idea that technology is always the highest and best solution, and is superior to the people-based solution.'"

But human drivers kill a lot of people. It would be a shame if that's the best we can do. And some car tech improvements have saved lives, so it's not necessarily chauvinism it's just extrapolation.

As long as the U.S. personal-injury legal system remains in place (with strong support from media coverage of fatal crashes), it won't be enough for self-driving systems to have lower death rates/mile in aggregate. They will need to be better or equal to human performance in every subcategory of driving. That's really hard.

To wit: It's not enough to say "Our self-driving cars avoid 14,000 drunk-driving, texting and asleep-at-the-wheel fatalities," if it's also true that: "Our self-driving cars hit and kill 30 errant pedestrians a year that a human driver would have noticed."

I know that 14,000 > 30. But the specter of roadway martyrs being murdered by killing machines needs only a few examples to sustain itself.

Tough problem to solve.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#29

Post by seiferteric » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 6:40 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #15

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more citie…

I love the idea because it would remove the need for me personally to own a car. Also it was supposed to happen in the scale of a few years, instead of the decades needed to build the heavy infrastructure projects you mentioned, but remains to be seen. Also, it could quicken the move to electric vehicles if uber/waymo etc fleet was all electric.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#30

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 6:41 PM UTC

agentultra wrote: post #14

I was just having this discussion last night as it happens. We sat at an impasse as everyone was quite inebriated and didn't have any real empirical evidence to back any of our claims up. I was rather curious if the rate of deaths caused by human drivers would continue to dwarf those caused by edge cases of deployed self-driving cars if we scaled up the number of self-driving vehicles. Presently human drivers cause a…

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