Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality • Hacker News Board

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#51

Post by dpc59 » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:00 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…

>A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor

That's because it is. I had to take the metro in Montréal to get to work this week, hadn't taken it in months because I usually bike, it's such a shitty experience. It smells bad, it's hot, it's filled with tired people that don't feel like going to work (you feel it in the air), beggars harass you, it's slow (it can take 3x as much time as riding a bike to get where you want to) and it's operating past maximum capacity during rush hour. I haven't even gotten started on when service is interrupted and you show up over an hour late to work or class. Anybody who can afford a bit more for reliability and comfort will spend it without looking back.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#52

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:01 PM UTC

gist wrote: post #41

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 all the people who are barely making it who's lives fall apart if something on their car breaks. Maybe people need to take personal responsibility and not spend money as if the government will make things easier for them and solve all problems. I am not claiming this is possible for everyone there are truly people who need help. But the vast majority of people can try to live in a way that they can have persona…

[deleted]

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#53

Post by stephengillie » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:01 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…

> *Presently human drivers cause an awful number of deaths with cars. ... would drunk drivers ...

Sober drivers crash a lot of cars too. Are all traffic situations NP-complete?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#54

Post by lukev » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:02 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…

By that logic, we should be putting all the money we're putting into driverless cars into getting more people to travel by bus, rail and air, all of which are a much much better than marginal improvement in terms of deaths per person-mile.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#55

Post by sowbug » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:02 PM UTC

rounce wrote: post #18

Totally unrelated to the article's content but is Refactor now part of common english?

If you factored algebraic expressions in high school, and you agree that the "re" prefix generally can be added to a verb, then it's already part of your lexicon.

The process of code refactoring, especially extracting common code into a method, is very similar to the process of simplifying algebraic expressions. So it's not just a grammar argument; the two words really do represent related concepts.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#56

Post by stephengillie » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:03 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #30

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…

[deleted]

Even Japan's trains don't run 24 hours. Deadheading is expensive.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#57

Post by beneTleilax » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:03 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…

Hmmm, weird idea here, but maybe that's the answer then?

If self driving cars are terrible at coping with the chaos humans grit their teeth and deal with, maybe software for engineering cooperative bumper-to-bumper traffic jams involving clogs of slow-moving self driving cars, that reduce the road speeds to constant 20 MPH (the /constant/ part being important), and eliminate chaotic lane changing to near zero for the group, is one way to bootstrap self driving cars.

In other words, low-performance self driving cars might work fine, and since people can lounge about, and disengage from the guidance and navigation tasks, why not go slower?

Then, add swarming to the mix, such that cars going to the same place, all travel slowly in a single group.

It's against the law to obstruct traffic, or violate minimum speed requirements, so certain laws would need to change. For example, zero emission vehicles can idle indefinitely, and software-controlled vehicles can interface with an external control network, approved to operate in such ways, with points of contact at operations centers for resolving problems, technical or otherwise.

So change laws to permit idle electric vehicles (in more places and controlled, desginated places, not just anywhere), and permit large slow moving groups to occupy certain corridors, at certain times, when jammed traffic is a known quantity, that driverless systems aren't the cause of. Driverless networks can cut into a slice of the jam, and possibly improve outcomes for members only at first, and eventually boost efficiency within the jammed system by augmenting flow through expert participation.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#58

Post by camjohnson26 » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:03 PM UTC

wyldfire wrote: post #19

irq11 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving cars will also kill a lot of people. We just don’t know how many yet.

It will very likely kill far fewer per mile driven than humans do. Unfortunately you're right -- it probably still will kill some. Even nonfatal accidents will be scrutinized heavily and leave a lasting impression of fear/loss of control.

That's totally unproven, the technology doesn't even exist yet and we're still assuming we know what it will look like. In their current state self driving cars would kill far more people than humans if all cars used self driving 100% of the time, and no one knows if we will ever move past that.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#59

Post by linuxftw » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:03 PM UTC

wyldfire wrote: post #19

irq11 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving cars will also kill a lot of people. We just don’t know how many yet.

It will very likely kill far fewer per mile driven than humans do. Unfortunately you're right -- it probably still will kill some. Even nonfatal accidents will be scrutinized heavily and leave a lasting impression of fear/loss of control.

I'd wager a relatively small percentage of drivers account for a relatively large percentage of deaths. Reckless driving, not driving as conditions permit, intoxicated drivers probably account for the vast majority of road fatalities, either directly or indirectly.

I don't believe a computer will ever be as good a driver as I am in my lifetime in terms of my personal safety, except for when I'm really old and possibly can't see well.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#60

Post by chubot » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:04 PM UTC

I can't read this paywall article, but here are some similar counterpoints to hype, starting in 2016. They are from people actually working on self-driving technology or executives/investors close to it. (I'm interested in any earlier "expectation setting", having heard a lot of this at Google.)

March 2016:

Chris Urmson: How quickly can we get this into people's hands? If you read the papers, you see maybe it's three years, maybe it's thirty years. And I am here to tell you that honestly, it's a bit of both.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sel...

https://mondaynote.com/autonomous-cars-the-level-5-fallacy-2...

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April 2017:

It will be 25 years before self-driving cars take off in America, says early Uber investor Bill Gurley

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/bill-gurley-uber-investor-se...

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October 2017:

https://medium.com/self-driven/a-decade-after-darpa-our-view...

Those who think fully self-driving vehicles will be ubiquitous on city streets months from now or even in a few years are not well connected to the state of the art or committed to the safe deployment of the technology. For those of us who have been working on the technology for a long time, we’re going to tell you the issue is still really hard, as the systems are as complex as ever.