Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality • Hacker News Board

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#61

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:05 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…

[deleted]

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#62

Post by akira2501 » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:05 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…

> didn't have any real empirical evidence to back any of our claims up.

NHTSA publishes the FARS every year. It is their database of every known roadway fatality in the United States. It's free to the public. It's well worth study. Here's an example: Texas has more fatalities than California. Not per-capita, but in total. California has 10m more people living there than Texas. This is not a uniform problem.

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

Yes, a majority of accidents only involve a single vehicle. It is often the case that a driver exceeds their ability or roadway conditions and kills only themselves.

> would drunk drivers still kill more people every year even if we replaced all of the cars with robot ones?

Replaced them with cars that have no manual control option. Given everything we've learned about automation, this is a bad idea given our current infrastructure. So, it's highly unlikely that they will have much of an impact for this group.

> it seems like we'd be faster at making them safer than preventing humans from making poor decisions.

This ignores the nearly 100 years of saftey history that we already have. We have already reduced roadway fatalities by a staggering amount and have created a regulatory framework that has successfully created higher saftey margins for all drivers.

We already drive Trillions of miles every year in the US and we only have 36k fatalities. Further: 6k of those are pedestrians and 8k of those are motorcycles. 7k are young men under 24 and 7k were drivers under the influence. There are not a lot of "easy gains" left out there where it's obvious that self-driving cars will have a major impact.

> I think in the case of piloting a slow-moving bullet around crowds of humans

Which is one thing. However, we're talking about piloting thousands of slow-moving bullets around crowds of humans _and_ each-other. There will not be a single manufacturer of technology, nor will there be a single auto-pilot system.

Plus we haven't experienced any automation failures yet that have caused us to establish best-practices around this system. For example, should the autonomous system have full 100% authority over the cars controls? It may be useful in an accident that the car can use full authority to avoid an accident. It may be disastrous in a situation where the car has bad data from it's sensors. So, should we limit control authority to reduce the opportunity for failure here and also leave some margins for a human to override the machine? Will drivers actually understand the complicated and subtle difference?

What happens when we need to roll out regulatory changes to autopilot functions? Do we do that all at once? How do we force drivers to do these updates? How do we keep drivers safe now that we've changed a major operational mode of their vehicle? We expect airline pilots to engage in simulations and continual training to ensure that they are on top of these changes, what are we going to do in vehicles?

> It did wonders for the aviation industry

It wasn't without it's own set of challenges[0]. Upshot of the video is, switching to a lower level of automation is now recommended practice in many situations because it's actually safer.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#63

Post by freedryk » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:06 PM UTC

lemoncucumber wrote: post #47

petre wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ECA has recently made an assesment of high speed rail and they found out things are not as rosy as they seem: https://www.eca.europa.eu/en/Pages/DocItem.aspx?did=46398

That link requires HTTP basic auth. But my understanding is that at least as far things like subways go, driverless trains aren't a difficult problem.

Vancouver, BC has been operating a driverless train system for its rapid transit since 1986.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#64

Post by mythbuster2001 » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:07 PM UTC

lemoncucumber wrote: post #26

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?

Driverless trains are not a problem to begin with. If you have a train and it carries hundreds of people [or trainload of cargo], it is economically irrelevant whether it has a human operator or not. So it is safer to have a human there just in case.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#65

Post by quotemstr » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:11 PM UTC

I wish cities would create zones specifically designed around facilitating autonomous car operation. For example, there's zero reason to allow random private cars in Manhattan south of 96th street. In a small, dense area like this, it should be possible to optimize around the limits of current autonomous car software.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#66

Post by kyrra » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:11 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…

BTW, Waymo already agreed with you[0]. They are partnering with Phoenix transit authority to drop people off at bus and train stops.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/waymo-partners-with-phoeni...

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#67

Post by stale2002 » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:12 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…

Driverless cars might be a bad idea.

City driving is a hard problem space, and all we'd achieve is cooler taxis.

The real game changer is instead driverless trucks.

Shipping is both a trillion dollar industry, and the problem space of "highway driving when it is sunny out" is much much easier than the consumer usecase, while still being extremely valuable.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#68

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

gist wrote: post #32

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 pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." And honestly any number is simply just 'pulled out of the ass' anyway. It's not as if they can see daylight on all the problems that need to be solved or predict various soft issues (the government only one example). So this is not that someone is building the atomic bomb and can realistically judge more or less the scope of the problems that need t…

Sure, the number is pulled out of the air in a way, but that's not what is important. People in the field know what is holding things back, and even if they don't don't see all the way to the end, they know enough about the journey to recognize that newcomers don't completely appreciate what they're up against, and rosy predictions about the proliferation of driverless cars is a reflection of that naivete.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#69

Post by 100ideas » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:14 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…

"in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity" - ...because why? I am assuming in good faith you might say:

because a world in which a greater proportion of people travel via multi-passenger vehicles like the buses and trains of public transport networks is a better world because these transportation solutions are 1) more efficient per passenger (does this help w/ reducing carbon emissions?); 2) economically more accessible because passengers pay per trip instead of purchasing vehicle outright; 3) potentially less expensive to operate due to economies of scale (purchasing & maintaining a large fleet of vehicle vs a single vehicle) and higher equipment utilizationl; 4) perahaps encourage more social connection amongst passengers; 5) passengers do not have to focus on driving and can "recover" the time that would have been spent driving a car doing something else.

I ask because I think the endgame for self-driving car companies is not so much to sell cars (self-driving in this case) to individual consumers, but rather to to win the zero-sum-game of becoming the largest on-demand "elastic" self-driving vehicle transportation platform; i.e. 80% of the cars Ford makes in 2030 it reserves for its automated fleet, which it dispatches on a per-ride bases to subscribers/customers for a single trip, a day, a month, etc. The ultimate technological opportunity here is effectively "packet switching" for physical transport via the highway network.

While it's possible (and desirable, in my opinion) the fleet of vehicles enabling this automated transport network could be a composition of myriad different vehicles, from many different vendors, contributed dynamically by everyone from families (or groups of families) that own a single vehicle and rent it out when its not in use to the fleets of large companies like ups, hertz, ford, etc... it seems more realistic that a few giant companies (Waymo, Uber) will be the ones that can scale up a working network fastest and cheapest by building, owning, and operating huge fleets of vehicles made up of just a few vehicle variants.

Anyway, imagine 60% of the cars on the roads today were capable of participating in an automated-vehicle-on-demand transportation network. This scenario seems like it has the same benefits I attributed to public transportation. What do you think - is it an equally desirable solution, or are there other particular benefits to a world with significantly more (conventional) public transportation / less cars that I failed to articulate?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#70

Post by rory096 » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:15 PM UTC

camjohnson26 wrote: post #50

jazzyjackson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unfortunately Illinois borrowed from future generations and horribly mismanaged the economy. Now they're struggling just to avoid bankruptcy, let alone building out huge public transit projects. Not to mention a multibillion dollar, unnecessary tunnel linking O'Hare with downtown which will almost certainly cost multiples higher than Elon Musk and Rahm Emanuel claim. We'd rather spend money on vaporware than build so…

>Not to mention a multibillion dollar, unnecessary tunnel linking O'Hare with downtown which will almost certainly cost multiples higher than Elon Musk and Rahm Emanuel claim. We'd rather spend money on vaporware than build something that would actually help.

That project is privately funded. The Block 37 station was the expensive vaporware.