Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality • Hacker News Board

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#71

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

Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people.

This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy that you just hook up some cameras to a machine learning system, train it, and you have self driving. Doesn't work. Machine learning is way too dumb.

You can maybe identify "traffic light", "car", "pedestrian", and "deer" with machine learning. That's just used to guess what they're going to do next. It's not used to decide if they're an obstacle. Obstacle detection and avoidance is all sensors and geometry.

Also, "self driving car", "electric car", and "transportation as a service" are all independent. All will be available, but not from the same companies.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#72

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

briatx wrote: post #45

Generalized self driving cars seems like such a hard problem, laced with a huge amount of hard to handle edge cases and a huge amount of hard to enumerate possible scenarios. I think it will still happen, but they need to simplify the problem. The way to simplify it is to create automated driving lanes, similar to the current HOV lanes, that have standardized markers that are easy for computers to read, and then even…

Afaik, highways in non-severe weather are already pretty much solved, so I’m not sure that special lanes would make much difference, except perhaps during snow storms.

The edge cases seem to be mostly around city driving, rural back roads, and bad weather.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#73

Post by stcredzero » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:16 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 knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest."

Driverless. Technology of the future. Always was. Always will be.

But seriously, how much would it take to mostly handle driving trucks on limited access highways between exurb mega-warehouses? By "mostly," I mean, be able to handle 98% of all situations, and be able to flag attention from a remote control human supervisor for the other 2%. I suspect we're pretty close.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#74

Post by iabacu » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:16 PM UTC

The argument that autonomous tech will save lives is the most dangerous. This will take decades to be true.

The same companies who are pushing for that narrative, are also the first ones to blame the drivers when their tech goes wrong.

There’s so much data fudging to push for those narratives — they want the credit for lives saved, and at the same time don’t want the blame or liability for accidents caused.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#75

Post by outside1234 » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:17 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…

Why does it have to be either/or?

I think driverless has the potential to be both - we can have a bus system that runs dynamic routes based on the users that are going to ride it and runs closer to ideally efficient vs. a fixed route that is likely inefficient.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#76

Post by seanmcdirmid » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:18 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 ....

I don’t think the killer market for driverless cars in America in the first place. Places like China that have all that (commuter rail, subway) but lack places for new roads and parking would benefit greatly from optimizing their limited road infrastructure. They already have people who are used to taking taxies everywhere, now make the ring roads automated only to triple their capacity.

Europe, Asia, can be benefit greatly from driverless cars because they have a different situation from America.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#77

Post by quotemstr » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:18 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…

The bigger problem, IMHO, is the attitude that it's some kind of moral quandry if technology allows us to solve a problem without effort. For example, I've heard people really say that an obesity-preventing drug would be a bad thing because it would discourage exercise. This fetishization of hardship does a lot of harm, because in reality, the kind of progress we can make as a civilization essentially amounts to refocusing exertion on increasingly impactful things.

Other examples of this phenomenon:

Direct atmospheric carbon removal is bad. It encourages emissions!

Contraceptives are bad. They encourage sexual license! (I had to try to avoid the obvious joke here.)

Highways are bad! They encourage driving.

Word processors are bad. They discourage good penmanship!

Fertilizers and farm equipment are bad! They discourage small family farms!

GPS navigation is bad! It discourages map reading and mental direction finding!

Some of these examples look ridiculous to us now, but people really did think these things at some point. I see some opposition to autonomous vehicles falling into the same category.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#78

Post by stale2002 » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:20 PM UTC

bussierem wrote: post #22

x220 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 wit…

You argument is basically that it is more important to figure out who to blame for deaths, than it is to get rid of those deaths in the first place.

That strikes me as weird.

Also, the people who will be paying out damages will be exactly the same as the people who are paying out for them today. The insurance companies.

The simple solution to these "ethical" issues is for everyone to have insurance, and for the insurance to pay out.

And I am sure that the insurance companies will be very happy with this arrangement, as reduced accident rates mean that they make more money.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#79

Post by abawany » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:20 PM UTC

dpc59 wrote: post #51

save_ferris wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ge…

My experience in my multiple Montreal soujourns has been so different that I consider the Metro to be a jewel. I admit that some stations are grungier than others (once I had to duck an errant basketball at Cote-des-Neiges) but that was once out of around 100 trips. I do agree that the air conditioning is marginal.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#80

Post by blattimwind » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:21 PM UTC

danenania wrote: post #72

briatx wrote: post #45

Generalized self driving cars seems like such a hard problem, laced with a huge amount of hard to handle edge cases and a huge amount of hard to enumerate possible scenarios. I think it will still happen, but they need to simplify the problem. The way to simplify it is to create automated driving lanes, similar to the current HOV lanes, that have standardized markers that are easy for computers to read, and then even…

Afaik, highways in non-severe weather are already pretty much solved, so I’m not sure that special lanes would make much difference, except perhaps during snow storms. The edge cases seem to be mostly around city driving, rural back roads, and bad weather.

Just like teaching humans to drive. Yes, sure, you have to show them how to do it on the highway/BAB, driving safely at 130+ km/h, but it's really not hard (over long distances things you can't really teach make it difficult). City driving on the other hand takes time to master; here easily 80 % of the driver education is done in cities (0-50 km/h).

Practically all the edge cases, all the difficult situations and complex maneuvers are done in cities. Outside cities driving is very simple and safe (if you stick to the limits).