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Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

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Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#91

Post by Fricken »

camjohnson26 wrote: post #58
wyldfire wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The current state of self driving cars is transient. That much is proven. They aren't getting worse.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#92

Post by 100ideas »

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 wife & I live in San Francisco. SF Muni fares are a flat $2.50.

So for the two of us, a Muni trip is

  - total cost: $5
  - usually takes 30-60 min to get wherever we want to go in the city. 
  - we need to to figure out the optimal route, schedule, and entry & exit stops. 
  - we need to make sure we will arrive at the stop on-time.
  - we need to walk 5-10 min to closest stop on either end
This process is familiar to anyone who's taken public transportation. In general, I think it's a great system. Muni network coverage is pretty good in SF.

However... a low-cost Uber or Lyfts pool ride for two is

  - total cost: $5-12 (same serice area as Muni)
  - duration: 15-45 min
  - we don't have to plan the route or schedule
  - we don't have to worry about going to a remote pick-up stop on-time
  - we get dropped off directly at our destination
So, in the best case scenario, a lyft line ride is the same cost as Muni but so so much better in terms of value to us. Even when it is 2x as expensive, for us, the extra $5 is totally worth it. I know that's not true for everyone, but I personally am amazed that the cost of using the cheapest ride share option is often only 1x-2x the cost of using the billion-dollar municipal public transportation system.

Of course, here in SF ride share vehicles are definitely not allowed to use the special public-transportation-only lanes of some of the major roads, which remain reserved for the exclusive use of Muni buses and taxis to improve their transit times.

(edited to fix indentation)

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#93

Post by pjc50 »

amthewiz wrote: post #39
Buldak wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Really? I don't like to fetch water from a lake every day to my house. Instead of using technology to bring water to my house, what lifestyle changes or hard choices should I rather make?

The great invention for dealing with this is a public utility that provides water to everyone. A mass transit system for water.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#94

Post by Nydhal »

Animats wrote: post #71

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 th…

I'm sorry I can't back up my claims but you will be proved wrong with time.

I would bet in less than 10 years you'll have camera only fully autonomous systems.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#95

Post by erikpukinskis »

Animats wrote: post #71

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 th…

Hasn’t Tesla autopilot saved more lives than it took? So it’s more net beneficial (so far) than cautious Waymo?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#96

Post by aij »

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…

I live in the countryside but work in the city. This is in the US, so there is no bus I could take for my daily commute, though I've lived in countries where a similar arrangement would have a bus route within walking/biking distance.

The thing is, if there were a bus, it would have to stop to pick up / drop off passengers along the way, which would make it so much slower than driving that it really would be for the poor. I've been on such buses as a kid. Even when traffic is bad, bumper-to-bumper in a car (taking the fastest route) is going to be faster than bumper-to-bumper in a bus (taking a more circuitous route and stopping frequently along the way)

I think the only way buses will stop being for the poor, is when they stop become faster than more expensive alternatives. (Or at least nearly as fast and significantly cheaper.) If you can save a lot of time by spending a little bit of money, which would you choose? What if you could spend a lot of money but it wouldn't save you any (or much) time?

In cities where congestion is a major problem, dedicated bus lanes/roads can help balance the equation in favor of buses. Usually there aren't enough dedicated bus routes though. (I might point out that the people deciding how to balance bus/car traffic are not the people who ride the bus.)

I still think self-driving cars are far in the future, but I find them appealing because they would make "buses" more efficient. A lot of the cost of operating buses is paying the drivers. To maximize economies of scale, buses are large, which means they have to make a lot of stops to pick up and drop off passengers, which in turn makes them slow. Self-driving buses could be a lot smaller and wouldn't need to make as many stops. If they could tell that no one will be boarding or deboarding at a given stop, they could skip it entirely and take a shorter path instead. At some point, the lines between bus/ridesharing/taxi get pretty blurry.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#97

Post by zaphod12 »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #86
dpc59 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

­>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…

I can't speak for Montreal, but there are countless counterexamples of cities in wealthy countries (not as wealthy as the US) where metro users are drawn from more or less every income level. Turns out you can actually make riding a metro into a good experience with a bit of effort. New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Taipei, London, Berlin, Munich come immediately to mind. And as sibling commenters have pointed out, in some p…

Don't know if I'd go so far as to say riding the subway in NYC is "good" experience, but I'll certainly agree that it's one shared by people across the socioeconomic spectrum.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#98

Post by iabacu »

yannyu wrote: post #85
iabacu wrote: post #74

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.

Or maybe we hold driverless cars up to an unfair standard. Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents. Many, many more are injured or disabled. Why would we expect driverless cars to reduce that to 0? Shouldn't it be good enough if they reduce it to 50%? 25%?

No one is talking about reducing anything to zero — that’s a straw argument.

It you really want a fair comparison, one can start by controlling statistical variables by car price point, car age and driver demographics.

It’s not hard to spot blatant data fudging by companies that are big on marketing.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#99

Post by emiliobumachar »

quotemstr wrote: post #77
Buldak wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 refo…

Okay, what is the allegedly obvious joke about contraceptives?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#100

Post by baybal2 »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #84
baybal2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In level of stupidity, the concept of self driving car in my opinion is second only to a flying car. The second disregard, that well... there are airplanes. The first, that driverless busses that creep at 30km/h and do emergency brake every every 10 minutes thanks to overattentive collision avoidance system also been around for decades.

We've had flying cars for decades. They're called helicopters. Unfortunately they're much too expensive for the masses. But I don't see why anyone would consider the concept stupid.

My point is that the popular image of flying cars with retractable wings and wheels turning into jet engines is ludicrous, and that yes, light personal airplanes and helicopters are there.

And the same parallel for driverless car, except for even when well executed it is kinda of arguable usefulness/value.

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