Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality • Hacker News Board

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#101

Post by SlowRobotAhead » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:43 PM UTC

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…

Taipei... yes, absolutely. That was a great experience and easy to use.

NYC... altright, better than 15 years ago but still not great at all. Not as good as Germany or DC.

Tokyo... lol, no! While clean and efficient, it’s a joke that you have different rail stations owned by different companies, different cards that may work on each other but probably not. The ticket machines are almost all cash only. And instructions in other languages might have well used Google translate. Tokyo was one of the more difficult public transport systems I’ve used and I’ve been around the world a bit.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#102

Post by dwighttk » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:44 PM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #95

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?

[citation needed]

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#103

Post by anamexis » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:45 PM UTC

stephengillie wrote: post #44

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…

I'd like to join in on the bikeshedding mass transit into solar-powered self-driving car-apartments that can always drive anywhere with no congestion for free, need no maintenance, and aren't controlled by a monolithic entity with an abysmal reputation for profit over users. Mass transit is expensive, boring, and thankless. How many bus companies have ever applied to YC?

Chariot, for one. (For some definition of "bus")

https://www.chariot.com/

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#104

Post by erikpukinskis » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:47 PM UTC

kyrra wrote: post #66

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...

This seems like the inevitable conclusion: autonomous cars bring you from your house to your destination, unless you are traveling through a thoroughfare. In which case they will drop you at a tram (ideally drop you at the platform), the tram gets you through the bottleneck, and another private car will take you from the tram stop to your actual destination.

There’s no efficient way for busses to get people close to their door. It makes no sense. Mass transit should relieve congestion on major routes, it’s not an efficient solution to the last mile problem.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#105

Post by ocdtrekkie » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:47 PM UTC

I think the car manufacturers will, in the end, win out with the continued, steady progress of smarter and more capable driver assistance systems. Cruise control gave way to super cruise with lane keeping, warnings when your back bumper was approaching something gave way to features that stop the car for you before you hit something.

Eventually, the car will be less dependent on the human's attention, as the safety features will make the human's attention less important (while not telling the human their attention is less important), until it's good enough to take over for the human.

I think a lot of the issue is that dream and expectation that "hey, I can just watch a movie, I don't really need to pay attention" is crazy, and will continue to be for many years to come. We need to stop marketing that future.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#106

Post by travisoneill1 » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:47 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #48

piyh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds to me like driverless cars are easier than redesigning existing cities.

Redesigning cities to be less reliant on cars is pretty much a solved problem. It just needs a few decades of focused policies. Check out for example how the Netherlands became bike friendly by relentless improvement since the seventies.

And being completely flat and never getting very hot/cold. Bikes aren't really workable in most cities as a primary form of transit.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#107

Post by Fricken » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:47 PM UTC

Nydhal wrote: post #94

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.

From Sterling Anderson, former director of Autopilot who oversaw the implementation of HW2:

>Perception is a game of statistics.Crudely speaking, if we have three independent modalities with epsilon miss-detection-rates and we combine them we can achieve an epsilon³ rate in perception. In practice, relatively orthogonal failure modes won’t achieve that level of benefit, however, an error every million miles can get boosted to an error every billion miles. It is extremely difficult to achieve this level of accuracy with a single modality alone.

>Different sensor modalities have different strengths and weaknesses; thus, incorporating multiple modalities drives orders of magnitude improvements in the reliability of the system. Cameras suffer from difficulty in low-light and high dynamic range scenarios; radars suffer from limited resolution and artifacts due to multi-path and doppler ambiguity; lidars “see” obscurants.

https://medium.com/aurora-blog/auroras-approach-to-developme...

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#108

Post by topynate » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:48 PM UTC

emiliobumachar wrote: post #99

quotemstr wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They too encourage emissions.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#109

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:50 PM UTC

Nydhal wrote: post #94

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.

[deleted]

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#110

Post by resu_nimda » Thu, Sep 13, 2018, 7:50 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 ... the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want.

Well that's because it's actually true for a lot of people. Sure, there's no freedom in commuting between SF and south bay by car, or navigating the most dense downtown environments. But I definitely use my car on a daily basis for things that would be impossible or incredibly time consuming by transit. And yes, many of the transit patrons around here would probably prefer a car if they could afford it. Most places are not like NYC where the subway is often the most effective option regardless of wealth.

I don't think it's really feasible for more spread out suburban environments to implement effective mass transit. The anti-car idealists often seem to forget that there are a lot of people living outside of dense city centers.