Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 440 posts

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#111

Post by rb808 »

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?

Quite probably. But that is irrelevant to the lawyers of the people that driverless cars did take. That is the real problem to me.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#112

Post by Jdam »

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.

Have you ever heard about that thing called fog?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#113

Post by erikpukinskis »

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.

Isn’t it already true that autonomous driving has saved lives?

I’m not sure what you’re waiting for.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#114

Post by x220 »

lukev wrote: post #54
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…

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.

You are absolutely correct. That would almost certainly reduce deaths, and I would support taxing myself more for more money to go towards safer public transportation to reduce traffic fatalities.

I will, at the same time, support self-driving car research.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#115

Post by boxcardavin »

Zigurd wrote: post #40
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 car" is probably not the outcome for autonomous vehicles. At one end of the scale, cities will use road space vastly more efficiently with optimized vehicles for groups of riders, and at the other end of the scale, short-haul air travel will be challenged by door-to-door 150mph+ highway vehicles. None of these will look much like a personal car, and only the wealthy will consider owning one that will beco…

Self-delivering bicycles my man, too light to kill people in impacts, slow when autonomous.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#116

Post by dwighttk »

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…

rail and bus infrastructure is never going to be feasible in the small town in Texas where I grew up, 1.5 hrs from Ft. Worth. Not to mention all the even smaller towns in that county and the counties around it.

How is one supposed to move 3 horses across the state using rail and buses?

What about my parents driving to surrounding lakes to kayak? Just cary that on a train that for some reason actually goes to these lakes in the middle of nowhere?

What about hauling larger personal watercraft? Just don't do that? Store it at the body of water you've chosen to exclusively use your boat/jetski on?

Rely on Amazon to handle the logistics of shipping hay for your livestock?

Maybe these are all just cultural things that need to disappear and be replaced by magical super-efficient factory farms or not replaced at all. But there are other ways of life than just living in an apartment and commuting to an office.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#117

Post by fabiospampinato »

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…

> 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.

There are about 7 billion instances of those learning systems though.

Will this be replicated with machines in the next 10 years? I have no clue.

Is this doable at all? Sure.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#118

Post by x220 »

fmpwizard wrote: post #83
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…

If we look at humans as a counter, sure, apply all the stats you'd like, but I don't think we should do that when it comes to self driving cars. if we simplify the driving risks, we have: 1. driver kills him/herself 2. driver kills person outside his/her car * Humans and computers can make mistakes on both. But, my wife and I can teach our kid everything we have learned over the years, to prevent 1, and try to reduce…

If you care about traffic safety and take steps to be a safer driver (minimize distractions, pay attention, don't drive while under the influence of drugs, including alcohol) then you are almost certainly not a significant part of the problem. The problem is other drivers, whom you have no control over, and who can ruin your life at any moment with sheer carelessness and with few consequences.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#119

Post by erikpukinskis »

GCA10 wrote: post #28
sp332 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But human drivers kill a lot of people. It would be a shame if that's the best we can do. And some car tech improvements have saved lives, so it's not necessarily chauvinism it's just extrapolation.

As long as the U.S. personal-injury legal system remains in place (with strong support from media coverage of fatal crashes), it won't be enough for self-driving systems to have lower death rates/mile in aggregate. They will need to be better or equal to human performance in every subcategory of driving. That's really hard. To wit: It's not enough to say "Our self-driving cars avoid 14,000 drunk-driving, texting and…

They don’t need to match in every category, they just need to match in one category and then detect when they’re in that situation.

It will be a gradual transition as they learn how to handle more and more situations.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#120

Post by NTDF9 »

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…

Hongkong as well! My god that was some unreal efficiency in subway systems. NYC is a poor mans system in comparison.
Post reply on HN